[Music] if you asked historians today what mineral or earth resource has had the biggest impact on geopolitics most of them would probably say oil understandable in today's context but go back in time a bit more than a century and you would have gotten a totally different answer and a resource we barely think about today nitrates there are two easy reasons for that one nitrates are responsible for roughly 50 percent of the world's population currently being alive without nitrogen fertilizers agricultural production would be about half of what it currently is but the second reason is the one that gets most of the interest from the historical point of view for most of history nitrates also known as niter or saltpeter were the main ingredient in gunpowder and in most other explosives and from about the 13th century on much of the known world was engaged in a desperate centuries-long scramble to acquire nitrate minerals the global consequences of this competition for nitrates include the fall of the byzantine empire the british colonization of india and the war of the pacific among others so clearly nitrates deserve a little recognition the earliest mention of nitrates dates from sometime in the 22nd century bc in a sumerian inscription followed by a mention in an egyptian text sometime around 1500 bc between about 400 and 200 bc there were mines and process facilities producing nitrates in at least two locations around jordan and west of the dead sea but they were small since ancient people didn't have a lot of use for nitrates the principal applications were pharmaceuticals making incense and for the romans wine coolers ice wasn't readily available in most of the roman middle east but the dissolution of nitrate minerals in water is highly endothermic meaning it chills everything around it including amphoras of wine plunked into the solution content with their cooled chablis the romans left it to investigators further east to find other uses for nitrate minerals by the early centuries a.d alchemists in india and china were well aware that these could include exploding when three parts of nitrate minerals were combined with one part of mixed charcoal and sulfur it was the charcoal and sulfur that actually did the burning but the admixture of nitrate minerals provided oxygen that allowed the combustion reactions to go much faster than they would have been able to if the oxygen had had to come from the air this in turn meant rapid evolution of heating and expanding gases and the more nitrate was added the faster this went if the gases had space to expand into not much would happen besides some burning and a nasty smell but if the gun powder was ignited in a confined space the expanding gases were a very different story several tang dynasty alchemists gave their all for the cause of science in discovering that the burning mixture would under such circumstances blow up everything in the vicinity somewhat ironically they'd been researching it as an elixir of immortality by the 9th century the recipe for gunpowder had been pretty well nailed down in china at about 75 percent nitrate and the rest evenly split between charcoal and sulfur all ground up and mixed together popular for fireworks it saw brief use in the chinese military between about the early 10th century and the mid-12th century a.d but was thereafter abandoned in favor of more traditional armaments and tactics but the genie was already out of the bottle china's neighbors had picked up on gunpowder or as they called it chinese salt with enthusiasm this included the invading mongols who began incorporating gunpowder into their horde's armament in the 13th century walled cities which had been impregnable to traditional mongol cavalry tactics were suddenly no longer safe in 1258 a.d the khan's armies bombarded baghdad with gunpowder-based rocket attacks and destroyed the city about 50 years later it was more than the mongols getting in on the gunpowder game a hitherto obscure turkic group led by one othman bay adopted firearms and by the mid-1300s his orthomondly or ottoman turks had become a regional power in the middle east perhaps because their traditional tactics already relied heavily on ranged weapons the early ottoman sultans embraced gunpowder upgrades with such zeal that history recognizes them as the first of what are called the gunpowder empires to their contemporaries the reason for that historical nickname would have been obvious estimates for the ottomans first use of gunpowder in combat range from 1354 to 1389 but what is certain is that by the time they overran the remnants of the byzantine empire in the early to middle 1400s they were among the world's masters at artillery and firearm combat the equipage of mehmet the conqueror as the sultan of that time preferred to be known included cannon capable of firing a pound stone cannonball a distance of a mile one of them tore a hapless venetian galley in half with one shot during a test run european armies which at first had opposed gunpowder as it smacked of dark magic were left scrambling to catch up in the early 1400s german and hungarian metallurgists had become highly skilled at making guns but getting enough powder to fire them with was a problem beyond their skill to solve and that was where the ottomans had an unshakable advantage over any state in europe the resource geology of their region or more specifically its climate the relatively hot and dry atmosphere of most of the ottoman empire ensured its rulers a large and steady supply of nitrates unlike most mineral resources we're used to thinking about nitrate minerals form rapidly in soils that contain decaying organic matter the dead organics give off ammonia which is a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen microbes in the soil join the nitrogen to atmospheric oxygen and form potassium or sodium nitrate minerals in wet climates the nitrates will dissolve quickly in the rain or get picked up by plants what's left tends to be low quality mainly calcium nitrate efflorescences around caves and other dark organic rich settings but where it's dry there isn't enough water to dissolve and carry off the nitrates and so soils can accumulate up to about five pounds of high quality potassium and sodium nitrate minerals per hundred pounds of soil over the course of five to ten years the early ottoman sultans were quick to capitalize on that advantage spreading firearms and artillery throughout their armed forces on average ottoman military activities in the 16th century consume some four to five hundred metric tons of gunpowder each year translating to more than 300 metric tons of nitrate produced the sultan's government enjoyed a state monopoly on nitrate mining and all other gunpowder related industries and all known nitrate deposits automatically became royal property deposits were mapped out in detail and the most favorable were selected for mining at a large scale usually these were around densely populated areas near transportation networks and if possible not too far from the current theater of war the main producers were in the balkans in anatolia with subsidiary production in egypt for use in the north african theater total output made the ottoman empire of the 16th century the only state around the mediterranean that was self-sufficient with respect to nitrates and therefore the only state that could fully supply its own armies with as much gunpowder as they needed the resulting string of conquests which spread the empire over thousands of miles was awe-inspiring throughout the 1500s the ottoman