The earliest European illustration of a gun
The illuminated manuscript De Officiis Regum, held at Christ Church College, Oxford, contains a marginal miniature: an armoured knight setting fire to an incendiary arrow from a vase-shaped device. This is the earliest known depiction of a firearm in England. The author of the manuscript, Walter de Milemete, presented it to the future king of England, Edward III, around 1326-1327 as a mirror of princes.
The device itself is not yet a fifteenth-century cannon: a short bronze vessel, muzzle-loaded through a large mouth, and an incendiary projectile more like an arrow with fletching than a ball. But the principle is already there: a powder charge propels a projectile through a barrel. Over the next hundred and fifty years this vessel would grow into the siege bombards of Constantinople in 1453 and into the first field artillery of the fifteenth century; over two hundred years it would produce the need to rebuild fortresses so that walls should cease to be passive defences.
Milemete is taken as the axis point as the oldest dated illustration. Earlier mentions of guns in written sources are disputed and are not accompanied by images.
Why this date
exact: manuscript De Officiis Regum, Christ Church, Oxford, of the reign of Edward II, 1326.
What it grew from
-
The metal barrel: a bronze hand-gun of c. 1288
influenced · Confidence: medium
The metal barrel, which appeared in China by the end of the 13th century, reached European soldiers around 1300 and got into Milemete's manuscript.
Dispute: Needham regards the transmission itself as established by China's priority in dates, but calls the route a matter of conjecture: through the Arab world, through Italian merchants at Tabriz, or directly through Russia (he cites Lattimore's argument about the word pushka). There is no direct evidence of who brought the barrel to Europe or how.
Link sources
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 570 (1986), 570
tackle the problems of how the Chinese discoveries and inventions spread out over the whole world
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 570 (1986), 570
(c) how the metal-barrel bombard and hand-gun found their way to the European military by about +1300 in time to get into the picture in the MS. of Walter de Milamete.
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 570 (1986), 570
and the last only from about +1290
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 570 (1986), 570
Node sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica, 11- (1911), «Ordnance», Wikisource Verified 5 Oct 2026
The earliest known representation of a gun in England is contained in an illuminated manuscript 'De Officiis Regum' at Christ Church, Oxford, of the time of Edward II. (1326).
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.