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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
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- [02:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from and and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but Most definitely also the Tudors. The fifth group of the army were those with arquebuses. And when they had come to enter the great palace, the residents of the rulers, they fired them. They repeatedly fired the arquebuses. They each exploded, they each crackled, were discharged, thundered, disgorged. Smoke was spread, smoke was spread diffusely. Smoke darkened, Smoke massed over all the ground, spread over all the ground. By its fetid smell. It stupefied one, it robbed one of one's senses. That is an account from the Florentine Codex of the arrival of Hernando Cortes and the Spanish troops entering the Aztec city of Tecnochtitlan. The description evokes the effect of guns on a battlefield. Thunderous noise, diffuse smoke, stupefaction. No wonder that Erasmus wrote of them as weapons invented in hell. And it's accounts like this that have cemented the idea that technological superiority is, especially in firearms, helped the Europeans establish their empires, when the truth is more complicated than that. The 16th century saw a revolution in firearms in their use, proliferation and control. And yet, even as they multiplied, they seemed for many, to represent the antithesis of courage and chivalry. The epic poem Orlando Furioso describes guns as a foul and pestilent discovery, weapons through which no more shall valor prove their prowess. More prosaically, in 1573, Leonhard Frundsberger wrote, it is very often the case that a manly and brave hero is brought down by a pathetic little brat with a gun. When Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of Parma, was murdered in 1547, his assassins used guns to force their way into his citadel, to force servants to strip and to threaten. But they did not shoot Pierre Luigi. They stabbed him. This may have been, as my guest today suggested, to echo the assassination of Julius Caesar. It may have been a practical reaction to firing a gun in an enclosed space. But one can't help wonder if it was also because guns ultimately seemed emasculating. The story of the firearm revolution of the 16th century is therefore one of complexity and ambivalence, of desire and discomfort. And all of this has been drawn out in a recent book, the Firearm From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, published by Princeton University Press. Its author and my guest is Professor Katherine Fletcher of Manchester Metropolitan University. Her expertise in the early modern period is broad and profound. Her books include the Beauty and the An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance and the Black Prince of the Life of Alessandro de Medici, while she's also published on the Roman Road network and
- [05:31]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Henry VIII's break with Rome.
- [05:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I'm delighted to say that she's a friend to and repeat guest on the podcast. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb. And this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Katherine, welcome back to the podcast. It's good to talk to you again.
- [05:48]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
No, it's lovely to be back with you.
- [05:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I suppose what we need to start with is thinking about the origins of this. So let's start by thinking about when gunpowder technology first began and when we get the first recorded instances of firearms.
- [06:08]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Gunpowder is around in China in the 12th century and makes it to Europe by the 1320s. So there is a move probably with the Mongols, but across the Silk Roads from China into Europe. And by the 1320s we have accounts of cannon being used in siege warfare. And what I'm writing about in the book is not so much the large cannon that are used in the context of battlefield, but what happens once they shrink, once you make this technology smaller, once it becomes portable, once it can easily be carried around by a single individual. And that happens over the course of the 15th century. So there's a lovely account from 1433 of the first time these modern wooden stocked handguns that you can carry over your shoulder were seen in Italy, and they come south with German troops, with the Holy Roman Emperor as he's coming to his coronation. So we can see at that point that we are beginning to get in the 1430s, a recognizably modern handgun. But it takes about another 70 years until those handguns become decisive on the battlefield. That's as much about military training and discipline as it is about the technology itself. So we've got quite a long period of transition, almost two centuries, from gunpowder coming into Europe to handguns really becoming decisive. But from that point onwards, the beginning of the 1500s, they really do take
- [07:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
off and can describe the mechanism of handguns, the literal lock, stock and barrel.
- [07:53]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Yes, well, that's where we get the phrase from. So there are three parts. There's the barrel, the long gun barrel, a hollow tube through which shot is fired. There's the stock, which is just the wooden part that holds it in place. And there's the lock, which is the firing mechanism. And there are two types of lock around this period. One is called a matchlock, and that works by having a long length of burning cord that you clip into the firing mechanism. And when you pull the trigger, the burning cord gets touched to the powder. There's also another type of mechanism that's coming in which is called the wheel lock and older listeners might remember those cigarette lighters where you have a little wheel that spins with your thumb and that creates a spark that lights the flame. And the wheel lock works in much the same way. It's a spinning wheel that creates a spark. And the key differences with the wheel lock is that the wheel lock can be concealed, you can keep it inside your cloak, you don't have to have a lighted match carried around with you. And so the wheel lock prompts a lot of concerns about the effect on social order, the possibility that bandits and assassins would carry these guns around. And it's actually the wheel lock that is subject to some of the early legislation against guns.
