One of the first European small arms -- called handgonnes -- that can be reliably dated was the Tannenberg Hand Cannon.
Using black powder as a propellant, and probably fired by sticking a red-hot iron into the torch hole, this weapon was discovered in a well under the Tannenberg castle ruins, and since they know the castle was knocked down in 1399, that is the latest the piece could have come to be there. Still had a round in the chamber. (The illustrations are of the original, and a copy, showing how a wood "stock" would have be used.)
It would have been held in the hand like a spear, or maybe tucked under an arm, nobody is certain. Could have had an assistant to touch it off.
Large cannons had been around for a while, but this seems to be among the earliest, if not the earliest example of a working pistol. It would have fired a big honking bullet, been accurate enough to keep four of five on a man-sized target at twenty feet, and able to blow a hole in a knight's armor.
Come a long way in a mere four hundred years with these things, haven't we?
True, I do credit weapons technology as having come a long way although Europeans seem to have started from scratch when knowledge was out there. I do remember reading about China having what looked like variants of modern rifles as early as the fourteenth century. Not to make this a commentary on societies, especially European ones, but I does make me wonder about Europeans re-inventing something that was already around.
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If the measure of any society is the development of weapons that remove the personal element from combat, I think we have moved away from what is honourable toward a minimization of human life and a removal of the connections to our actions...
Just the direction my thoughts went...
They were really scary things to fire. According to some accounts I saw years back they were hammer-welded around a mandrel and tended to blow up in the gunner's face after a limited number of firings. Maybe that's where the famous "43 times more likely to kill you" comes from
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