Late medieval Europe saw a genuine shift in where political power actually sat. Gunpowder artillery made a fortified castle a far less reliable guarantee of a local lord's independent military and political power, while centralising monarchs built standing armies and permanent taxation systems that made a king materially stronger relative to individual nobles than feudal kings had ever managed to be, and early representative institutions, England's Parliament among them, emerged partly from that same need to negotiate reliably for the expanded tax revenue those standing armies required.
Cannon made a thousand years of castle-building strategy obsolete fairly quickly
For centuries, a well-built stone castle had given a local lord a genuinely reliable, independent defensive base, one that could resist a besieging army for a very long time even against a much larger force. Gunpowder artillery changed that calculation, cannon could breach walls that had previously been considered essentially unbreakable within a fraction of the time older siege methods required, which meant the older feudal assumption, that a fortified position gave its holder real, durable independent power, stopped being reliably true.
Centralising monarchs used the resulting military shift to build permanently stronger states
Fielding an effective gunpowder army required sustained, large-scale funding, cannon, professional gunners and standing forces were all considerably more expensive to maintain than the older feudal levy system where individual lords supplied troops as a personal military obligation. Monarchs who could establish permanent, reliable taxation to fund that kind of standing military force grew genuinely stronger relative to their nobility than earlier feudal kings had been, and early representative institutions, most clearly England's Parliament, emerged substantially from the practical need to negotiate that expanded, permanent taxation with the people who actually had to pay it.
What we're still unsure about
That gunpowder weakened castles' defensive reliability, and that centralising monarchs used the resulting funding needs to build stronger, more permanent state institutions, are well established, extensively documented facts of late medieval and early modern political history. What's more genuinely a matter of ongoing historical debate is exactly how much causal weight to put on military technology itself, as opposed to separate economic factors, a growing cash economy gradually replacing land-based feudal exchange, in explaining feudalism's broader political decline, and historians continue to actively debate that relative balance rather than treating gunpowder alone as the full explanation.
This sits inside Late Medieval Political Transformations, one of eight topics in Medieval History, one of seven domains in History, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.