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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PapersAndPaychecks" data-source="post: 2304560" data-attributes="member: 28854">I don't know about the Orient, but I can tell you about Europe. The first use of gunpowder on the Western European battleground was the use of cannons c.AD1320.  This coincided with people beginning to use larger quantities of plate mail, and resulted in the beginning of the end for the Crusader period in which heavy cavalry charges dominated the battlefield. It came at roughly the same time as the Bubonic Plague, of which there were two important outbreaks during this period:  the plague of Justinian (which petered out around 1340), and the Black Death (which ran from 1346 to around 1351).  Between these two outbreaks more than 25 million people - at least a quarter of the population of Europe, and some estimates say a third - was wiped out, with the result that the population was less in 1350 than it had been when the feudal system had been established, and a disproportionate number of the deaths had been among the serfs.  There was inflation, economic recession, a horrible shortage of labour, and peasant strikes culminating in the Statute of Labourers in 1351.  Ultimately the collapse of feudality and the end of serfdom can be traced back to this event. (The same kind of plague that broke out in London in 1665, but was fortunately controlled and virtually eradicated by the Great Fire of London in 1666 after killing only around 70,000 people.) Thus, it is safe to say that a vast number of changes took place in European society in the first half of the fourteenth century, but it is difficult to say which of the changes are attributable to the first battlefield uses of gunpowder.</blockquote>

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