- [09:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And we'll come back and have a look at some of that in due course, I hope. I would like to know, though, how effective these guns are. You quote Michel de Montaigne in his essays on the sort of haphazard unpredictability of early handguns. You know, how efficacious, on an individual
- [09:31]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
basis, there is always the risk of misfire. You know, if you want to absolutely guarantee that you are going to be able to shoot an animal or a person, then a single gun isn't particularly reliable. On the other hand, if you're on the person who is facing a gunman, you might think, well, that's not a risk worth taking, I'm going to hand over my money. And so there's an interesting thing there about the sort of the imminent threat of the gun. If somebody came and mugged you at gunpoint, well, you might think, I'm not going to take the risk, that this is the time the gun doesn't go off. So there's an issue there about the gun being inherently threatening, even if it doesn't always work perfectly. And then once we get onto the battlefield, the way that guns work in this period is en masse. So we have the development of pike and shot formations, where you have rows of shooters all shooting together, synchronized one line at a time, and working effectively like a human machine gun. So the cumulative effect of lots of people shooting at once is that even if one gun misfires, you don't have a major problem. Problem, because all the other guns have gone off as an individual weapon, not hugely reliable, you can't count on it. But maybe if the other person that you're pointing it at doesn't have a gun to shoot back or doesn't have any other means of defence, you can get it to work in your favour.
- [10:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thinking about the gun on the battlefield, then let's talk about the changes that it brought to the battlefield. I mean, some of those were alluded to in the Florentine Codex. The smoke and the noise. What difference did it make to have guns in battle?
- [11:13]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
So you have that smoke and the noise, and in order to manage dealing with that smoke and noise on the battlefield, you need a very high level of military training and discipline to really get the most out of these weapons. This is something that's been discussed over the years in many different theories around military revolutions in Europe. And the key to this is the people who make this work first very effectively in the Italian wars that break out from 1494 are the Spanish. The Spanish don't use mercenaries particularly. They have a national army with national units of soldiers. The Tercios, who are very well trained, have very good morale on the whole. Work together, live together in the camp. And it's a very interesting book by Eden Scherer for people who are interested in reading more about the Spanish army in this period. And they become very effective at using this pike and shot technique to really demolish enemies on the battlefield. I mean, they do it at Cerignola in 1503 against the French, when they just sort of shoot down a whole French cavalry charge. And that's very key in securing their power in the realm of Naples, for example. And they go on and they repeat this tactic in other contexts, but it changes what you need in an army. And that has all sorts of implications for military training in the state and developments as we go along.
- [12:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what are the advantages and disadvantages of guns in battle?
- [12:48]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
They aren't great. If it rains, you have a perennial problem of keeping your powder dry. And a lot of people who write critically about gardens in this period will say, you know, this is a major problem. You can't rely on this technology. If there's suddenly a thunderstorm, you have to think carefully about when you're going to use them. You have to maintain the guns. You know, they need to be cleaned, they need to be oiled. You have to have that army who knows what they're doing. I mean, you can't have the risk of people shooting each other in the back as they're trying to maneuver around. You've got to be very well organized. And the rate of fire at this point is still relatively slow. I mean, the reloading time for any individual gun, I mean, you hear all these different sort of statistics, but probably around a minute. By the time you've cleaned out the barrel, you've reloaded your back, being able to shoot Again, that takes a level of practice. So although in some senses the gun requires less training to use than the bow, which is very physical, requires a higher level of physical strength to make it work on the battlefield. You need that collective training of the units.
- [14:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And does the weather factor apply for wheel locks as well as the matchlock?
