The earliest European recipe for ‘powder for guns’ and three other misunderstood or unremarked recipes of the fourteenth century

Only a few fourteenth-century recipes for gunpowder proper (for use in shooting projectiles from guns) are known. They can be difficult to inter pret, partly because their rarity hinders comparisons between texts in order to clarify ambiguous directions. This article presents and discusses the earliest known recipe, from Friuli and dated 1336, in comparison what was previously the earliest widely known formulation: the Augsburg recipe of 1338–c. 1350. The German text (translated into English for the first time) provides context for the Italian recipe, and the latter, in turn, in combination with laboratory testing, settles a disputed reading of the German formula.