The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363-1477 (review)

The impressive iron and copper-alloy medieval guns in European museums are brought to life in the book under review here, produced as a collaborative effort by Professor Kelly DeVries and Robert D. Smith, conservationist at the Royal Armories in Leeds, England. DeVries will be well-known to readers of this journal for his works on medieval European warfare, many of which, like this one, relate to the Low Countries. Smith, meanwhile, was the co-author, with Ruth Rhynas Brown, of the important study, Bombards, Mons Meg and her Sisters, Royal Armouries Monograph 1 (London, 1989), which demonstrates the use of modern techniques such as x-radiography to analyze the wrought iron bombards (early cannons) in European museum.

The book's goal is "to put together a coherent framework for the development of gunpowder weaponry throughout the fifteenth century from a synthesis of the available evidence: contemporary narrative, documentary sources, and surviving examples" (p. 5). A key source used is the seminal L'artillerie des ducs de Bourgogne d'après les documents conservés aux archives de la Côte d'Or (Paris: 1895), by Joseph Garnier, an archivist in the Burgundian capital of Dijon. The authors state their intention to overcome problems of vague and non-standard medieval terminology, and to make use of scientific analysis of surviving pieces of Burgundian gunpowder artillery.

The first of the book's four chapters, "Overall History of Gunpowder Weapons during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," addresses the controversial question of when gunpowder weapons were introduced into European warfare. DeVries traces awareness of gunpowder to mid-thirteenth century writings by the English Scholastic philosopher Roger Bacon , with actual gunpowder weapons coming into use in Western Europe perhaps a century later, according to an isolated illustration in a ca. 1326 English manuscript by Walter de Milemete. DeVries finds "seemingly undeniable proof" that guns were "almost certainly" present at the battle of Crécy (1346) between the English and French (pp. 10, 12). (Accounts of possible earlier use in the Iberian peninsula are not mentioned.) This chapter also stresses that while the Burgundian dukes possessed a formidable artillery train, the better to control rebellious communities and to extend their domination over the wealthy Low Countries, their real importance to the history of gunpowder weapons stems from the "paper trail" they left behind, as a result of their patronage of chroniclers who recorded events and bureaucratic administrators who managed accounts.

Chapter 2, entitled "The Military Careers of the Dukes of Burgundy," is the most extensive of the book's four chapters and is devoted to a close examination of the impressive build-up of the Burgundian artillery train under the rule from 1363 to 1477 of the duchy's four Valois dukes. The authors take pains to demonstrate that the Burgundian artillery park during this period was every bit as large and up-to-date as that deployed by the French at the end of the Hundred Years' War (1338-1453) or during Charles VIII's celebrated invasion of Italy in 1494-1495.

Chapter 3 of the book provides a useful lexicon of medieval guns and gunnery, with modern equivalents for some of the more obscure terminology associated with the employment of gunpowder weapons during the period. Chapter 4, an "Illustrated Catalogue of the Surviving [Medieval] Guns," features black and white photos as well as line drawings by Robert Smith. The "stars of the show" are surviving medieval bombards: "Mons Meg" at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland; "Basel" in a museum in Basel, Switzerland; and "Dulle Griet" in a museum in Ghent, Belgium.

The book's conclusion underscores some universally accepted tenets, such as the observation that the introduction of gunpowder weapons required "changes in military thinking, and not just in strategy and tactics, … but also in military administration, logistics, planning, and technology" (p. 316). But, the authors warn, "gunpowder weapons...