Like small arms, cannon are a descendant of the fire lance, a gunpowder-filled tube attached to the end of a spear and used as a flamethrower in China.
Between the 10th and 12th centuries, the Chinese developed the huo qiang ("fire lance"), a short-range proto-gun that channeled the explosive power of gunpowder through a cylinder initially, a bamboo tube.
The fire lance was a spear, with a tube of gunpowder attached to it.
The siege of De'an in 1132 was the first recorded appearance of the fire lance, an early ancestor of firearms.
In Europe, the first representation of the fire lance is of a horse-mounted knight wielding the weapon in a Latin manuscript illustration dated to 1396, and also appeared in an illustration of Taccola's De Mechinis (1449).
Once the gunpowder was consumed, the fire lance could be wielded like a normal spear, or replenished by a new tube filled with gunpowder.
In the Islamic world, the fire lance first appears in a book of 1280 written by Hasan al Rammah, and again appears in a manuscript of 1320.
The fire lance and fire tubea combination of a firearm and flamethrower came in many different versions and were styled with many different names by the time Jiao Yu edited the Huolongjing.
The earliest metal barrel guns were not designed for high-nitrate gunpowder and a bore-filling projectile; rather, they were designed for the low-nitrate flamethrower fire lance that shot small co-viative missiles.
Eventually, the paper and bamboo of which fire lance barrels were originally constructed came to be replaced by metal.
