Horrible, unmanly, indispensable

If you were asked to think of a gun owner, then Lorenzo de’ Medici – the celebrated patron of Renaissance art – would probably not be the first person to come to mind. In fact, however, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ owned five portable firearms, which are listed in his 1492 postmortem inventory. Guns and gunpowder were controversial. In art and literature, they were labelled the Devil’s work, and were perceived as fundamentally unchivalrous. Yet within half a century, by the early months of 1539, Lorenzo’s descendant Duke Cosimo de’ Medici had 91 firearms in his Florentine storerooms. Somehow, in the courts of late-Renaissance Italy, the gun had become an acceptable, even valued, weapon.

Beyond the palazzi of the peninsula’s towns and cities, guns were also making inroads into more ordinary lives. There were no standing armies in the 16th-century Italian states. Their wars were fought through temporary mobilisations, and with considerable help from companies of mercenaries. Yet as the 1506 provision that established the Florentine militia made clear, ‘little hope’ could be placed ‘in foreign and hired arms’. Far better to establish a new magistracy with ‘full authority and power’ to enlist men from Florentine territory, at least 10,000 of them. One in 10 of these men were to be equipped with firearms, and 500 handguns (schioppetti) should be kept in the Palazzo della Signoria (the city hall, now known as the Palazzo Vecchio) along with ‘such money as should be necessary for the schioppetti’, presumably to purchase gunpowder and shot. Three or four companies (bandiere) entirely of schioppettieri might also be established.

This militia, most often noted for the role of Niccolò Machiavelli in its foundation, was to be organised after the fashion of the Germans, in whose cities there was a centuries-old tradition of civic defence and a duty on every male citizen to maintain suitable arms for the purpose. In fact, one of the Florentine militia’s early constables was German (a Giovanni Tedesco); another (Giliberto Spagnolo) came from Spain, a country making the running in the use of small arms on the battlefield. Giovanni Tedesco arranged target practice for his company, which from 1508 was extended more generally among the militia, with exercises taking place on a monthly basis.

Militias were not new but, by the 1490s, large-scale foreign military intervention on the Italian peninsula was giving a new impetus to their development, as was the growing importance of infantry in the military context. In Friuli, where Venetian lands bordered Ottoman territory, the militia were using handguns from the 1490s, and city guards across the Italian peninsula were soon provided with guns too. The growth of militias was the single most important factor in the proliferation of firearms in 16th-century Italy. This is too early a period for the kind of autobiographical writing that would tell us what these men made of the process, but there was certainly ample encouragement to become familiar with firearms and acquire shooting skills.

The backdrop to these developments was the decades of war in which France and Spain contended for hegemony on the Italian Peninsula. In the 1480s, while pitching his services to the duke of Milan, Leonardo da Vinci, highlighting his potential as a military engineer, wrote:

I have also plans of mortars most convenient and easy to carry with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of a storm; and with the smoke of this cause great terror to the enemy and great loss and confusion.

By the turn of the century, Spanish arquebusiers – named for the long, wooden-stocked gun with which they were armed – were doing precisely that on the battlefields of Italy. As the conflicts of 1494-1559 rolled on, the rulers of the peninsula’s multiple states promoted shooting in the interests of civic defence and military preparedness and, as they did, their own use of firearms shifted too.

The Medici were not the only leading family of Renaissance Italy to take an interest in this new military technology. In 1538, the duke of another Italian city-state, Urbino, described a novel firearm as ‘very dear to me’. Such appreciation, however, ran counter to the dominant image of guns in the period’s literature. Leonhard Fronsperger, once a captain of the ducal armoury in Munich, wrote of gunpowder as ‘indispensable’, but also as ‘horrible’ and ‘unmanly’. Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (1532) described guns as a ‘foul and pestilent discovery’, weapons through which ‘no more shall gallantry, no more shall valour prove their prowess’. Only in edgier texts, like the swashbuckling memoirs of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, did anyone hint that guns were fun. ‘Frightened’ by a plague that hit Rome in the early 1520s causing thousands of deaths, Cellini ‘began to seek relief in a sport that I found very enjoyable’. In between sketching the city’s ancient ruins, he shot pigeons. He developed his own gunpowder recipe, and boasted of his ‘really good marksmanship’, claiming to be able to shoot ‘200 yards point-blank’. This is probably exaggerated, but just as relevant is Cellini’s explanation that, by getting him out into the fresh air to go hunting, and combating his ‘naturally melancholy disposition’, his gun ‘brought me more gain than loss’.

