This is, as promised, my third post about the weaponry found in Captured in Amber, and specifically, why are there no firearms?

First, we must go back to my second post, where I wrote about the Antonine plague, and the way in which it spread eastwards, literally decimating the tribes beyond (decimating in the sense that the Romans used the word, killing 10%).

This not only removed the threat of invasion, but caused the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to introduce a policy of isolationism, with no further attempt to expand the boundaries of the Empire.

While this led to a long period of peace, that brought with it stagnation, a satisfaction with the way things are, and certainly no drive to develop new weapons, when, with no outside threat, there was no purpose.

Isolation, and not wishing to look to the East, also meant no introduction of new ideas from there.

In our world, gunpowder arrived in Europe during the 13th century via trade routes and the Mongol expansions, with the first written recipe recorded by English philosopher Roger Bacon in 1267.

Clearly, that did not happen in the world of Captured in Amber. If people wanted a weapon that could fire further than they could throw, they had crossbows, and as I explained in my last post, it was in the refinement of crossbow technology that any development work took place.

That does not mean that nations outside the old Roman Empire could not have refined the use of gunpowder. The Prussians, for instance, may have heard of it.

So far, though, we have seen no sign that they have developed a firearms industry…