How did guns change medieval societies?

[Elder-Basilisk]

Actually, what's worth looking at here is the way that firearms and other weapon developments changed armor. Firearms and crossbows didn't make armor useless immediately. Rather, they forced people to wear different kinds of armor if they wanted it to be effective.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a good Greenwich or Milanese armor would have been a suit of fullplate covering its wearer from head to toe leaving only the joints exposed. (Henry VIII had a number of ingenious tournament and field armors and pretty much all of them were head to toe protection). Later developments in response to the increasing power of firearms and other weapons included half-plate which generally left the legs under the knee to be protected by thick leather boots. By the time of the English civil war (mid seventeenth century), King Charles' armor was just a buff coat, helmet, gauntlets, and a breastplate. As the power of weapons increased, armor kept pace for quite some time, but it did so by becoming heavier and the end result of that was that the less vital sections of the armor were discarded entirely in order to make the breastplate, etc. proof against bullets.

For more common armors, someone else will have to answer definitively. I know that the standard spanish armor of the fifteenth century and the war of Spanish succession was a breastplate, Morion, and buckler. I'm not sure what happened with the common man's protection in between that era and the Colonial era though.

FALSE! Good armor stopped a bullet at least as well as it stopped a crossbow bolt, and a steel bodkin or awl point on a crossbow bolt actually did better at penetrating armor than a soft lead bullet.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Lack of cannons was also something that made peasant rebellions a lot less successful than they might otherwise have been. In Germany, for instance, during the revolution of 1525 (the bundschuh rebellion shortly after the Reformation that Luther denounced) the peasant armies were organized along the same lines as the noble armies. A lot of the peasants were or had been mercenaties and they trained and organized their armies like mercenary armies. (Though they had to rotate men as people would return to their villages to harvest crops). They had similar weaponry etc to the noble armies too. What they didn't have were canons. They had a few from the odd towns that joined the rebellion and they tried to buy a few more once the revolution started, but they never had the number of canons or of trained cannoneers to compete with the princes' armies.

IIRC (though my knowledge here is a lot more spotty), proper use of canons was also what won the English civil war for Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary forces.

The most immediate real change to society that gunpowder made though wasn't with handheld firearms; it was with siege weapons.
Cannon were complex and expensive and could only be financed by the richest states; building a castle and maintiaining a few mercenaries was easy for a dissident noble. However the king could now bring up some cannon and blast a way into your castle. The effect of this is to be greatly increase the power of central government. The central government can then raise taxes better, become more efficient and build better and more efficient cannon.

 

[Storyteller01]

Firing a longbow has three steps: nock, draw, and shoot. Don't leave it strung for long periods, don't get the string wet, and that's about it for maintenance.
Firing a matchlock gun has at least half a dozen steps, depending on how you define a step, and has to be maintained on a daily basis unless you want to foul it the next time you shoot. Easier?

It's not that guns were easier to use, it's that compared to longbows, they did not require constant physical/ conditioning in order to be effective, because the force driving the projectile was coming from a low explosive rather than from muscle power. Sunday afternoons, traditionally reserved for archery practice, became open to other amusements, much to the dismay of contemporary moralizers.

And the relative stability of the user, and the need of the archer to adjust his own arc of trajectory (bullets have a MUCH shollower arc), etc.

It was easier to learn the step to fire a musket then the subtlties used in archery (with are amazingly similar to sniper techniques).

 

[Storyteller01]

If it can be found, the 2nd ed campaign setting Red Steel may help. It's based on a spanish renaissance setting (closer to the 3 Musketeers [I know; they're french, not spanish]). It's later than the usual post Drak Ages setting D&D usually takes place in, but it can give you an idea as to where it is heading. You can fill in the blanks and adjust the history as you need you.


My suggestion: firearms become martial (if not simple) weapons, and they are far more available. War mages will have to stuggle to find work, as cheaper methods are found (it doesn't take a 10th level mage to make a 50 gallon barrel of gunpowder). Only the most powerful kingdoms can afford them, and only after they have outfitted their alchemists and engineers.

In FR, the magical powers that be are taking an active roll in reducing the effects of gunpowder on the world (or just to hide it's existence).

 

[Aus_Snow]

Training someone to use it takes a lot less time.

In a nutshell, yes (AFAIK).

The stopping power of longbows, and their efficiency, was still truly frightening. But training someone to be a decent archer took a lot more time than just getting folk (even peasants) to deal with the concepts of reloading etc. Apart from those procedures, it's point and click.

I've heard that the early guns had in fact less 'AP' and 'damage' characteristics than say, a longbow used properly (and were significantly slower). . . but I'd have to check up on that one. Sounds plausible, though.

 

[Andor]

A lot of the factors that made guns (and cannons) so effective in our world are subject to counter measures impossible here. Consider what almost any 5th level spell caster can do to an ammo dump. Or supply train. Mages (and especially druids) are gun killers, plain and simple. One fire based spell into the powder supply and *BOOM*. You could take counter measures, but you significantly increase expense and reduce mobility. I suspect if you carry the development of tactics and counter tactics to it's logical conclusion you would wind up with cannon being used exclusively from enchanted mobile fire platforms. Cannon golems and flying Ships O' the Line. Guns would still be used by foot soldiers I think. But you would need to take magical steps to protect powder supplies.

 

[Hussar]

Just on one point about the use of gunpowder which has been touched on a few times.

Cannons made traditional castles more or less obsolete. The development of the citadel is a direct result of cannons. This also resulted in some very good architechtural designs for protecting against cannon fire, like a Martello Tower which was pretty much in use until the 20th century due to their strength.

Gunpowder is one way you can justify dungeons though. Why build a citadel if you can dig a bunker? Then you don't have to worry so much about those nasty mages fireballing your powder supplies - they're 200 feet underground.

 

[Ourph]

Others have thoroughly covered the effects of gunpowder weapons on warfare, but the original post asked a broader question....How did gunpowder weapons affect medieval society.

The simple answer to that is, not at all. Gunpowder weapons didn't start to make an impact on the rest of society outside the arena of war until well into the 1700s (when gunpowder weapons first started to become readily available to civilians). In addition, they made no real significant impact on society outside the arena of war until the beginning of the industrial revolution, when mass production made it possible for almost anyone to own a firearm.

 

[S'mon]

Early guns were less accurate than bows. They were far better at penetrating plate armour though. Most importantly they required little training to use, allowing for the development of mass armies. A musket ball did do a _lot_ of damage, but so did a crossbow bolt.

 

[S'mon]

Actually cannon changed Medieval society a lot more than guns. They rendered the castle a much less effective defensive structure and took away a lot of the knights command and control advantage

This is an important point - the ability to attack & destroy castles that had withstood any assault for 400 years was a huge change. Cannon's superiority to catapults was far more marked than early handguns superiority to crossbows.