- [14:06]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
It's the powder staying dry that's key. So if the powder has got damp, even if that's in a wheel lock, I mean, obviously the wheel lock isn't quite the same as keeping a cord smouldering, but you can actually keep a cord smouldering through somewhat damp weather up to a point. But, yeah, the problem is more of the powder stores in general getting damp, because waterproofing in the 16th century is not what it is today. You know, can you really seal in powder? People do their best, but there are limits. So I think we've got questions there about the reliability. But also, on the other hand, most wars at this time are fought seasonally. They are primarily fought in the summer months. And that makes. And particularly in Southern Europe, that makes the immediate problem of rain a lesser issue than it might have been. But, you know, people are alert to this limitation of guns. And of course, guns are rarely deployed on their own at this stage. They're deployed in the context of pike and shot units. There will be other things going on the battlefield. There will be cavalry, for example, there are cannon. So this is one type of weapon. And if the guns don't work out, there are other resources to draw on.
- [15:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I mentioned in the introduction this theme of kind of cultural ambivalence, what are sort of late 15th, early 16th century attitudes to firearms and their use on the battlefield.
- [15:42]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
So they are, on the one hand, valued as a military technology for the reasons that I've been outlining. But on the other hand, they're very frequently spoken of as diabolical and as unchivalrous. So there is a great image that I include in the book, from a French book of Hours, of an image of two little demons on a balcony shooting down at the figure of the risen Christ after his resurrection. And that I think sums up in visual form some of the idea that these weapons are not particularly godly, perhaps because of their lethality, that human beings are appropriating to themselves that the power of life and death, and that that is problematic. Although I have to say, I mean, the Church had previously been very critical of crossbows, and actually there were various interdicts against crossbows in the medieval period. So the idea of the Church being critical of weapons is not new. Crossbows similarly get labeled as the devil's work. And I think there's a broader idea around. There's a broader idea with missile weapons that they are unchivalrous, particularly because proper men should fight up front and together with swords or with knives, in physical contact. And if you are an ordinary soldier shooting somebody from a distance, then that doesn't really give your opponent the opportunity to fight back in a fair way. And it also challenges some of the lines of social status and rank on the battlefield. Because coming back to that Franzberger quotation, it means that any ordinary person with a gun can shoot down one of the leading commanders from his horse. And that, I think, is an idea that, you know, that that isn't easily accomplished even with a bow and arrow. It's possible for knights in armour to fight back after being hit with arrows. I mean, not absolutely all the time, but it's much less easy for them to fight back after they've been hit with a bullet, because a bullet is so much more of a powerful force coming against the armor than an arrow would have been.
- [18:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, to have guns on the battlefield, one needs a gun industry and arms dealers. And can we talk about what are the first of those you've identified? Giovanni Battista Portulaga. How did he operate?
- [18:17]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
He was a member of the office holding class in the town of Brescia in northern Italy. So Brescia is located between Milan and Venice? It's a little closer to Milan, but it's run by the Venetian authorities at this point. And so his was a patrician family, people who were eligible to be on the ruling council of the city. Really quite well off, from what we can tell from his account books. And I managed to turn up in these account books, rather speculatively, having gone into the archive to hunt through what might be there relating to guns, a set of records of arms transactions that he is facilitating between, in one case, a purchaser on behalf of the Papacy, an important mercenary commander called Camillo Orsini, who's buying guns to fight on behalf of the Pope. And on the other hand, gun makers in a place called Gardo de Valtrampia, which is a small, very small town, even a large village in the foothills of the Alps and Gardena. Valtompier has a very, very long history of gun making. It's where today you find the headquarters of the Beretta company. And Beretta actually dates itself back 500 years to 1526. So, weirdly, for an early Modern historian. There's actually some sense that there being living actors in, in this story because that company has such a long heritage now, they are not directly connected into any of the transactions that I discuss in the book. There aren't many records for them at that very early stage. But yeah, Portulaga is somebody who gets into this new industry and is clearly not directly taking money because that would be incompatible with his role on the city council. It's not done for a patrician to engage in trade directly, but he's receiving favours for, for his son, he's making connections, he's networking with important people in Venice through these different gifts of types of weapon and through facilitating these arms purchases.
- [20:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mention there gifts, we start to see a shift in that gifts become part of elite culture, which has to do with gift giving. And this is, I suppose, but thinking about guns as material objects, objects of decorative beauty, objects of desire. Can we talk about how guns looked at the elite level? What sort of imagery we see used on them and the ways in which they were given?
