From the Devil’s Arse: The Invention of Gunpowder

Berthold Schwartz

I have a longstanding interest in gunpowder — I was a fireworks fanatic in my youth, and I was impressed by the sheer uniqueness of the material. Now called black powder, the mysterious substance was for many centuries, and still remains, the only known combination of commonly occurring ingredients that can produce an explosion.

This original gunpowder became obsolete in the late nineteenth century, replaced by smokeless powder and dynamite. These were products synthesized in the chemistry lab — gunpowder was made from substances in nature. The history of gunpowder’s origin goes back in history — way back.

A key figure in the invention of gunpowder was Berthold Schwartz. He was called Black Berthold or der Schwartzer, perhaps because of his complexion, perhaps to signify his interest in the dark arts. An enterprising Franciscan monk, he was an alchemist who devised the formula for the magical powder.

Gunpowder was never a single compound but a mixture of three ingredients. Saltpeter is a white powder that forms in the soil of barnyards, the product of organic decay. It’s the same substance gardeners aim to produce in a compost heap — a nitrate that serves as an excellent fertilizer.

Saltpeter’s critical role in gunpowder is to emit abundant oxygen when heated. Combine it with finely powdered charcoal for fuel and a bit of sulfur for ignition and you have a material that burns almost instantaneously. It changes to hot gas so rapidly that it explodes. It can be used to crack a rock, fling a bullet, or power a rocket.

Schwartz at work.

Many inventions are said to have changed the world. Brother Berthold’s really did. Introduced into warfare in Europe in the 1300s, primitive cannon began to knock down the walls of castles. Barons and petty warlords could no longer defy kings, who had the money for big guns and powder. These sovereigns could also build expensive forts — low and soft rather than high and hard — to dominate their realms. As a result, nations began to coalesce from small principalities. “The modern frontiers of Europe,” historian John Keegan notes “are largely the outcome of fortress building.”

Those bent on conquest could easily transport this compact form of energy on ships. Their cannon intimidated distant coastal ports and the societies that depended on them. Large invading armies were no longer necessary. Vasco da Gama took gunpowder around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and began the conquest of India and the East. Hernán Cortés brought it to America for the same pupose in the early 1500s.

Berthold Schwarz had lived in Freiburg, a small town in western Germany near the French border. The folks there were proud of their ingenious forebear and erected a statue of the monk in 1853.

Schwartz in Freiburg.

There was one little glitch in the story. Brother Berthold never existed. Nor did any European invent this most consequential substance. Just as da Gama and Cortés claimed sovereignty over empires, Berthold was invented to lay claim to the gunpowder that made conquest possible. For centuries, his legend let Europeans rest easy in the assurance that they had originated this crucial technology. Yet Berthold was no more real than Robin Hood or Rip Van Winkle.

Alchemists had indeed stumbled onto gunpowder — Chinese alchemists. They were looking for an elixir of long life. They observed that saltpeter, when tossed into a fire, made the flames flare brightly. Sulfur was highly combustible. Perhaps a potion with these ingredients would restore a man’s vitality and let him live forever. Dried honey at first stood in for charcoal.

Around 900 A.D., the alchemists warned of the explosive power of the substance. Before long, they began to exploit it. The devices they developed were various types of containers. A closed receptacle allowed pressure to build up until it blew apart — a bomb. A tube open at one end could heave a stone or metal ball at high speed and became known as a gun. Turn that tube around, pack it tightly with powder, and you had a rocket. Their uses in warfare were not lost on the Chinese, who were entering a long struggle with the Mongols. By the 1100s, they had adapted the novel material to all these uses.

Word got around. Did Marco Polo bring the news to Europe? Did it filter westward with Ghengis Khan or with enterprising merchants? No one knows for sure. But it had reached England by the 1200s. Its formula was first recorded there by the philosopher Roger Bacon, who was indeed a Franciscan friar. The English king Edward III scored the first recorded use of gunpowder in a European war at the 1346 Battle of Crécy in northern France. The novel weapon produced more fear than fatalities, but it was a start.

Old print, Schwartz and the devil upper right.

Although gunpowder made possible the delights of fireworks on summer nights and greatly eased the work of digging mines, folks soon realized that when used in war and crime, it introduced slaughter and cruelty into the world on a vast scale. Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson referred to the inventor of gunpowder, whoever he was, as one “who from the Devil's Arse did Guns beget.”

For more on the subject, read my book Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards & Pyrotechnics.