The history of the firearm begins in 10th-century China, when tubes containing gunpowder projectiles were mounted on spears to make portable fire lances. Over the following centuries, the design evolved into various types, including portable firearms such as flintlocks and blunderbusses, and fixed cannons, and by the 15th century the technology had spread through all of Eurasia. Firearms were instrumental in the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of European colonization in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. The 19th and 20th centuries saw an acceleration in this evolution, with the introduction of the magazine, belt-fed weapons, metal cartridges, rifled barrels, and automatic firearms, including machine guns. Older firearms typically used black powder as a propellant, but modern firearms use smokeless powder or other propellants. There are reports of some sort of incendiary chemical weapon, the Greek fire, used by the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) from the 7th through the 14th centuries, which may have been delivered through grenades and/or by some kind of flamethrower. However, its nature is still being debated, and it does not seem related to ancient Chinese or modern firearms.
10th to 12th centuries
The first firearms were invented in China, following the invention of gunpowder. The earliest known depiction of a gunpowder weapon is the illustration of a fire lance on a mid-10th century silk banner from Dunhuang. The fire lance was a tube, made of paper and bamboo, filled with black-powder and attached to the end of a spear, which was used as a flamethrower. Shrapnel or pellets were sometimes placed in the barrel so that they would fly out together with the flames. The De'an Shoucheng Lu, an account of the siege of De'an in 1132 during the Jin–Song Wars, records that Song forces used fire-lances against the Jurchen. The earliest depiction of a gun is a sculpture from a cave in Sichuan dating to the 12th century. It depicts a Chinese figure carrying a vase-shaped bombard with flames and a cannonball emerging from it. The proportion of saltpeter in the propellant was increased to maximize its power. To better withstand that power, fire lance barrels were made of metal. At the same time, the shrapnel was replaced by projectiles whose size and shape filled the barrel more completely. The result was the hand cannon, with a metal barrel, high-nitrate gunpowder, and a properly sized projectile.
13th century The oldest surviving firearm is the Heilongjiang hand cannon dated to 1288, which was discovered in modern-day Acheng District where the History of Yuan records that battles were fought. Li Ting, a military commander of Jurchen descent, led foot soldiers armed with hand cannons to suppress the rebellion of the Eastern Christian Mongol Prince Nayan. Kublai Khan's mostly failed invasion of Vietnam and of Java (1258–1288) may have spread the knowledge of making gunpowder-based weapons to Southeast Asia. There is evidence of that knowledge in the Nusantara archipelago. A stele inscription by Trương Hán Siêu dated to 1312 recorded guns and shots ("súng đạn") among the loot that the Vietnamese obtained from the Chams in a campaign. It indicates that both polities had knowledge of guns and even employed them well before that date. Ahmad Y. al-Hassan claimed that the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 pitted the Bahri Mamluks against the Mongol Empire. "The first cannon in history" used gunpowder almost identical with the ideal composition for explosive gunpowder. However, Iqtidar Alam Khan argued that it was the invading Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world and cites Mamluk antagonism towards early riflemen as an example of how gunpowder weapons were not always accepted.
14th and 15th centuries
Firearms appeared in the Middle East between the late 13th and early 14th century. The first references to what may have been arquebuses (Ottoman Turkish: tüfek) made by the Janissary corps of the Ottoman military date them to between 1394 and 1465. However, by as late as 1444, it is unclear whether these were truly arquebuses or rather small cannons. The fact that they were listed separately from cannons in mid-15th century inventories suggests that they were handheld firearms. The musket first appeared in the Ottoman Empire by 1465. In the Shen Qi Pu (神器譜), a firearms manual written in 1598, Chinese firearm designer and writer Zhao Shi Zhen described Turkish muskets as superior to European muskets. At some point before 1598, Turks developed a pivoting matchlock mechanism that was later modified by Zhao into the first mechanism using rack and pinion. One major obstacle preventing matchlock guns from large-scale adoption was complaints that strong wind and rain could either blow away or ruin priming powder placed in the flash pan. Mentioned in Shen Qi Pu, Zhao later developed the "Xuanyuan arquebus" (Chinese: 軒轅銃, romanized: Xuānyuan-chòng, named for the Yellow Emperor), which used a novel rack-and-pinion mechanism. This firing mechanism was connected to both the serpentine and flash pan cover and designed so that whenever the trigger is pulled, the serpentine was lowered at the same time as flash pan cover opened, minimizing the priming powder's exposure to open air and thus reducing the risk of priming powder being blown away by strong wind or spoiled by rain. The combination of a trigger-operated flash pan cover and small copper rain cover mounted on a pendulum was considered a more sophisticated approach to the Japanese solution of covering the entire firing mechanism with a lacquered box, which could hamper aiming, shooting and reloading. The Chinese military book Wubei Zhi (1621) describes Turkish muskets that used similar rack and pinion mechanisms, which were not known to have been used in European firearms at the time.
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