"surprised Chinese and Mongols alike, accustomed as they were to the small, wiry animals of the steppes". Marignolli stayed in China for five years, departing by ship in 1347 and returning to Avignon in 1353. Military technology The poet Zhang Xian wrote the Iron Cannon Affair in 1341, detailing the destructive use of gunpowder and the cannon. Europe Political developments War and decline in Western Europe In Europe, the decade continued the period of gradual economic decline, which followed the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age in the 1300s. This secular decline, often mistitled a "depression", affected most of Western Europe, with the exception of a few Italian city-states. It was the result of factors which had begun earlier in the century, the main cause being the breaking of the balance between Church and state. The more dominant state increasingly interfered in the social and economic life of late medieval Europe, imposing detrimental taxation and regulation. King Edward III of England faced a brief standoff with some dissident barons in 1341 — one of only two such isolated standoffs in his popular reign. Meanwhile, the role of the Parliament of England became more defined, with the House of Commons regularly petitioning Edward from about 1343 onward. Europe entered a period which saw almost continuous war for the next century. Fighting took place in the Duchy of Brittany, "a country well suited to guerilla warfare", from 1342 to 1365 in the Breton War of Succession. The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) between France and England continued, and Edward III led an invasion resulting in a number of victories. One of the earlier English victories was at the naval Battle of Sluys in 1340, which annihilated the French fleet and gave the English control of the English Channel for several years. The initial campaigns were frustrating and expensive, so Edward altered his strategy to use English armies that were lightly supported but prepared to forage off the land. It successfully established English control over Brittany in 1342. Further armies were sent to Brittany and Gascony in 1345, and Edward himself crossed the Channel in 1346 with 10,000 men — an enormous army by contemporary standards. They plundered Caen, an important town in Normandy, and eventually began moving back toward the Channel. In 1346, the Battle of Crecy became the first great land battle of the