The textual enthusiasm of both Cellini and the duke of Urbino finds a material counterpart in a growing culture of luxury weapons. The aesthetics of these high-end guns helped firearms fit into a court culture that valued beauty and craftsmanship. They were decorated with classical gods, Christian figures and mottoes, and images of the hunt, while the novelty value of combination weapons such as spears with miniature guns attached appealed to the Renaissance sense of fun.

Records of gun ownership in elite households, too, tell a different story from the literary sources. It is at court that wheellock guns – a groundbreaking technology that allowed concealed carry – first leave traces. Leonardo’s sketches of their mechanisms (probably developed in Germany) can be seen in the Codex Atlanticus. Expensive, convenient and modern, wheellocks seem to have become a status symbol. The standard military firearm of this period, the matchlock, was fired by means of a lighted cord (the match) that ignited the powder when the gun was triggered. But the wheellock was a self-lighting mechanism that avoided the need for a lighted match. It was a more complex and therefore more expensive technology, and could be unreliable (probably especially if produced on the cheap). On the other hand, wheellocks had advantages in hunting, avoiding as they did the glow and smell of the burning match cord which might alert prey to a hunter’s presence.

Designs echoed court imagery: hunting scenes, battles, motifs from ancient history and myth, biblical figures

By the start of 1539, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici owned four wheellock handguns made in the German style that he (or more likely his bodyguards) took with him when he travelled. Not a decade on, a wheellock appeared in the first portrait of a European ruler with a handgun: Titian’s equestrian portrait of the victorious Emperor Charles V after the Battle of Mühlberg, in which Charles is shown ‘in the manner in which he went against the rebels’, that is, in the garb of the wheellock-toting Spanish cavalry.

The aesthetic qualities of high-end firearms helped guns blend into the wider courtly environment. Designs echoed imagery common to the court: hunting scenes, battles, motifs from ancient history and myth, or biblical figures like Judith. A wheellock pistol made in Germany and dated 1548 features a figure of the Roman heroine Lucretia along with a Christian motto and image of the Crucifixion. By this time, guns were finding new uses in Europe’s religious wars: far from the Devil’s weapon, they were a means of asserting true Christianity against the heretics.

Back at court, novelty weapons such as the match-fired combination pollaxe and gun in the Royal Armouries, or the boar-spear with two small guns attached given to Cosimo de’ Medici, engaged with a fashion for wider theatrical and festival machines aimed at provoking wonder in their audience. These firearms functioned as marketing devices, promoting their makers – and perhaps also the cities or states of their makers – as potential providers too of the thousands of weapons that might be commissioned for use in war. A striking indication of their acceptability in elite culture comes in 1553, when Mantuan officials began to make ceremonial presents of firearms to the city’s duke in place of the crossbows they had previously given. That the gun could now appear in these ritual contexts shows it had truly arrived.

In wider society, luxury decoration was out of reach, but other factors favoured an expansion of gun ownership. Florence was not the only state to establish or revive a civic militia. In the context of long-running on-off war, it made sense for rulers across Italy to mobilise citizens and equip them with up-to-date weapons. Alongside requirements for militia drill went contests to incentivise the acquisition of shooting skills. Farmers found guns useful for pest control; hunters used them too. Thus, in the 1520s and beyond, more and more Italian states formalised or expanded their militia. Giovanni Moro, a Venetian official who had previously handled military supplies, proposed in 1525 the formation of a citizen militia of 12,000 men, of whom two-thirds would use firearms; these men would receive powder and lead for practice, and a contest would be held three times a year to encourage them. This would be, said Moro, to the ‘honour and utility’ of Venice, and of ‘great benefit’ when it came to conserving Venetian territory.

Such ambitious plans didn’t always succeed, as two cases from Tuscany show. Jacopo Pessina’s detailed study of military organisation in the Republic of Siena estimates that in the last 30 years of the republic (1525-55), between 20 and 33 per cent of adult men served in the militia, with each 500-strong battalion including 150-200 arquebusiers. A report from 1543, however, suggested that the militia was not fit for purpose, lacking not only sufficient men but also the necessary firearms and helmets. The case of Florence, moreover, where the last republican government of 1527-30 fell to the Spanish-backed Medici party after a long siege, shows the limits of a city militia in the face of a foreign army. Anticipating attack, the republican government issued new ordinances for the militia, instituting training in the use of arquebuses, and shooting contests. During the siege of 1530, artisans from shoemakers to cutlers were equipped with arquebuses. They did not, however, prevail against the much better-resourced Spanish army. Still, governments across Italy continued to expand their militia, which made firearms increasingly available to men of all social ranks.

