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- [00:01]
A
What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me, Mike suiter, author of NextGen CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders. To find out, listen wherever you get your podcasts. Long before modern debates over gun control, Renaissance Italy was grappling with many of the same questions. As firearms became smaller and easier to conceal, guns spread rapidly through society, moving from battlefields to appearances at court and onto the streets of the Italian city states. Speaking to Emily Briffett for this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Catherine Fletcher reveals how they were weapons of war, tools of personal protection, and sources of deep social anxiety.
- [00:56]
B
Thank you so much for joining us to talk about your new book, the Firearm Revolution. I've got so many questions I'd like to ask you today. So I want to start by asking what did the emergence of firearms actually feel like in Renaissance Italy? Was it this shocking rupture or was it just another step in sort of evolving times?
- [01:17]
C
So it takes quite a long time to get from the point when the new style guns are first seen in Italy and noted, which is around 1433, to the point since 70 years later when they're becoming decisive on the battlefield, and then point even a couple of decades after that when you start to get the first laws passed to try and control certain types of guns. So we're looking at a span of time over almost a century. So it's a technology that sort of starts and kicks in. I guess you could maybe imagine going from the invention of the telephone to the mobile phone or the smartphone. It's that kind of timescale that we're talking about. But just so that listeners are aware of what exactly these guns are, these are the first type of portable handguns that are easy to carry around. They're not just a primitive shrunk cannon. They're a gun with a metal barrel, a wooden stock, and some type of firing mechanism called lock. So that's where we get the phrase lock, stock and barrel. It's the three parts of the gun that go together and there are different types of firing mechanism which we can come onto. But basically they, they start off as a military weapon. They originate, so far as Europe is concerned, it's a technology that's pioneered in Germany, southern Germany, and then spreads out. And yeah, they become a very, very significant technology of the modern age.
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B
So you mentioned some of the specifics. Could you just tell us about those? I know you said we'd come onto it. Yeah.
- [02:45]
C
So one of the reasons in the background to As I mentioned, by the 1520s in Italy, that's my main case study of 15 teams. Elsewhere in Europe, we start to get this gun control legislation. And so one of the things that is interesting, that prompts some of that legal development is a change in gun technology. So your early military guns basically work by having a lighted match or match cord. So you imagine essentially a fuse, a piece of thick string or thin rope that smoulders at the end. You clip that into the top of your gun. And when you fire the gun, that smouldering cord touches onto the powder, sets it off, fires the shot. Round about the end of the 15th century, we get the development of a new type of firing mechanism, which is called the wheel lock. Now, some listeners will remember the old sort of cigarette lighter that you used to get where there's a little metal wheel on the side of it. And when you spin the wheel with your thumb, it creates a spark which lights the lighter fuel and makes a flame. So wheel lock guns work a little bit like that in that they've got a wheel that's wound up, and when you pull the trigger, the wheel sort of spins, creates a spark, and then sets off the shot. Now, the key difference here is that when you've got that type of mechanism, just like you can put your old cigarette lighter into your pocket, you can put your gun ready to shoot into your pocket. And so you can do what they now call in the United States concealed carry. And so you can see, sneak around the city with a gun underneath your cloak. And as you can imagine, people start getting a little bit nervous about how to police this. What if somebody goes and shoots the Duke of the City, you know, or one of the major council officials or anybody else, just like their personal enemy. And so this is the thing that first really starts to be regulated and to sort of bring in some of the first targeted gun control legislation. So there's always been control of weapons in society. You know, it's never been a free for all. You can take your sword anywhere you like. There have all been, you know, regulations about who can have which type of weapons and where they can take them. But the first bit of gun control law comes around, this technology of the
- [05:07]
B
wheel lock, it sounds like it completely revolutionizes guns and warfare. At this time, I want to come on to talk to you about this, but before we do, I'd like to ask you a couple of other quick questions. So. So one of the things we should touch on is that in this we have figures like Leonardo da Vinci who were experimenting with firearm design. How important were people like inventors, engineers in accelerating this revolution?
