Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIV

[Clistenes]

We actually have a pretty solid date for the first use of gunpowder in Europe, 11 April 1241, at Mohi. The slight problem is that it was used against European troops, and that some of the western historians took some significant liberties with interpreting the information we have, some claiming that gunpowder was then spreading in Hungary.

What Carmen Miserabile basically tells us is that mongols used hwacha against Hungarian army to panic them, and that's about it. There are indeed records of some later use of mongol mercenaries in Hungary (though again, some historians tend to claim Ladislaus the Cuiman employed them on a large scale, which he almost certainly did not, he employed the cuimans), but nothing that proves or disproves hwachas or other gunpowder being used by them. If anything, Hungary was as dramatically unprepared for Hussite tactics as the rest of Europe.

If I had to make a guess, gunpowder came to Europe through attempts at Franco-Mongol alliance, and as such arrived at first to kingdoms that had a keen interest and connections in Outremer - France (Templars), Italy (Papacy and Venice ferrying people for hefty fees), England (mostly because of Lionheart nostalgia) and HRE (Teutonic knights). Countries that were either in the middle of succession crisis at the time (Hungary) or separated by geography and disinterest (Poland, Scandinavian kingdoms) acquired it later from their neighbours.

This also means that gunpowder wasn't arguably brought to Europe by Muslims, seeing as mongols weren't Muslim until Ghazan's conversion circa 1300.

If you follow the link I posted, primitive cannons were used by the Andalusian garrison against Castilian troops during the Siege of Niebla, in 1262. Technically speaking, the tiny kingdom of Niebla was part of Europe, even if it was a muslim state.

And it wasn't even a big, rich, well-connected kingdom; it was a tiny, remote kingdom, the westernmost muslim state in the world. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder and cannons had to cross the whole muslim world before reaching Niebla, and there were many states who were able to pay more to experts for their knowledge. I think there were many people in the Muslim world who knew how to make and use gunpowder and primitive cannons.

If you compare the cultural and knowledge exchange between Christian Europeans and Arab-speaking Muslims and between Christian Europeans and Mongols (muslim or otherwise), the flow of knowledge from the Mongols was almost neligible, when compared to the knowledge adquired from the Arab-speaking Muslim world...