sultan was among the most powerful and feared men in the world his only arrival in the region apart from the rare occasions when christian europeans stopped fighting each other for long enough to fight the ottomans was the second gunpowder empire just to his east the safavid kings of persia the safavids coalesced out of a confederation of azerbaijani tribes in the early 1500s and rapidly spread their control through the area that is now iran overpowering a dynasty of incumbent rulers descended from the mongols even early on the safavid shahs had been decades slower than the ottomans in embracing gunpowder throughout their reign they would be the least gunpowder reliant of the gunpowder empires for several reasons one was the rough terrain and relative lack of fortified cities in persia another was the fact that apart from the ottomans the safavid's usual enemies were highly mobile horse-mounted back country tribesmen these factors both tended to favor speed and agility over firepower and siege especially at the time most firearms were still too large to be practical on horseback and they got off maybe one shot every few minutes in between frequent misfires thus the first attested interest in firearms by the safavids dates from 1469 a.d when european governments desperate to stave off an ottoman invasion began shipping arms and master gunners to what was then a mildly troublesome insurgency of religious dissidents in the ottomans backyard as the safavids power grew and they expanded from back country insurgency to besieging fortified cities they began employing gunpowder more and more though always with a certain reluctance even a massive defeat by the ottomans in 1514 due almost entirely to ottoman cannon fire did not shake the safavid ruler's quasi-religious conviction that true blue culturally pure persian warfare should rely on swift cavalry and avoid the cumbersome gunpowder of the western heretics around 1600 the shah did form an artillery corps and establish an infantry musketeer unit initially this worked but it involved a serious overhaul of the traditional persian military which ended up having dire consequences for the safavids power base the maintenance of a large standing army equipped with firearms placed what turned into an intolerable strain on the royal treasury the military strength of the safavids began to wither it didn't help that the safavids disdain for firearms led them to neglect what improvements were possible by the 17th century persian gunpowder had become notorious for low quality at least partly because the safavids never put nitrate mining and gunpowder milling under the careful ministrations of the government as the ottomans had by the late 1600s the safavid shahs were paying dutch and portuguese merchant shippers to carry nitrates directly to them from india we're the third of the gunpowder empires then held sway the moguls the indian subcontinent had a nearly perfect climate for nitrate formation and the utility of nitrates had been introduced by the mongols during the 1300s that was the first time artillery showed up but by the 1400s nitrate production was widespread throughout the region large in scale and had reached a very sophisticated technical level that was a crucial time period in india because it was during the 1400s that the reigning delhi sultanate broke up into a series of smaller usually warring states partly due to the constant hostilities all sides used firearms and gunpowder technology with gusto keeping demand for nitrates high by the 1460s multiple indian rulers were not only encouraging nitrate mining but had organized it into highly favored but efficient state monopolies they were not to enjoy their situation for long india's division into squabbling states made conquest easy and the moguls distant descendants of the earlier mongols and timarids swept down through the khyber pass into northern india in 1526 the would-be sultan babur defeated the warring indian principalities and began establishing the mogul empire along the way he notched the world's first known execution by gunpowder armed firing squad babur's descendants continued to make liberal use of gunpowder and warfare replacing india's previous reliance on selected elite swordsmen with masked armies of musketeers this was powered by indian nitrate mining supplemented by one of the world's earliest state-sponsored programs in synthesizing a mineral resource a subset of one of the lower castes was assigned to nitrate production either by mining the natural nitrate deposits or by industrial chemistry this was done by collecting what one might call organic rich earth which usually meant shoveling out the contents of stables or latrines heaping it up and irrigating the heat with water or vinegar or other solvents these dissolve the nitrogen that the microbes had fixed in the heap and percolated downward workers would collect the liquid in trenches and boil it to precipitate the nitrates which then had to go through several cycles of re-dissolution and re-precipitation before they reached gunpowder grades of purity but the dry climate made it a fast process and between the mines and the synthesis program indian nitrates were famous far and wide for being high quality explosive most other regions of the world even china which had invented gunpowder could only produce nitrates of far lower quality these reduced firearms muzzle velocity decreased their range and in extreme cases could render artillery unfireable by contrast indian nitrates consistently had high ballistic power not only that they were more voluminous than almost anywhere else at that time in the world in 1629 shah jahan ordered 234 tons of nitrate to supply gunpowder for a single military campaign an amount that was almost a year's supply in the ottoman empire and impossible to procure almost anywhere else the quantity and quality of their nitrates gave the mobiles a substantial military advantage which they put to use over the 16th to 17th centuries a succession of emperors aided by large artillery units and infantry armed with mashlock rifles extended mogul rule over almost the whole indian subcontinent the considerable resistance they faced was partly overcome by combat partly by inducing gunpowder and firearms experts to change sides processing and trading nitrates became one of the relatively few routes to upward social mobility in mogul india with at least one major warlord of the time originating as a low-caste dealer in nitrates but in the end gunpowder could not only establish empires but blow them up in the ottoman empire there was so much nitrate around that some of it inevitably escaped the government's would-be monopoly much of it was located in the balkans fractious provinces that the central government struggled to control at the best of times banditry and corruption added to the problems created by peasant revolts nitrate production cratered and by the mid-1700s the ottomans were beginning to find themselves dependent on european traders for large supplies of gunpowder further east the safavids were no better off their reluctance to keep up with technology had left them nearly helpless against afghan and uzbek cavalry that could move far faster than the clunky antiquated persian firearms could shoot let alone reload by 1722 the safavid shahs existed only in name and over in india the abundance of high quality nitrate had attracted interest for more than the moguls other empires too needed gunpowder and would invade and conquer distant lands to get it but that's a story for our next video you