- [05:34]
C
I mean, Leonardo is an interesting case because he's both involved in weapons design and we can see him sketching the wheel lock. Probably not his original design, probably he's drawing up sketches of something that's already in existence. We also see him sketching multiple multi barrel guns which are quite experimental and actually not used very much in practice. We get a few examples of them listed. So clearly some wealthy people were trying these things on, but they never really took off at the battlefield. But I think that partly, yeah, there's some technological innovation that drives it. I think the technological innovation really sort of helps to get guns established as a sort of cool and trendy object at court, because there's a lot of cultural hostility towards guns from members of the elite, because guns are regarded as a bit of an unchivalrous sort of weapon. Some people will call them the devil's work. We've got some incredible images of these little demons shooting with guns from the late 15th century. Gives you an idea that, you know, people are rather uncomfortable with this technology. But when you can produce sort of luxury, fashionable types of guns where, you know, they're really nice sort of decorative objects, that helps them to fit in and get normalised. At the same time as in parallel, you've got a military culture which is increasingly valuing guns as a useful military object for winning battles. So you've got these sort of two tracks going, the luxury gun for the courtiers and then the ordinary plain gun for the soldiers.
- [07:12]
B
So when we're talking about a firearm revolution, we're not talking about a military revolution. It is its own thing.
- [07:19]
C
It's much broader than just the military element. And I think one of the things about guns is that obviously there's been quite a lot of discussion of how does fighting with guns change the nature of warfare? How does it change what you need to do to train your army and so on. But the thing about guns is, unlike cannon and unlike fortification, which only sort of, I mean, they have an indirect impact on defence spending and so on. The gun actually, as an object leaks out of the military sphere, starts to be adopted much more widely. People have them for farming and livestock control, they have them for hunting, and increasingly they want to have them for personal protection because there are bandits out there who've also got guns. So when you're traveling from place to place, there comes a real incentive to say, okay, well, actually what I would quite like is to have a gun myself, so if anybody shoots me, I can shoot back. And so we get this spiral of gun ownership where on the one hand they start as a military technology, access expands because there's a lot of militias in this period. So town sponsored militias, city sponsored militias, people are required to learn how to use guns and train with guns, which makes them more familiar. But as I say, unlike some other military technologies of the gunpowder revolution, they don't see stay in the military sphere, they move really well beyond it.
- [08:42]
B
And before we move beyond the military sphere, I should probably ask you, could you maybe situate us in the wider context of what's going on within the Italian city states at this time?
- [08:52]
C
So, yeah, from 1494 in Italy, there has been a whole series of wars which are primarily a war between France and Spain for which is going to be the more influential foreign power on the peninsula. In some cases like that happens quite directly. So Spain ends up directly ruling the Kingdom of Naples across a lot of the south of the peninsula. In some cases it's more indirect influence through marriage alliances and making sure that the people in charge of the different Italian states are all friendly princes towards whichever ruler we're talking about. So in the context of that conflict, there's a lot of individual wars, small scale wars, different battles and so on. And it's in this context that the use of firearms on the battlefield really first takes off in a big way. And there's a particular battle in 1503, the Battle of Cerignola, when the Spanish really pioneer a combination of firearm fire from, you know, organized ranks of soldiers in combination with earthworks. So they basically tempt the French army to sort of basically ride into a ditch and then they just shoot them all. I mean, it's kind of quite nasty business really. And they absolutely rout the French. But this is a sort of demonstration of how very disciplined and well drilled army shooting sort of line by line from front to back of what you call a pike and shot formation. So the shooters protected by men with these very, very long sort of spiky pike staff weapons. How that kind of formation can be
- [10:30]
B
really decisive moving beyond the military sphere. Then you've mentioned how it goes beyond warfare. It's very much in the cultural sphere as well. You've also hinted that this is something that's both fashionable, it's a bit frightening, it's also practical as well. Could you tell us more about gun ownership?
