The cannon began as a Chinese fire-lance and conquered Eurasia
The oldest cannon with its production date inscribed on it, the Xanadu Gun of 1298, is only about 35 centimetres long and weighs just over 6 kilograms. Within two centuries its descendants included a 16-tonne Ottoman monster, and guns of this family had battered down the walls of Constantinople.
The weapon probably grew out of the fire-lance, a short-range Chinese weapon that paired a gunpowder-filled tube with a pole. At some point soldiers packed scrap iron or porcelain shards in with the powder, and metal barrels replaced the original paper and bamboo. A carving among the Dazu rock sculptures in Sichuan, dated to 1128, may be the earliest image of a cannon, but physical specimens and written accounts only appear in the thirteenth century. Historians disagree over exactly when true guns arrived, with estimates ranging from about 1200 to 1280; most accept that they emerged at some point in that century.
The Wuwei bronze cannon is dated to 1227 and the Heilongjiang hand cannon to 1288, both by context rather than inscription. The latter was dug up near the site of a battle that year, when the Jurchen commander Li Ting led troops with hand cannons against the rebel prince Nayan. By the 1350s cannon were common in Chinese warfare; a Ming army failed to capture one city in 1358 because its defenders had them, then deployed thousands of its own at the siege of Suzhou in 1366.
By the end of the fourteenth century cannon had spread across Eurasia. At first they mainly targeted infantry, but around 1374 large pieces first broke through a European wall, and siege work became their speciality. After Constantinople's walls fell in 1453, the limber, a two-wheeled carriage, made guns mobile enough to matter on open battlefields. European designs settled around 1480 into a longer, lighter, more accurate classic form that changed little until the 1750s.
The name comes via Old Italian cannone, large tube, from Latin and Greek words for a reed. Italians used it for guns from 1326 and the English from 1418, and both cannons and cannon are correct plurals. Black powder was the standard propellant until smokeless powder arrived in the late nineteenth century. Today most such weapons are simply called guns, howitzers or mortars, though rapid-firing autocannons keep the old word alive.
Source: Cannon