‘Every low herdsman or shepherd you meet in the countryside today has a wheellock arquebus over his shoulder’

If militia service provided one route to familiarity with firearms, so did the related rise of shooting contests. In 1506, Venice introduced a competition to encourage the development of handgun skills among the archers serving on its naval galleys. In 1518, the first prize was 16 arms-lengths of damask fabric, worth 32 ducats, along with 6 ducats in cash. In 1520, the Republic of Lucca instituted a thrice-yearly shooting contest in order to ensure that its citizens were prepared for defence, the founding decree urging them to prefer ‘death over the loss of dear liberty and the reduction of their fatherland to servitude’. Prizes included a silver cup worth almost 20 ducats, and six arms-lengths of damask worth 5 ducats. Soldiers’ pay could be less than 30 ducats a year, so these were generous rewards. Contests, however, were not only about financial incentives. They were also about establishing an acceptable social image for the firearm, just as the iconography of luxury weapons had done at court. The language of the Lucca decree, for example, offered a new and more positive discourse of the gun, as a weapon for the defence of liberty.

Hunting was another context in which guns became familiar not just for elites but more widely. In 1552, for example, a cowherd named Vincenzo obtained a licence from the Bologna authorities that allowed him to carry arms, including a gun for the purpose of hunting. It came with the standard caveat that the weapon must not be carried in churches, at festivals or in markets. These were busy environments where an accidental misfire had higher risks than out in the countryside, and where a generalised ban on arms-bearing (staff weapons such as pikes were also included) made policing more straightforward. Such wide access to guns, however, was a matter of concern. The anonymous author of a proposition for international gun control observed, probably in the late 1570s, that if the Italian princes did not take action soon, then ‘there will be no place nor state where people are safe, given that every low herdsman or shepherd you meet in the countryside today has a wheellock arquebus over his shoulder’.

As guns became more common, so did their appearance in the criminal records. By 1600, firearms had become the predominant weapon used to commit homicide in Bologna. That said, they still accounted for only a third of offences, and in interpreting the figures we should bear in mind the relative lethality of guns when compared with other weapons. In fact, across the broad range of gun crime, it was still relatively rare to come across cases where guns were directly used in planned homicide. More commonly, they were used to threaten: the ideal outcome for the highwayman who shouts: ‘Your money or your life!’ is to ride away with the money without firing a shot.

Many of the historic investigations feature possession of illegal guns and/or their use to intimidate. In a 1554 case near the northern Italian city of Brescia, Valerio Soncino and a gang of 20 men ‘armed with various weapons, including arquebuses’, scaled the walls of a property belonging to Valerio’s brother Annibale, and ‘with various threats’ forced two of his stewards to bring them carts, which they loaded up with goods, stealing in addition cattle and a horse. The robbers got only five miles, however, before they were halted by some villagers who had got wind of what was happening and sounded the alarm. In the ensuing violence, two men and a woman among the villagers were injured. Here, the primary use of the guns was to frighten people into doing as they were told, not to kill them. That is not to say, however, that the proliferation of firearms was not risky. Criminal records from Bologna describe a case in 1575 in which an elderly woman named Giovanna was killed by a man named Pierantonio Fangarezzo; Fangarezzo had been looking over an arquebus (perhaps an early variety of flintlock) to see how it worked when it accidentally went off.

In some notionally criminal cases there was also a political motivation for gun ownership

People engaged in, or considering, political violence also used firearms. The distinction between criminal and political activity was not always straightforward. The system of exile in the Italian states – in which offenders were banned from their home territory and had their property confiscated – often made banditry an attractive option (hence the overlap between the concepts in Italian, where the word bandito is also used for an exile). Civic authorities were particularly keen to police weapon ownership when it posed a risk to the regime. The early years of Medici ducal rule in Florence (formally established in 1532) saw numerous confiscations of illegal weapons: Girolamo di Filippo Bonciani and Francesco di Piero Serragli, for example, fell foul of the law after an arquebus was found under the straw of their former stable. Some of these weapons were probably planted by city officials, but opponents of the regime might reasonably have decided to arm themselves in case of an uprising (for which there were several precedents).

Dissidents in Brescia (a subject city of Venice) also obtained weapons: testimony from 1539 shows how one alleged firearm offender, Antonio Maria, was accused of saying several times that ‘he desired nothing more than that the Emperor and the King of France should make an accord against our Venetian lords, and that he hoped to come with them to sack Brescia.’ Antonio Maria was further accused of ‘continually keeping in his house exiled men of a bad sort, who go out killing on the streets’; he had in his house around 25 guns of different types. While we typically learn about these cases from regime records, by reading between the lines it becomes clear that at least in some notionally criminal cases there was also a political motivation for gun ownership.