- [10:49]
C
There's a little bit of an ambiguity about whether it's a status thing, because the symbol of the elite is still the sword. And if you look at how wealthy men carry on being portrayed through the 16th century and indeed beyond, a lot of that is still like their sort of classical image. They still still want the chivalrous tournament, jousting armour. They don't necessarily want to be seen with guns, but at the same time they are buying them, they are being given them. Guns by the middle of the 16th century have become a part of the exchange of diplomatic gifts. And we have these incredible high tech luxury objects. They are covered with ivory or gold or inlaid. They have these amazing designs on them. So we get one of my favorites in the Chicago Art Institute and it's got the Judgment of Paris, so Paris and the goddesses, you know, the inciting incident for the Trojan wars, basically on the side of the gun. And you get pictures of Cleopatra and pictures of Judith and, you know, sometimes you get sort of sexy ladies as well. That's. I mean, Cleopatra can be one of those. Or you get Venus, you know, like what I'd like a topless woman on the side of my gun, but like, call her Venus to make her socially acceptable. You also get hunting scenes in. You sometimes get religious scenes. This starts to come in because guns are a little bit of a problematic object from a religious point of view, because with a gun you could almost be seen to be appropriating to yourself the power of life and death that properly belongs to God. And so you get a lot of an idea that guns are diabolical, that they're not a very proper Christian weapon. But over time we start to see people attach much more Christian imagery to guns. So you will get guns with Christian mottos on them, with images of the crucifixion and so on, Particularly when people are fighting in wars of religion. So either within Europe, where you have wars between Protestant and Catholic in this period, or fighting the Ottoman Empire. So that's very much a sort of Christian crusading element to all that. So you might have religiously inflected guns there and also in the imperial conquests, because at this point we have this strong. The supposed justification for a lot European empire building is that, you know, it's not all about the money. Oh, no. It's also about taking the word of God out around the world. And so in that context, again, we start to get much more positive religious attitudes around firearms. So there's a whole set of different ways by which these quite suspected objects become, you know, start to feel a little bit more legitimate. For through, you know, through the course of the 16th century.
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B
In what other ways did they legitimise these guns? It sounds like it was a bit of a moral quandary to overcome.
- [13:46]
C
Yeah, I think one of the things that happens is simply that because they're an important military technology and we don't have a strict military civilian divide in this period. So, you know, men in general are expected to undertake some military service, particularly through the militia systems. So. So if you are a resident of an Italian state, you may well, if you're of sort of fighting age, be expected to join in your local militia and go and drill every month or at least a few times a year. And we start to see people almost being required to have guns in order to do their militia service and incentivized to improve their skills in shooting by participating in these contests that are sponsored by the different cities. One of the favorite documents that I actually found in archive when I was researching were like the records and the prize lists of these different shooting contests where they actually have a picture of the target and a little of design of whose shot hit where on the target so they know who to give the prize to. We also have evidence of people cheating in these contests, tried to like enter the same contest twice under different names to double their chances at the prize. So there are all these different ways through that militia service, through the use of weapons for just ordinary sort of farming and hunting use, and then through these contests that people get used to having guns and people learn the basic skills of shooting.
- [15:21]
D
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- [16:14]
C
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- [16:45]
B
So with more and more people having guns, this brings us to the question, as you mentioned earlier, of gun control. Did local governments view armed citizens as a threat or was it sort of a necessary part of defence?
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C
There's a real tension here between the two sides of what governments do in this period. Governments don't do an awful lot in this period, but on the one hand they do do defence and they do do some policing and maintenance of general social order.
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B
So.
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C
So the question with guns is how do you balance out the risk? Because clearly if you've got a lot of guns floating around in society, they become more accessible, there's greater likelihood somebody is going to use them to go out and do crime, or else somebody is just going to get into accidents with them with the kind of risk that the gun as, you know, an unpredictable and not always perfectly constructed technology which people who don't know what they're doing, they are very lethal. So if you get shot, particularly a period when they don't really understand infection and so on very well, your chances of recovery are. It's possible, but they're not great. And the size of the wound cavity that a shot makes is substantial. The governments basically have to decide what's the trade off between getting lots of guns out there to equip a well trained militia and then stopping them getting either into the wrong hands or, you know, into the wrong places. So they do certain things. Sometimes they run a gun licensing system, often with exemptions for people of higher rank can automatically have guns or they can have guns for their bodyguards. So if you're on the city council, you might be in exempt category and you're automatically allowed to have weapons in certain places. But if you're not, then you have to go in and make an application and pay to get a gun license. Then there are regulations around where you can have guns and these carry over from wider rules about where you could have weapons. So often they will restrict them in busy places. So markets, fairs and churches are very common ones. So you don't want people taking a lot of risky weapons into big crowded spaces, particularly churches, prominent sites for renaissance assassinations, because they're actually where you can get up close to prominent people, because even very well known people Go to church. Right. So they try and keep weapons out of those environments and sometimes they restrict certain types of weapon altogether. So there are some outright bans on wheel lock guns and there are some outright bans even on production of wheel lock guns at certain points, but they don't really last very long. The demand for this type of weapon outweighs the ability of the governments to regulate it. We're not talking about very strong modern states in this period. We're talking about forms of government that are often negotiating with major aristocrats and noblemen, as well as with their own citizens who want to do different things and have different interests. So they are just not really in a position to police very strongly even if they wanted to.
