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The Greatest and Most Cunning Military Innovators

Khalid Elhassan February 25, 2022 39 min

19. The Badass General Who Revolutionized Warfare With Firearms

A 1470 battlefield illustration, depicting two medieval soldiers, on the left, with arquebuses. Wikimedia

The invention of gunpowder revolutionized warfare, but it did not happen overnight. It took centuries before gunpowder weapons, first used in battle in the fourteenth century, came to dominate warfare in the sixteenth century. Canons were the first to leave their mark in the late fifteenth century, when King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. He used mobile artillery to breach castle walls up and down the Italian Peninsula. Firearms, held back by their slow rate of fire, took a bit longer to make their mark. When they did, it was thanks in no small part to Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba (1453 – 1515).

A Spanish general known as El Gran Capitan (“the Great Captain”), de Cordoba revolutionized warfare when he innovated tactics that enabled firearms to dominate battlefields forever after. Firearms had been in use for centuries before Cordoba appeared on the scene. However, infantry armed with such weapons were handicapped by their slow rate of fire. After the firearms were discharged, they took considerable time to reload. Long enough for enemy cavalry or even swift-footed infantry, to close in and chop up the firearms users before they managed to get off another shot. As seen below, de Cordoba came up with a solution for that problem.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.