Like the `Gunpowder Empires' of Islamic Asia (the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople, the Safavid Empire based in Iran and the Mughal Empire based in India), the Western European `gunpowder states' of the early modern `military revolution' made ceaseless efforts to secure the raw materials for explosive munitions. Their siege trains, fighting ships, fortresses and musketry consumed vast amounts of powder as they vied for dominance and projected their force beyond their frontiers. From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedes and English built their strength on gunpowder. Neither monarchies nor armies could operate without this special commodity. Without gunpowder weaponry they could have no national security, and without its principal ingredient --- saltpetre --- there could be no firepower munitions.1 Only with the development of chemical explosives in the later nineteenth century did dependence on gunpowder decline. Familiar in Europe by the thirteenth century, gunpowder was composed of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur (known as brimstone) and carbon (from charcoal). Reliant on milling and mixing, the product was only as good as the material from which it was made. The charcoal provided solid substance for combustion, the sulphur allowed immediate ignition, while saltpetre provided oxygen for the explosion (strictly speaking, a deflagration rather than a highly exothermic combustion). The proportions varied with use and changed over time, but by the late sixteenth century most English cannon powder mixed six parts saltpetre to one part each of brimstone and charcoal. This combination, claimed the seventeenth-century gunner Nathanael Nye, produced `the strongest powder that can be made'
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