- [20:08]
B
So it would be fair to say that there were not loopholes, but there were some gaps almost.
- [20:15]
C
Yeah. And as we were saying, there is a whole set of wars that are going on in Italy in this period that don't completely finish until 1559. So we had 65 years of war across that first part of the 16th century. So as the wars calm down a little bit, you end up with a lot of weapons in circulation, military surplus, former soldiers who are perhaps a bit underemployed, a lot of concern about banditry. And the idea we would now call this a post conflict environment. And actually gun proliferation in post conflict environments in the 21st century is a real known problem. And it's a problem that's difficult to address because the people are worried that there might be another conflict, that things haven't been fully resolved. They don't want to give up their weapons necessarily. They want to hold onto them, or they're concerned that these former soldiers from the next village have formed a gang of bandits that are going to come round and rob them. So again, they want to have their guns as some kind of deterrent to make sure that those bandits in the next village don't come and steal their stuff. And so there's a bit of a spiral effect of once you have some guns out there, other people don't want to be left without them. Although having said that, even at this point we already see the argument coming in on both sides because of the argument people should be allowed to have guns to protect themselves, that we can see that written down in 16th century documents. But also the argument that actually a gun isn't very helpful as a defensive weapon because by the time somebody has pointed a gun at you, you do not have time to go and find your gun and get it out and prepare to Shoot back. By that point they have shot you. So the idea that the defense argument doesn't really work is already out there. And what's incredible to me about writing this book and finding these documents is that over almost 500 years, the arguments have shifted very little. We are still having the same arguments about guns in multiple parts of the world where there's sort of strong gun cultures that they were having in the very earliest gun cultures in Europe in that sort of middle to later 16th century.
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B
There are very strong echoes. Are there any other parallels between what was being discussed in the sort of 15th, 16th century and today's discussion on gun control that perhaps surprised you?
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C
What's interesting is the idea of the gun as the devil's work was very consistent. So I mean, it's there very visibly in the 15th century. And so there's a great image from a book of hours of these little demons shooting down at the resurrected Christ as he walks by. So we get that image. We get lots of people say these things are diabolical. And even right up into the 20th century there is critique of the arms trade saying this is the devil's traffic. There's a whole real negative image. I mean, if you think about Hollywood movies, who is the bad guy? He's an arms dealer. So that idea of negativity towards certain elements of guns and arms trading has never really left us. Even though, you know, questions about how to regulate guns have come, you know, in and out of fashion. And they are quite different and quite inconsistent around the world, depending on local cultures, how strict you're going to be on gun control and so on. Those ideas persist. The idea of the gun as a man's weapon is also quite current then and I think is still with us quite strongly now. I mean, it's much less common to see women shooting in general. I mean, perhaps you get a little bit more now in films than you would have done. And that idea gets set quite early on. And we know that there were some female gun owners. There's a really entertaining description in one of my documents from the city of Brescia in northern Italy, where an official is complaining about the state of things in the main gun producing area, which is kind of in the mountains to the north. And he says, like even the women are going about with these wheel lock guns and they've got one in their hand and one with their belt. And they are all Lutherans, so they are all like religious radicals and anti Catholic. And this is just, you know, he's the worst people and I love the, the idea of these kind of religious radical women going around with their like, you know, gun in each hand. And that was a real sort of anxiety prompting idea, sort of transgressive in multiple different ways for the people who were running the local city. So I think that that's an idea that gets set in stone. Of course, we also have some continuity with the people and the producers because you might have heard of the company Beretta. So Beretta date themselves back to this same area of gun production with the radical women to 1526. So they have 500 years of a traceable history to when they have first identified a documentary reference to a member of the Beretta family involved in gun production. And so this like continuity of one of the major companies I think is very interesting just to see how persistent this trade and this, you know, arms industry has been through European history and obviously beyond Europe and into the wider world.
