"The impact of Chinese firearms in terms of war fare and territorial expansion was profound."
Sun Laichen, Asia Research Institute
A musket is a smoothbore firearm loaded from the muzzle and fired from shoulder-level. It is larger than an arquebus and often fired from a rest on which it can be pivoted from side to side. It is difficult to pin down with certainty when the musket was invented, although according to ancient Chinese texts it was some time in the fourteenth century. Basic cannons had been fashioned by the Chinese, and Chinese weapons experts were the first to produce a device that was recognizable as a musket, but it was when this technology met the greater metallurgical prowess of the Ottoman Empire (and later that of the European powers) that a revolution in warfare took place.
It took a long time for muskets to become established; early muskets in particular took a long time to reload, could not reliably pierce armor, and were expensive and unreliable. Crucially, a cheap and deadly accurate alternative already existed: A longbow and arrows could be constructed relatively easily from locally available materials. Yet from the sixteenth century onward, Europeans, and in particular the Portuguese, were producing muskets and cannons and exporting them to Asia.
By the seventeenth century, the musket's reliability and ease of use had improved, and it enjoyed one distinct advantage over the longbow: It did not require a highly trained soldier or nobleman to use it. Despite initial resistance to this "cheapening" of "noble" warfare, the aristocracy quickly realized that enemy forces were utilizing firearms to deadly effect, and also that the vast majority of casualties were now not people of their own class, but the more expendable common man. This pattern of warfare continued and intensified through the centuries, reaching a bloody peak in World War I.