- [20:53]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
There's a really interesting example of the way that guns move into this set of gift giving exchanges is made at the princely courts that are made in the context of diplomacy. So there's an example from the court in the city state of mantua in the 50s, 1550s, where a gift that has traditionally been given on almost quite a regular basis through the 16th century switches from being a gift of crossbows to a gift of guns in the 1550s. And we have examples of these gifts from multiple different Italian courts. Particularly we have very good records in Florence and we have a number of the surviving guns. In fact, the castle outside Prague, weirdly, it's outside Prague called the Kolapiste Castle that has the only intact surviving collection from a Renaissance Italian armoury because the Este family ended up moving up to the Holy Roman Empire from their original base in Ferrara. And here we have these incredible guns that are inlaid with ivory, with gold. They are decorated with all sorts of imagery. Sometimes it's religious imagery. So we will get images of the Crucifixion, for example, on the side of a gun. Sometimes you. Quite often we see images of women. So you have Judith, Judith cutting off the head of the general Holofades. We have Cleopatra sometimes. So classical imagery. Cleopatra comes in there. There's an amazing gun in the Art Institute of Chicago which was a wedding gift to the Archduke of Styria in the 1570s. And that has the Judgment of Paris. So it has Paris and the goddesses you know, who he's choosing between, when, of course, he chooses Helen. And the whole Trojan War kicks off. And I suppose that is in a way an association of war, but also an excuse to put some glamorous looking women on the side of the gun. And then we have scenes of the hunt, we have these very luxury materials. And all of this, I think, helps to situate the gun in, in the broader decorative context of the court. So these objects that are quite suspected as unchivalrous and the devil's work start to be assimilated into a visual and material culture of the court in general. The materials reflect other objects. They can be made to match your sword or your dagger. The sheath in which a gun might be stored can be made of luxury velvet, for example. So lots of ways to help make guns fit in, both through the giving process and also through the materials themselves.
- [23:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And the depiction of Christ on a gun, does that indicate a shift away from ambivalence? Have we come full circle from diabolical to divine?
- [23:51]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
I think one of the things that happens in the 16th century to shift that attitude is a perception that guns are beginning to be used in religious war and war that is expressed very clearly as being war in God's interest. And those wars are happening in two different contexts. They are happening in Europe in the context, for example, of conflict between Protestant and Catholics particularly, but not only the French wars of religion, but also earlier on, wars in Germany. So there for the first time, we, in the end of the 1540s, after the battle of Muhlberg, we get a very big equestrian portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. So portraits in the Prado. If you look online for the Prado, Charles V, you'll find it. And he is painted in the style of the Spanish cavalry with a wheel lock pistol at his hip. And this is a battle that Charles and his troops have won against the Protestants. So here you can start to see the idea of the gun doing the right sort of God's work. And we also have that in the imperial contexts. So obviously one of the big justifications underpinning imperial and colonial projects in this time is that the Europeans are bringing the word of God to people who have as yet had no access to it. So in that context, the use of guns can also be seen as the godly because it is part of a mission context. So there are different ways in which, you know, the religious change of the 16th century helps to, you know, contextualize guns in ways that I think the earlier idea of all guns as diabolical was somewhat distinct from.
- [25:45]
Paige Desorbo
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- [26:17]
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Paige Desorbo
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- [27:12]
Paige Desorbo
Yeah, hi.
- [27:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Quick question.
- [27:14]
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- [27:18]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
You love buying stuff and earn cash
- [27:20]
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- [27:22]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
You love purchasing eligible things.
- [27:24]
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- [27:29]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.
- [27:31]
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- [27:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's really interesting. So we, we know that guns are proliferating over the course of the 16th century. Is it possible to put a number on that proliferation?
- [28:07]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
It's quite tough to be specific about numbers because we don't know how many guns stayed in use, fell out of use, and so forth. But to give you an indication of how many guns are being produced. We know that, you know, we are talking just in Gardo de Valtrompi, I mean, the one main Venetian production centre that we are up at peak production in the 1570s when there's a war with the Ottomans going on, of about 100,000 guns a year. Now, if you imagine that's one center producing that number of guns and you multiply across that, across the different factories around Europe that have, you know, expanded by this time. Even if you write off quite a lot of those, that's a broad gun ownership and this is a society as well that is developing a militia system for civic defence of its different towns. There's actually an active attempt to, to arm the citizens so that in the event of an invasion they will be able to defend the place that they live. So we see an awful lot of people coming into contact with guns simply by virtue of the fact there's an obligation of men of military age to undertake militia drill every month to undertake militia service. And there are estimates that it's one in three households in the countryside possibly have a gun. It may well be even more than that because they start to become very standard. For example, in agricultural work you have a gun in case the fox attacks your hen house. And so the normalisation of guns over the course of the 16th century, I think, is one of the striking parts of this story, whereby they go from being quite an unusual and specialist military technology to becoming very, very standard and very broadly available across both rural and urban areas.