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B
That's the astonishing. What do we know about that historical relationship between gun manufacturers and gun owners?
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C
So the gun manufacturers that we know about in this early period are predominantly doing sort of a couple of different things. So you have producers in this Gardone Val Trompia area where Beretta had their factory workshop really at the early stage, and now have much larger factory as, as do a lot of other small scale and now larger scale gun companies. They, at that point, these valleys were primarily producing military weapons and they export them. I mean, they are in Venetian territory, so they export them initially just for use in Venice and then they are producing them for wider use. So we know that Henry viii, for example, got an export license to bring some of these guns out from this little place and into England. We find them on the Wreck of the Mary Rose, for example, in the 1540s. Guns from this very specific, almost like a village really, in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy. So they're going out in that direction. And so it's through that military route that you get these large orders taken out, going to armies, going to militias, and then passing into the hands of ordinary people. And then we also start to get luxury production at this point. So there are a few prominent gun makers. So people like Peter Peck, who's based in southern Germany, makes some very notable weapons, including for Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He's the most powerful man in Europe. You can go and look up Charles V's weapons on the website of the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Musee de l' Amais in Paris and the one in The Met is incredible. It's a sort of double barreled, double wheel, locked, gilded gun. So, you know, the men with the golden guns, like, go back 500 years, and these are the types of novelty, very high tech, perhaps not always very practical objects that help to make guns into this fashionable sort of object at court.
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B
One of the things that really fascinated me about your book is how you note that firearms naturally become tied with overseas expansion. So I wanted to ask you how narratives of conquest expansion reshape attitudes towards guns back in Italy and abroad, I guess, as well.
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C
Yeah. So a lot of historians, I think now, would criticise a simplistic narrative that guns enabled Europeans to conquer the world. And what I would say about that is that obviously, you know, there's a bit of an initial shock value if you've never seen a gun before, when somebody turns up and points one and shoot it clearly. But that initial shock value doesn't really last very long. And guns are not the major factor in enabling European conquest. But I think it's more the other way around that European conquests actually create, back in Europe, a more positive narrative that almost enables guns and helps to make guns look like a great superior technology that Europeans have. And isn't that a good thing that we can talk about in a positive way, about how European civilization has invented this object, or perhaps not completely invented, but, you know, pioneered the development of this object that is enabling us to win all this territory in a society where actually princes. Winning more territory is a thing that is generally narrated very positively. And so I think that this story about guns comes back and it's one of the more positive stories that is told in Europe about guns as a useful object that signifies European superiority in various ways. And it's also very interesting in some of the imagery of guns that quite a lot of the early portraits that feature guns are also connected to this type of activity. So whether that's English colonization in Ireland, colonial wars in Ireland, or there's a great portrait which really sums this image up, and it's in the Bodleian Libraries collection in Oxford, and again, you can find it online. This is a portrait of Sir Martin Frobisher, who's gone on an expedition to try and find the Northwest Passage. And he is there standing in very fine sort of Elizabethan garb, with a pistol in one hand and a globe behind him. And it really is the portrait that sums up this kind of connection between the globe and the gun and the imperial adventuring in the figure of this particular individual. The other Thing that really fascinates me about the visual culture of this period is the way that while Europeans are often quite hesitant still about putting guns into artworks, whatever type of artwork, we see multiple examples from indigenous artists in different places showing Europeans with guns. So there's a manuscript which is known as the Florentine Codex, which has multiple images of guns in use in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. And that kind of comes back into Europe and provides some of the evidence for what was happening. And it's co created, I would say, like through a lot of interviews with indigenous veterans of the conquest. Although the person compiling it is European himself, there's a, a lot of input from the veterans of the conflict. And so that's an interesting example of how they were seeing European guns at the time. And one of the Benin bronzes in the British Museum, controversially the British Museum collection, since they were famously looted in that British expedition in 1897. But the Benin bronzes are also some of the earliest sculptural examples of European gunmen. Europeans at this time were not showing themselves in sculpture with guns. Sculpture in Europe was very classically influenced and of course classical ancient history doesn't have guns, so they leave them out. But the West African sculptures show them show Portuguese mercenaries with firearms. So all around in different contexts, we get these portrayals looking from the outside onto European gun culture and making it visually much more prominent than most Europeans were making it themselves at this point.
