Gunpowder Empires

Gunpowder empires. The term conjures up images of muscular men (and maybe some women) carrying guns and pulling cannon. These firearms are turned on everyone they meet, which allows rulers to conquer small kingdoms and independent people, thereby creating vast empires that they rule at gunpoint.

Well, that’s partly true. The idea of “gunpowder empires” was born when historians William H. McNeill and Marshall G.S. Hodgson noticed that three vast empires emerged around the same time in central Asia—the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire, and the Mughal Empire. Seeking to explain why these empires all arose at the same time, they concluded that gunpowder and the weapons that used it were a common factor. In fact, gunpowder may have been a factor in the rise of other big states in Europe and East Asia, as well.

So, gunpowder technology wasn’t unique to the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. And it wasn’t the only factor that enabled their success. Rather, these three powerful Islamic empires also developed some really powerful political technologies. But “bureaucratic empires” doesn’t have the same ring to it, so Hodgson and McNeill went with “gunpowder empires” instead. In this essay, though, we’re going to discuss the political factors as well as the firearm technology that made these empires great.

Gunpowder and authority in the three Islamic empires

Hodgson and McNeill did discover that gunpowder solved a big problem for rulers. In the fifteenth century, it was difficult to govern a large area, as overland transportation still relied on horses and camels. That made it difficult for rulers to travel long distances, which made it hard to govern large empires effectively. To work around this handicap, most Eurasian kings or would-be emperors—from England in the west to Japan in the east—forged agreements with local nobles. The nobles were allowed to govern parts of the kingdom in their ruler’s name. In exchange, the nobles agreed to serve and protect the ruler.

Now, here’s the problem: When you give people power, they often want to keep it. Those local nobles built castles and trained skilled soldiers. Protected by their soldiers and safe behind their walls, the nobles could do what they wanted. For a while, the rulers didn’t have an effective response strategy.

Gunpowder changed this equation. First, gunpowder weapons were expensive—so expensive that local nobles usually couldn’t afford them. Only sultans, kings, and emperors could pay for large numbers of muskets and cannon. Second, cannon could reduce the walls of a castle to rubble, which meant they neutralized the advantages of local rebels and nobles. Finally, muskets—put into the hands of even half-trained peasants—could destroy the nobles’ highly-trained soldiers.

The result was a huge increase in power for the rulers of the three large Islamic states of the era. Ottoman Sultan Murad I (r. 1362–1389) built a musket-armed force of enslaved soldiers, the janissary corps, loyal only to him, while his successors used cannon to conquer Constantinople and other cities. The Mughal Empire’s founder, Babur (r. 1526–1530), utilized muskets and cannon to defeat the Sultan of Delhi in 1526, which expanded his empire into central India. The Safavid Emperor Abbas the Great (r. 1588–1629) assembled a force of 12,000 musketeers and 500 cannon. Each of these rulers used their forces to win great victories, and they also monopolized these weapons. The Mughal Sultan Akbar (r. 1556–1605), for example, forbade anyone but the emperor from owning cannon.

Political technologies and historical events

Gunpowder was clearly significant. Yet recent historians have argued that the term gunpowder empires may be misleading. That’s partly because—despite having some firearms—most of these armies continued to rely mainly on swords, spears, and bows. But it’s also because the rulers’ ability to reign over vast empires may have relied more on advances in governance and global historical trends. These new “political technologies” weren’t physical things. Instead, they were ideas and ways of organizing the empire that allowed a central government to rule a big area.

First, let’s discuss the history. Each of these empires—along with the Russian Empire and Qing (Manchu) Dynasty in China—emerged in a vacuum left behind by the fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol Empire. But they also relied on the tools of governance developed by the Mongols. These included the first of our political technologies: bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are large group of officials paid by the central government, and therefore, likely to be more loyal to the emperor than local nobles. We call this process rationalization, the development of a permanent, organized set of government agencies that observed, tracked, and made policies to govern the vast empire. These officials built and maintained roads, policed communities, and made sure food was distributed. Each of the gunpowder empires developed these bureaucracies, which made them stronger and better equipped to rule larger areas.

The second political technology that made it possible for gunpowder empires to rule vast areas was an alliance between rulers and religious officials. The Ottoman sultans declared themselves the protectors of the Muslim holy site of Mecca and relied on religious judges called qadi. The Safavid rulers worked closely with Shi’ite Muslim clergy to impose a single religious identity on their population. In the case of these two states, their religious affiliations helped lead to generations of conflict. It wasn’t enough that the two states were political rivals for territory, they were also each tied to rival Islamic sects—and they both had gunpowder weapons! It’s no surprise that territorial and religious rivalries coupled with technologically superior weaponry led to numerous clashes.

But gunpowder empires also found ways to rule religiously diverse populations. The Muslim Mughal rulers had a difficult task, for example, as they ruled a majority Hindu population in addition to large Buddhist and Muslim communities and several smaller religious minorities. Thus, sultans such as Akbar may have sponsored Muslim mosques and relied on Muslim religious magistrates, but they were very tolerant of other faiths and often sponsored multiple religious orders and buildings as well. In a similar way, the Ottoman rulers made careful rules for their Orthodox Christian, Jewish, and other minority communities but also gave them enough freedom to keep them loyal.

Although the various gunpowder emperors continued to rely on some local nobles, they began to take steps to control them. The Mughal sultans, for example, created a set of military commanders known as the mansabdari, but made sure they frequently came to court to prove their loyalty and pay respect to the sultan. The Ottoman rulers also worked to keep their nobles, or sipahi, reliant on the sultan by making them give annual service to the state in return for the right to tax communities and control an area.

Beyond the three main gunpowder empires

Historians who came after McNeill and Hodgson noted that other parts of Eurasia experienced similar changes to the three gunpowder empires—and around the same time. The governments of Russia and Qing Dynasty China began using gunpowder weapons to ensure the power of the central government. In Russia, the state also forged an alliance with the Orthodox Church, and China implemented the most advanced bureaucracy of the age. Further east, guns were making an impact in Japan. To the south, guns were being used by the armies of Moroccan rulers and other North African states.

Dramatic changes were also taking place in Europe. While there may not have been a single vast empire there (although the Habsburg rulers tried), many of the same trends can be seen. European kings and queens were centralizing power in their own hands. They were using cannon and muskets not only against each other, but to reduce the power of their landholding nobles. In fact, people were beginning to abandon castles because cannon were so effective at destroying them. In places like France and England, real and permanent systems of government with bureaucratic professionals at their core were taking shape. Their rulers were also making alliances with Christian bishops and officials—both Catholic and Protestant.

The invention of firearms played a role in the expansion and consolidation of imperial power, as in the case of the huge Islamic gunpowder empires, but that wasn’t the whole story. Behind the scenes, the more monumental changes were the alliances forged between rulers and religion and the development of bureaucracy—two of the central features of the period.