- [30:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Of course, once you've got guns in society like that, then you run into potential problems. And we see guns starting to appear in the criminal records at this time. In what sort of cases do we most commonly find them?
- [30:22]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
There are a number of different types of cases where we see guns. So we see them in the context of feuding and vendetta. So this might be quite low level gun crime. It's like I have a feud going on with my neighbors. We've had an argument about it. So I went round and I shot up the front wall of their house. So it's kind of, you know, the more casual implication in gun violence. We also have quite a lot of banditry. Obviously there have been wars going on. There are quite a lot of spare guns around. There are also quite a lot of demobilized soldiers who might be underemployed. And so we have people basically doing highway robbery. And one of the places where guns become quite quickly, quite widely accepted is for self defense during travel. So for more elite People, they will have bodyguards and outriders. But even more generally there start to be systems put in place to allow people to carry guns with them when they are going, for example, from the town to a country residence, because out of town is perceived to be quite dangerous when you're going along these roads. And then of course there is some use of guns in interpersonal violence, but as yet that's really a minority of cases of interpersonal violence. It is much more common for people to get into knife fights, not least because that's the weapon that everybody has to hand. Because people in early modern Europe are routinely carry dyes for eating and for general use.
- [31:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is it fair to say that guns are solely a preserve of men at this time?
- [32:00]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
It's not absolutely fair to say that, but they are gendered male very quickly, I would say so when we have references to women using guns, they tend to be in fairly specific circumstances. So one of my favourite ones from my sources is the. The tale of the women in Gardo de Valtrompia, the gun producing town, at a point when the Venetian officials are getting very nervous that they are turning towards Lutheranism, Protestantism, the new sort of religious radicalism. And he writes a description of these Lutheran women who are all going about with two guns, each one in their hand and one at their belt. So this is definitely a representation of women with guns, but in a context of religious disorder. From the writer's point of view. We also know that some women in Ferrara who were householders had guns in their house for which they were responsible. And that we know that from a sort of survey of the city that was taken anticipating a possible siege. And it is in those contexts of siege warfare where often there are exceptions to the rules in terms of women being allowed to fight in self defence and in defence of a city that's under attack. But on the whole it is quite uncommon to hear stories of women with firearms.
- [33:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned earlier that with these increasing number of guns, and particularly with the wheel locks, there came attempts to control their use. What sort of measures were being introduced?
- [33:36]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
There are two types of gun control law that we see quite early on, and the first is around particular types of technology. So there are quite a lot of restrictions on wheel locks that simply say you cannot have a wheel lock unless you are either a high ranking person or delegated as one of their servants, or you are a bodyguard or such like. So there's quite a lot of generalized restrictions. Just saying wheel locks are simply not allowed. And those can extend across quite a broad range of societies. Society. I mean, there's at one point the Duke of Ferrari says even people at court cannot have wheel locks. There is an outright ban, and that's tied into the fears around assassination and political violence and so on. And then we have restrictions around where you can take a gun so often. And this, this sort of builds on earlier and more generalized weapons restrictions. You can't take a gun to a market, to a fair or to a church. And as the 16th century goes on, we start to see developments whereby you can't bring your gun as a traveler into the city. You have to deposit it at the gate, and then you can move around the city freely without your gun, and you can pick up your gun when you leave and go back on the road again. So it's avoiding having too many guns in places that are busy and avoiding having the particular types of technology that perceive to be the most dangerous.
- [35:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In your book, you consider a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations that involve the use of guns. You know, we start to see reasons why people might want to control their possession. There are a number of interesting stories here, but perhaps tell me about the first assassination of a European ruler with a gun and when the first head of state was executed with a gun. And also, were these firsts commented on at the time?
- [35:32]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Yeah. So the first of these assassinations is James Stuart, the Earl of Murray, who was the Regent of Scotland and he was assassinated in 1570. And this is an assassination that really takes full advantage of the potential for a gun to be shot from a distance. Distance, because the assassin, who is from a politically opposing family in Scottish politics, shoots down from a window as the Earl is passing in a procession. And so this is an early example of political assassination by firearm. Further down the line in the 1580s, we have the assassination not just of a regent, but of a head of state.
