The authors of the Modern Age were clear about who invented the harquebus. In the Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish language (1611), which was the first monolingual dictionary of Castilian, Sebastián de Covarrubias defined it as a “weapon forged in hell, invented by the devil.” Ludovico Ariosto also told us in his Orlando Furioso (1532), that it is Beelzebub who deserves recognition.
The feeling that was then had towards this device is summarized by Cervantes in Don Quixote: “Well be those blessed centuries that lacked the terrifying fury of those devilish instruments of artillery. To whose inventor I believe that in hell the reward is being given for his diabolical invention, with which he caused an infamous and cowardly arm to take the life of a brave knight, and who, without knowing how or where, In the middle of the courage and verve that ignites and animates the brave breasts, a wild bullet arrives.”
They hated the harquebus because it had made inane virtues that until then were considered important on the battlefield, such as courage or skill. And would El Cid have existed if anyone could have killed him from fifty meters away?
The devil didn’t invent it – although it surely helped, if we accept that he is behind all the evils – but we don’t know who either. The only certain thing is that its closest predecessor, the hand cannon, arrived from China in the 13th century; Some say that through the Silk Road, and others, with the Mongol invasion.
As its name indicates, the hand cannon was no more than a miniature cannon, used rarely for the defense of fortresses and very rarely for foot soldiers. This gives us to talk about the etymology of “arcabuz”, a word that comes from the Dutch haakbus or the French hakenbühse (French was a language of the Franks). In both cases it means “cannon with hook”, as it ended in a hook that could cling, for example, to a battleship.
It did not become a weapon for infantry until the invention of the matchlock, a firing mechanism that, for the first time, allowed two hands to be used for aiming. The fuse was placed at the tip of a curved lever called a serpentine, the other end of which acted as a trigger. When pressed, the serpentine fell on the bowl with the gunpowder, causing a small explosion that went down the ear (hole that connected the bowl with the propellant charge) and which, in turn, fired the projectile.
Its effectiveness was demonstrated in the battle of Ceriñola (1503, within the framework of the Spanish wars in Italy), when the infantry of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, defeated a theoretically superior French army. Another milestone was the Battle of Pavia (1525, also in Italy), in which the French cavalry, with their medieval armor, was decimated by Spanish bullets.
It was fundamental, but it cannot be said that the harquebus alone explains what the historian Michael Roberts (1908-1996) called “the Military Revolution.” It was a muzzle-loading weapon, that is, it was loaded through the mouth of the barrel and had to be reloaded after each shot. A well-trained soldier could fire at most every half minute (as long as it wasn’t raining, as that rendered the fuses useless), plenty of time for an enemy horseman to run over him.
The companies of harquebusiers only served as support for the pikemen, who were the true striking force. Grouped in blocks, with their long pikes (three meters long) they kept the enemy away, with the harquebusiers placing themselves in the middle of the formation or on the flanks.
This required a lot of organization, and that is the key to the so-called “military revolution.” In the 16th century, the value of soldiers came to be measured more by their ability to move as a whole than by their individual skill. There was no longer a need for heroes who carried out solo exploits. The time of knights-errant had passed.
