The hand cannon was the first personal firearm: a short barrel on a wooden shaft, fired by touching a hot wire or a match to a hole in the top.
A hand cannon is the simplest possible firearm: a metal tube closed at one end, with a small hole bored near the closed end, mounted on a wooden shaft. Powder and ball go in the muzzle, and fire goes in the hole.
It appears in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century and is in general military use by the end of it. By any technical measure it is worse than the crossbow it competed with — slower, less accurate, less reliable — and it won anyway.
The reason is training. A crossbowman needed weeks and an archer needed years; a man with a hand cannon needed a fortnight, and armies could be raised faster than they could be trained.
The barrel is thirty to forty centimetres, either cast in bronze or forged from iron, thickest at the breech where the pressure is greatest. The bore is smooth and the fit of the ball is loose, which costs a great deal of the powder's energy.
The touch hole is bored through the top of the barrel into the powder chamber. A wire heated in a brazier, or later a length of slow match — cord soaked in saltpetre that smoulders steadily — is touched to it to fire the gun.
The barrel is fixed to a wooden tiller, either socketed over it or strapped down. Almost no tillers survive, because the wood rots while the barrel does not, which is why museum hand cannons are usually bare barrels.
It was fired from a rest, from a wall, or over a pavise, and often by two men — one to hold and aim, one to apply the fire. Everything about the loading and firing cycle is slow and requires both hands and open flame.
Effective range is short, perhaps fifty metres against a formed target, and accuracy against an individual is negligible. What it delivers at that range is penetration: a heavy lead ball will go through plate that would turn an arrow.
The Hussite armies of the 1420s were the first to build a system around it. Jan Žižka's war wagons carried handgunners and crossbowmen behind timber sides, forming a mobile fortification that repeatedly broke the heavy cavalry sent against it.
Its strengths are training time, penetration and effect. A recruit is useful in days, the ball defeats armour that stops other missiles, and the noise, smoke and flame frightened men and horses in a way a crossbow bolt did not.
Its weaknesses are almost everything else. It is slow to load, hopelessly inaccurate beyond short range, useless in rain, and dependent on keeping a source of fire alight next to a supply of gunpowder.
It also burst. Early barrels were made without a real understanding of the pressures involved, and the risk to the man holding it was a genuine part of the weapon's character rather than an occasional accident.
The first European references to small guns appear in the 1320s and 1330s, and the weapon spreads steadily through the fourteenth century, first as a curiosity and then as ordinary equipment for town militias and garrisons.
The Tannenberg gun gives a firm date: it was recovered from Tannenberg castle in Hesse, destroyed in 1399, so the weapon must predate that year, and it is the oldest surviving firearm in Europe.
From the early fifteenth century the improvements come quickly — longer barrels, better powder, and above all the matchlock, which holds the burning match in a moving arm so the shooter can keep both hands on the weapon and actually aim. That change turns the hand cannon into the arquebus.
The Holy Roman Empire and Bohemia led. German founders produced most of the surviving early guns, and the Hussite wars made Bohemia the first place where gunpowder infantry were decisive rather than incidental.
Burgundian and Flemish armies adopted handguns early and in numbers, and the Burgundian ordinances of the fifteenth century specify handgunners as a fixed proportion of a company — an early instance of firearms being organised rather than merely owned.
Italy and Iberia developed the weapon along the same lines, and the Iberian kingdoms carried the resulting arquebus into the campaigns that ended the medieval period on the peninsula.