From ancient times throughout the known world men had used incendiary mixtures for warlike purposes. They were well-acquainted with saltpetre (potassium nitrate), the most potent of the three ingredients of gunpowder, its effect when burned with charcoal and sulphur, the other two, as well as with other substances. That someone would eventually chance upon a mixture which exploded when ignited was inevitable.

However, while mixtures involving the crude saltpetre dug from the ground or scraped from the walls of cellars by the ancients can be made to burn quite fiercely, they cannot be made to explode. To make an explosive mixture the saltpetre must first be refined.

The earliest known reference to the refining of saltpetre appears in an Arabian text dated 1240. Therefore it is extremely unlikely gunpowder was discovered prior to that year. Among the many claims to have discovered it are the Chinese, Hindus, Greeks, Arabs, Germans and English. Within the well-recorded histories of the first four there is no written evidence which would satisfy a historian that any of them discovered or used gunpowder before it came into use in Europe. If one of their people had discovered it some writer doubtless would have mentioned the fact.

For over 500 years military historians attributed both the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the gun to one Berthold Schwarz (Black Berthold), a German monk so-called because he dabbled in the 'black art' of alchemy. They based their beliefs on an entry allegedly made under the year 1313 in the records of the city of Ghent, but a study carried out in 1923 by Sir Charles Oman revealed the entry was a marginal note, not a contemporary entry, inserted not in 1313 but in 1393, by which time guns were in general use throughout Europe. The entry was therefore declared invalid.

Extensive research produced not one scrap of evidence that Schwarz ever existed. He is now seen as a legendary figure, rather like Robin Hood - or perhaps Friar Tuck! It is thought the entry, made in a foreign hand, may have been made by a German scribe anxious to credit his countrymen with both discovery and invention.