- [32:40]
B
Obviously today we've been speaking about Italy, the city states. To what extent did the firearm revolution in Italy influence developments elsewhere? Or was it just one part of a broader interconnected shift?
- [32:57]
C
So I'd taken Italy as my case study partly because it's a major theater of war in Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. It provides examples of things like that post conflict environment, which is very violent. And it also has very rich archives for what's going on and types of document that we don't get in the same detail elsewhere. So we have Italian trial records of this period where there are lots of witness statements about who's attacked whom with a gun and how. In English trials you don't get that same richness because the legal system system works differently and you don't have these investigating magistrates to go out and send their agents to gather testimony. So in some ways it's easy to do a study that's focused on Italy because of the wide range of archival survival. But in general, things like the gun control legislation, it has slightly different inflections and priorities across Europe. So in Germany, they have gun control law tends to be more of a focus on the problem of poaching. In England we have similar law from, I mean, the 1540s. There are bans on wheel lock pistols in England very much along the same lines. So this is a generalized problem across Europe, but it's perhaps one that feels a bit more immediate when there has just been a war and you immediately have the problems of demobilized soldiers and lots of surplus weapons floating around. So I don't think this is something solely a matter of interest for the Italian city states, but it is one that spreads more widely, spreads through the European empires and actually eventually ends up with the American second amendment that is so contentious today in terms of how it ought to be interpreted and the balance between the bit it has about the well regulated militia and a bit it has about the right to bear arms and how you interpret that from modern society. Society. I mean, at the moment the interpretation leads very much towards the right to bear arms and very little towards the significance of the part of the amendment about the militia. I think one of the interesting things for me, looking back on this history of European militias, which reach much more widely than just in Italy, is that the militia was the major reason to allow wide access to guns in the first place. And that kind of history can, I think, you know, help us to reflect on what that piece of law originally meant. But, you know, it's a big, much bigger debate, of course, in terms of how we get from what's happening in the 16th century to what was happening in the 18th with a new language of rights and so on. So many things to think about around that for those people who have to be involved in debating it.
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B
Are there any lessons that you think we can learn from this history? Or perhaps if not a lesson, just things that's important to bear in mind and to think about.
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C
One of the things that really struck me is that the debates in some ways haven't changed all that much, but in other ways they can be quite foreign. And one of the things that interests me, and I'm currently working on a project about, is using some of this history, which is quite distant from our lives today in some ways, but quite resonant in others, to help facilitate debates amongst young people at high school and university level around gun culture without those debates becoming really polarized in the entrenched attitudes of the present day. So we're working on a great project with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh to put together teaching materials about this, if you're interested in knowing more, you can get in touch with me and I'll put you in contact. But I think this material helps us to reflect on where guns came from and how we got from a society quite different to where we are now. It's perhaps most obvious in the United States, but there is also a debate in Europe going on now about the arms industry, rearmament, defense spending. That's not irrelevant to people 500 years ago. And in many post conflict environments around the world, there are questions about people's relationships with weapons, people's understandable reluctance to give up weapons. And you know, there are lots of routes, I think, for historical material to help us reflect on and talk in different ways about the problems that face society today, perhaps without, as I say, falling into the entrenched polarization that sometimes can characterize gun debate.
- [37:48]
A
That was Catherine Fletcher, professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University, speaking to Emily Briffet. Catherine's new book is the Firearm Revolution From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires. If you want to read more on this subject or check out any of the images or primary sources mentioned by Catherine in this episode, you should head over to her website@catherinefletcher.it info.