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Conventional ideas about the impact of gunpowder on warfare are wrong. Gunpowder-based weapons were used in Europe in 1320, a hundred years before the battle of Agincourt, won by the longbow. So why did it take another two centuries for firearms to become important? This and other mysteries are followed up by Bert Hall in Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (John Hopkins University Press, £25, ISBN 0 8018 5531 4). It is a sadly revealing story of how technology and war interacted to transform warfare and eventually revolutionise societies and international relations.