People in northern and central Italy owned guns for several reasons: to participate in militia service, for hunting and livestock control, and for criminal activity. Some of this ownership was purely practical: a gun would more reliably than the alternatives kill the fox eating your chickens. Some of it had political motivations, whether to defend the liberty of one’s own fatherland or to oppose a tyrannical overlord. By the middle of the 16th century, a lot of people had guns. It is challenging to establish quite how many. Based on population estimates and numbers enrolled in the militia, the historians Michael Mallett and John Hale estimated that one in 15 rural households in Venetian territory would have had a firearm following the establishment of the militia in the later 1520s: ‘the government’, they observed in Military Organisation of a Renaissance State (2009), ‘was calculatedly accepting a risk to public order’. By 1540, the ruler of Modena required that one in three countryside households should have a gun. These calculations concern militia service, however, and other people may have bought guns second-hand from soldiers, or won them via gambling.

Later in the century, larger cities had shops where guns might be mended and probably also purchased. A 1559 proclamation issued in Bologna in anticipation of riots declared that ‘shopkeepers, who sell those polearms and arquebuses, must store them in their shops in such a way that they are not ready to use’. There is no reason to think that the anonymous author who complained of wheellock-toting shepherds was greatly exaggerating the extent of proliferation.

Guns had a role to play in changing ideas about gender, both in general and with reference to images of rulership

Certain moments in wartime no doubt accelerated access to firearms. Besides the 1529-30 Siege of Florence, records of the defensive provisions in Ferrara of 1552 (when the city was likewise preparing for a possible siege) show that, out of 520 households equipped with armour, pikes, arquebuses and morions, more than half (270) had a gun. Included in this list are 18 female heads of household, of whom six had guns. This raises the question of how many women were gun-owners more generally. The answer seems to be rather few. Sieges were emergency situations in which gender norms might temporarily be suspended, such as when the women of Siena took responsibility for repairs to the city walls. Outside the wartime context, Joe Tryner’s study of court records in Bologna turned up only a single example of a woman with a firearm, and nothing in my wider survey of source material has suggested that was untypical.

In contrast, guns did come to be associated with masculinity. In The Fruit of Liberty (2013), Nicholas Scott Baker argued that the siege of 1529-30 was a particular turning point for elite identity, redefining notions of masculinity from those associated with practices of civic governance to something more ‘rugged, militaristic’. This was particularly apparent in changing clothing styles, to which the bearing of new types of arms might be added. Focusing on Florence after 1537, in Masculinity, Arms and Armour (2020), Victoria Bartels identifies guns as one factor in shifting performances of masculinity, noting that they increased the danger attached to ‘routine bouts of aggression’ that had traditionally been employed to settle disputes between men. In the context of the Italian Wars (and specific local conflicts within them), guns had a role to play in changing ideas about gender, both in general and with reference to images of rulership. This is confirmed in the account of Benvenuto Cellini, whose self-aggrandising narrative of his participation in the Italian Wars includes a comment he made to a companion, Alessandro del Bene, to persuade him to stick around and shoot back at an invading army during the 1527 Sack of Rome: ‘Now you’ve brought me here, we must show that we’re men.’

Over the course of the 16th century, familiarity with firearms grew. It was increasingly expected that men would be able to use a gun: the expansion of militias was a key factor here alongside direct soldiering experience. The acquisition of skills in shooting was positively encouraged through civic contests with generous prizes. Rhetoric about the importance of guns for civic defence and for the maintenance of honour and liberty offered a counterweight to more negative images of gunpowder weapons as diabolical, unchivalrous or impious. Guns were useful for protection of livestock from predators as well as for hunting more generally. In turn, their ready availability also made them accessible for use by bandits, during vendettas and indeed for political violence. However, their lethality shifted the dynamics of violent encounters: so effective were guns as a threat that in some cases they may have prompted victims to give up without a fight. On the other hand, with increasing proliferation came an increased risk of both accidents and casual use in interpersonal violence. Yet not all gun ownership was enthusiastic. Some applicants for arms licences evidently felt constrained to carry guns in self-defence, and cultural ambivalence about these weapons remained long after they became common objects.

As firearms became more familiar, it was as much a decision not to be a gun owner as to acquire the new technology.