Sulphur and potassium nitrate for manufacturing of gunpowder

Sulphur and potassium nitrate for manufacturing of gunpowder

Head of Centre Peter Vemming Hansen, Mag. Art. (MA), The Medieval Centre

Nobody knows for certain exactly where gunpowder was invented, but the Chinese knew about it already around 1000 AD, at which time gunpowder was used in fireworks and primitive guns.       

Gunpowder consists of three ingredients: potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal. Charcoal was readily available everywhere, while the other ingredients were more difficult to obtain.

The geographical location of the invention is probably closely connected with the fact that potassium nitrate is only found in natural deposits in China and the Bengal in India, which was, of course, later to become the potassium nitrate store of the World.

Sulphur, the third ingredient, is found in areas with volcanic activity, and in order to understand the way in which sulphur was extracted and processed, one must go to Iceland, to the large store thermic areas in the northern part of the country. At the Ga’sir locality, archaeologists from the local Akureyri Museum have excavated the first known sulphur trading stations. They date back to the fourteenth century, and it was not merely sulphur that was traded in these locations, because the stations also had facilities for the refinery process that prepared the sulphur for gunpowder production!

The many archaeological finds at Ga’sir help lifting the veil concealing the everyday life and efforts of the Icelandic farmers at the beginning of the fourteenth century. These efforts enabled people in other places down in Europe to fight wars with weapons of a destructive firepower not previously seen at that time.

The Europeans

There is no doubt that it was the Europeans who developed the effective gunpowder recipes for use in canons and handguns. This took place in the course of the fourteenth century, and the development was so rapid that weapons arsenals across Europe already around 1350 contained ample supplies of gunpowder and cannonballs.

Practical tests

Modern scientists have always considered the first canons to be not very effective and of poor accuracy, suitable only for scaring the enemy with thunder and loud bangs.

However, modern experiments with early medieval canons and gunpowder recipes from that period carried out at the Medieval Centre at Nykøbing Falster, show that these first canons and gunpowder mixtures were extremely effective in a war situation. Today, we know that the Europeans almost immediately knew how to exploit gunpowder to great effect, and we are now able to see that these early gunpowder recipes are fully comparable to modern gunpowder recipes.

The reason why these new gunpowder-powered weapons did not immediately gain a position of ubiquity on the battlefields was thus not that armies did not possess the skills to exploit this new weapon, but rather the difficulties involved in securing stable supplies of the raw materials for the manufacture of gunpowder, that is, potassium nitrate and sulphur.

The project aims to map and describe the medieval supplies of potassium nitrate and sulphur, and to take a closer at the international trading systems that had to be established for the European war machines to be able to function.