"What Were Naval Tactics Like in Europe During the Middle" Topic

…Ages?

"The Middle Ages describes the period of time from about 500 to 1500. This millennium saw the invention and adoption of many new technologies, but by and large, naval warfare was not particularly affected. The game-changer in naval warfare was the cannon, and although that was invented in China sometime in the 900s at the latest and adopted by Europeans by the mid-1200s, it was very rarely used in shipboard combat until about the back half of the 1500s.

The obvious question is why the cannon wasn't adopted for use in naval combat earlier. The answer is pretty much the same reason why the invention of the internal combustion engine didn't immediately lead to powered flight: Medieval gunpowder-based artillery was extremely heavy, didn't give very much bang for the buck, and had a really nasty habit of unexpected blowing up in the users' faces. It took advances in metallurgy in addition to gun design before gunpowder artillery started being a viable means of blowing holes in ships, which meant carrying cannon on deck during the Middle Ages would have been a waste of space and money…"

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