This basic idea had percolated from China through India to the Moors and Arabs, and in the course of a few centuries had developed into a crude artillery used by the Moors in the siege of Cordova in 1280. The Spaniards, thus learning the use of the cannon, turned the lesson upon their instructors, when under Ferdinand IV. they took Gibraltar from the Moors in 1309. Then the knowledge of artillery soon spread throughout Europe. The French used it at the siege of Puy Guillaume in 1338, and the English had three small guns at Crecy in 1346. These antique guns were made by welding longitudinal bars of iron together and binding them by iron rings shrunk on while hot. Being shaped internally and externally like an apothecary’s mortar, they were called mortars or bombards. Some were breech-loaders, having a removable chamber at the breech into which the charge of powder was inserted behind the ball. The balls were stone. These early cannon, bombards, and mortars were mounted on heavy solid wooden frames and moved with great difficulty from place to place. Then in the fifteenth century they commenced to make wrought-iron cannon, and hollow projectiles, containing a bursting charge of powder to be exploded by a fuse lit before the shell was fired. In the next century cannon were cast. The Hindoos, when their acquaintance was made by the Europeans, were as far advanced as the latter in cannon and fire-arms. One cannon was found at Bejapoor, in India, cast of bronze, bearing date 1548, and called the “Master of the Field,” which weighed 89,600 pounds, and others of similar size of later dates. Great cast bronze guns of about the same weight as the Hindoo guns were also produced at St. Petersburg, Russia, in the sixteenth century. Many and strange were the names given by Europeans to their cannon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to denote their size and the weight of the ball they carried: such as the Assick, the Bombard, the Basilisk, the cannon Royal, or Carthoun, the Culverin, Demi-culverin, Falcon, Siren, Serpentine, etc. The bombards in the fifteenth century were made so large and heavy, especially in France, that they could not be moved without being taken apart. When the heavy, unwieldy bombards with stone balls were used, artillery was mostly confined to castles, towns, forts, and ships. When used in the field they were dragged about by many yokes of oxen. But in the latter part of the fifteenth century, when France under Louis XI. had learned to cast lighter brass cannon, to mount them on carriages that could be drawn by four or six horses, and which carriages had trunnions in which the cannon were swung so as to be elevated or depressed, and cast-iron projectiles were used instead of stones, field artillery took its rise, and by its use the maps of the world were changed. Thus with their artillery the French under Charles VIII., the successor of Louis XI., conquered Italy.