Toward the 14th century a kind of lighter cavalry was introduced, and a portion of the archers were mounted to facilitate their manoeuvring; but these and other changes were soon rendered useless, abandoned, or turned to different account by the introduction of that new element, which was destined to change the whole system of warfare, gunpowder.- From the Arabs in Spain the knowledge of the composition and use of gunpowder spread to France and the rest of Europe; the Arabs themselves had received it from nations further east, who again had it from the original inventors, the Chinese. In the first half of the 14th century cannon were first introduced into European armies - heavy, unwieldy pieces of ordnance, throwing stone balls, and unfit for anything but sieges. Small arms, however, were soon invented. Perugia supplied itself in 1364 with 500 hand-guns, the barrels not more than eight inches long; they subsequently gave rise to the manufacture of pistols (so called from Pistoia in Tuscany). Not long afterward longer and heavier hand-guns (arquebuses) were manufactured, corresponding to our present musket; but, short and heavy in the barrel, they had but a restricted range, and the matchlock was an almost absolute hindrance to correct aim.

Toward the close of the 14th century there was no military force in western Europe without its artillery and arquebusiers. But the influence of the new arm on general tactics was not yet perceptible. Both large and small firearms took a long time in loading, and what with their clumsiness and costliness, they had not superseded the crossbow by 1450. - In the mean time the general breaking up of the feu-dal system, and the rise of cities, contributed to change the composition of armies. The larger vassals were either subdued by central authority, as in France, or had become quasi-in-dependent sovereigns, as in Germany and Italy. The power of the lesser nobility was broken by the central authority in conjunction with the cities. The feudal armies no longer existed; new armies were formed from the mercenaries whom the ruin of feudalism had set free to serve those who would pay them. Thus, some-thing approaching standing armies arose; but these mercenaries, men of all nations, difficult to keep in order, and not very regularly paid, committed great excesses. In France, King Charles VII. therefore formed a permanent force from native elements. In 1445 he levied 15 compagnies d'ordonnance of 6OO men each; in all, 9,000 cavalry, stationed in the towns of the kingdom, and paid with regularity.

Every company was divided into 100 lances; a lance consisted of one man-at-arms, three archers, an esquire, and a page. Thus they formed a mixture of heavy cavalry with mounted arch-ers, the two arms in battle acting of course separately. In 1448 he added 16,000 francs-archers, under four captains general, each com-manding eight companies of 500 men. All the archers had crossbows. They were recruited and armed by the parishes, and free from all taxes. This may be considered the first standing army of modern times. - At the close of this first period of modern tactics, as they emerged from media3\al confusion, the state of things may be summed up as follows: The main body of the infantry, consisting of mercenaries, was armed with pike and sword, breastplate and helmet. It fought in deep, close masses, but, better armed and drilled than the feudal infantry, it showed greater tenacity and order in combat. The standing levies and the mercenaries, soldiers by profession, were of course superior to the casual levies and disconnected bands of feudal retainers. The heavy cavalry now found it sometimes necessary to charge in close array against infantry. The light infantry was still principally composed of archers, but the use of the hand-gun for skirmishers gained ground.

The cavalry remained as yet the principal arm - heavy cavalry, men-at-arms encased in iron, but no longer composed in every case of the nobility, and reduced from its former chivalrous and Homeric mode of fighting to the more prosaic necessity of charging in close order. But the un-wieldiness of such cavalry was now generally felt, and many devices were planned to find a lighter kind of horse. Mounted archers, as has been stated, had in part to supply this want; in Italy and the neighboring countries the stradioti, light cavalry on the Turkish plan, composed of Bosnian and Albanian mercenaries, a sort of bashi-bazouks, found ready employment, and were much feared, especially in pursuits. Poland and Hungary had, besides the heavy cavalry adopted from the West, retained their own national light cavalry. The artillery was in its infancy. The heavy guns of the time were indeed taken into the held, but could not leave their position after it was once taken up; the powder was bad, the loading difficult and slow, and the range of the stone balls short. - The close of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century are marked by a double progress; the French improved the artillery, and the Spaniards gave a new character to the infantry.

Charles VIII. of France made his guns so far movable that he could not only take them into the field, but make them change their position during battle and follow the other troops in their movements, which, however, were not very quick. He thereby became the founder of field artillery. His guns, mounted on wheeled carriages and plentifully horsed, proved immensely superior to the old-fashioned clumsy artillery of the Italians drawn by bullocks, and did such execution in the deep columns of the Italian infantry, that Machiavelli wrote his "Art of War "principally in order to propose formations by which the effect of such artillery on infantry could be counteracted. In the battle of Marignano, Francis I. of France defeated the Swiss pike-men by the effective fire and the mobility of this artillery, which, from flanking positions, enfiladed the Swiss order of battle. But the reign of the pike, for infantry, was on the decline. The Spaniards improved the common hand-gun (arquebuse) and introduced it into the regular heavy infantry. Their musket (hacquebutte) was a heavy, long-barrelled arm, bored for two-ounce bullets, and fired from a rest formed by a forked pole.