The Role Of Gunpowder In The Era Of The Renaissance

Medieval to Renaissance:
How the World Changed
The idea of state building is one that is important to empires, nations, and it is often on many powerful people’s minds. The period of state building that began with the Renaissance and continued into the so-called modern period has often been attributed to the invention of gunpowder. According to Rabb, “gunpowder warfare was the most unprecedented of the new circumstances that shaped the Renaissance.”1 This suggests that gunpowder was an entirely new technology that had no precedent and that changed the entire way European states interacted with one another. Gunpowder certainly played a role in the evolution of European states, but the change is certainly not as stark as Rabb would suggest and there are many more factors that lead to state bulding. There was an evolution of medieval warfare, politics, and economics that created the opportunity for the Renaissance era of state-building and without these evolving factors,
The printing press, new social theories such as humanism and Machiavellian politics, and even gun powder were all results of the innovation brought by a new secular patronage system.48 All of these innovations had a huge impact on state building, from printing presses creating a new form of record keeping and communication, to new social ideas changing the prevailing world view and gun powder taking warfare to a new level. They all helped nations form a centralized government and a specialized bureaucracy. What is important to note is that these innovations were the result of economic changes. And without earlier traditions or uses, these changes would have never happened. So although gunpowder was an impressive new weapon, its introduction into European warfare was not the cause of unprecedented change, but rather the result of a patronage system that was already in