Berthold Schwarz

(sometimes spelled Schwartz), also known as Berthold the Black and der Schwartzer, was a legendary German (or in some accounts Danish or Greek) alchemist of the late 14th century, credited with the invention of gunpowder by 15th- through 19th-century European literature.

[2] Schwarz is possibly identical with Bertold von Lützelstetten, a scholar who is recorded as "magister artium Bertoldus" at the University of Paris from 1329 to 1336.

[3][citation needed] It is also possible that Schwarz is not a historical person at all, but rather a symbolic inventor figure taking his name from that of Schwarzpulver, "black powder", the German term for gunpowder.

Such details are first reported by Franz Helm, an author active in Landshut during the 1520s to 1530s, who was also the first to introduce the epithet "the Black" (in Latinized form, as niger).

According to Helm, Feldhaus (1910) thinks that reports of a "Master Berthold" in the early 15th century, barely 25 years after this master's death, should be taken seriously as historical testimony of an alchemist Berthold, called "the Black", member of the Order of St. Bernard, who developed a recipe for effective gunpowder in c. 1380, and who was possibly executed as a magician some years later.