Hand Cannon
The hand cannon is the first true firearm: a small bronze or iron barrel on a pole or stock, loaded with powder and ball and touched off by hand with a hot wire or smoldering match. Born in thirteenth-century China and reaching Europe by the early fourteenth, it was crude, slow, and inaccurate — and it began the gunpowder revolution that would retire the knight, the castle, and eventually every weapon that came before it.
Also known as Handgonne, gonne, fire lance descendant
Origins
Gunpowder is Chinese, and so is the gun. The fire lance — a spear with a gunpowder tube that spat flame and debris — evolved during the Song dynasty's wars into a true projectile weapon, and the bronze Heilongjiang gun of about 1288 is the oldest surviving firearm. The idea moved west with terrifying speed along Mongol-opened routes: by the 1320s European illustrations show vase-shaped guns, the Loshult gun survives from Sweden, and by mid-century city arsenals from Italy to Flanders were casting 'gonnes' by the dozen.
Design & Construction
A hand cannon is elemental: a barrel of cast bronze or wrought iron, typically 15 to 40 centimeters, bored smooth, with a touch hole drilled to the chamber. It mounted on a wooden tiller — clamped under the arm, braced on the shoulder, or socketed like a spearhead on a pole — and some later examples added a hook below the muzzle (the hakenbüchse, root of 'arquebus') to catch on a wall and absorb recoil. Loading was powder, wad, and a ball of lead, iron, or stone; ignition was a second person's job as often as not, touching a hot wire or match to the hole while the gunner aimed, in the loosest sense of the word.
Combat Use
Early hand cannons were siege and wall weapons before they were field weapons: fired from ramparts and behind pavises, where their smoke, thunder, and armor-smashing hits at short range mattered more than their glacial rate of fire. Chroniclers dwell on the noise — horses bolted and untried troops flinched at weapons that announced themselves like thunder. By the Hussite Wars of the 1420s, Jan Žižka's war wagons bristled with them, and massed handgunners behind barriers proved they could stop armored chivalry cold. Accuracy beyond a few dozen meters was aspiration, but a wall of fire from fifty barrels did not need marksmen.
Legacy
Within a century the hand cannon grew a proper stock, a serpentine lever, and a trigger — becoming the Matchlock Musket that would conquer the world's battlefields. Everything after it is refinement: five and a half centuries of firearms development trace to these stubby barrels. Surviving examples are rare, mostly excavated, and museum-held; for the history of weapons there is no more consequential object than the first gun one man could carry — every firearm on this wiki descends from it in an unbroken mechanical line.
Sources
Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5 Part 7: Military Technology — The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
DeVries, Kelly, and Robert D. Smith. Medieval Military Technology. 2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, 2012.
The Heilongjiang hand cannon (c. 1288) and the Loshult gun (c. 1330s), the key surviving early examples.
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