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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2304693" data-attributes="member: 6533">Two things are missing here:1.) The cannon didn't make castles obsolete in the sense in which it's being used thus far.  I mean cannons had been around through much of the era of castles and castles still got built.  Even after castles went out fortresses were still effective up through WWI so theoretically all you would have to do is change the design of castles to make them like fortresses and you would be fine.  What really got rid of castles were a simultaneous change in the role of nobility in the new nation states and the expense of acquiring cannons with which to defend your fortresses.  Not simply expense, either, but bottlenecks in supply.  It takes a load of infrastructure to build a good cannon foundry, this load makes it fairly easy for central authorities to control their construction.  Castles take a load of infrastructure as well but its general infrastructure everyone needs since they'll be building urban defenses, churches, and civic works which use many of the same skills and supplies as fortified aristocratic homes.A similar thing happens with the printing press.  For all the talk about how it makes knowledge democratic the early printing presses made production insanely centralized.  Censorship wasn't a worry before the printing press, but it was also much easier afterwards.2.) The medieval society is one of elites, yes, but the post-medieval society is more so, particularly since the elites can get round to running armies rather then being in them.  What the medieval society had that the post-medieval society had less of was niche protection for the lower classes.  When those restrictions were lapsed in the wake of the economic realities of the black plague (less need for food more need for labour) that's when you could finally get your lower classes out of the places where they had rights and guaranteed material support and into the military where you could put them into cheap massive units like pike formations and gun units.So my final answer would be:Guns didn't change anything in the middle ages except make mercenary companies a more attractive deal.  In the early modern period guns became an exceptionally important component of the military revolution, but even though that was happening in conjunction with improvements in firearms it wasn't happening because of firearms.in other words:The death of the middle ages and their military regimes had to do with the black plague, intellectual, and institutional upheaval, the firearm wasn't part of the problem it was just their for the show and had been for some time.in other other words:Guns don't kill people, microbes do.</blockquote>

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