- [36:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
State.
- [36:17]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
And this is the case of William the Silent, Slightly different case there, because William the Silent is assassinated by somebody who is actually infiltrated his entourage and is able to get up close and make the shot. So we have a little bit of a distinction there. I mean, obviously, if you can get up close to make the shot, you can potentially also get up close to use different kinds of weapons. But I think with the Earl of Murray, you really see that potential for the lone shooter from a distance, which is also then tried and fails against the Admiral de Coligny in France in 1572. Then when the gunshot doesn't work, they resort to the more usual method of stabbing. But this is again you can see the potential for copycats around this time and for people to think, oh, this is an interesting method of disposing of a political opponent.
- [37:08]
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- [37:17]
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- [38:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, disposing of them and not being seen.
- [38:35]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Being able to be at a distance
- [38:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
and get away with it.
- [38:37]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Yes, exactly. And escape. And I think that's the time the distance gives the assassin the possibility of escape in a way that an up close attack makes much less likely.
- [38:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But I'd like to go back to the imagery that you mentioned earlier of Charles V and the inclusion of a gun in his portrait because it feels like we're having Guns are much more common with the militia are using them, people may be using them, hunting, they're given as gifts, they're sort of everywhere. And yet extraordinarily you write that that portrait is unique in the 16th century as a depiction of a European ruler with a handgun. Why? I mean, this is the dog that doesn't bark in the night. Why the visual silence?
- [39:27]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
The visual silence is really interesting and it's something that I think we see more generally in terms of warfare, particularly for southern Europe. And there are some exceptions in northern Europe that I'll come onto, but the fashion in Italy and which carries over more broadly I think is very much for classicizing portraits. And so we have a lot of rulers who want to be seen in the context of a classical tradition that excludes firearms Obviously, firearms are not an object you can put in the picture. If you're trying to appear in the style of a Roman emperor, then you are not going to have a gun. And even if that's more metaphorical because you are in modern dress, the idea of the gun as something that fits into a royal image doesn't really come in until the 17th century, when we start to get some of the Velazquez portraits of royalty, Spanish royalty, out hunting, and that sort of slightly more informal aspect of royal life that we see in those portraits can include a gun. But not yet in the 16th century, where we start to see guns in portraits in northern Europe. Again, two very interesting cases. One is in relation to the Dutch Revolt, men who have fought in relation to the Dutch Revolt, where I think we perhaps have some of that quality of the gun as godly coming back in. And then we have a number of examples of men who are involved in the Elizabethan campaigns in Ireland who are shown with guns in their official portraits, including Thomas Butler. Very striking portrait that's now in the. In the gallery in Dublin. And finally, in terms of where we do have visual representation is again, in relation to empire. And there is that marvellous portrait of Sir Martin Frobisher with a pistol in one hand and a globe behind him that commemorates his attempt to find the Northwest Passage and was commissioned by the Cathay Company. And I think that portrait really sums up the positive associations that are made between firearms and exploration in this period in the contemporary culture. And, you know, there are exceptions to the rule of silence, but I think those ideas about the gun being somewhat unchivalrous and unmanly still rule it out, unless there's a really compelling reason to include it.
- [42:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. So why is the gun significant in narratives of conquest? Is it that religious question, that this is godly work?
- [42:09]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
I think it's partly the religious question, but it also, I think, comes to signify ideas about European superiority quite quickly. It is a convenient shorthand to say we are more technologically advanced than the people we are encountering. And in a lot of these early narratives, you get stories about the shock value of guns, the fact that, you know, the different conquistadors and navigators and so on have encountered people who don't have iron. All their weapons are made of wood and such like. Now, obviously, quite quickly, many, many indigenous people acquire firearms. Many indigenous people ally with Europeans, and the shock value is, in fact, quite brief. But because these narratives are repeated and printed and rehearsed back in Europe, the idea of the Gun as a really important technology gets established, I think, in the popular imagination and in this set of narratives, because it doesn't really get challenged. I mean, it's only really very recently that we have had many historians writing up about the myths of conquest. And I think the gun as a key factor in conquest is one of the myths that got set in the storytelling very fast in the 16th century and never really went away until people started asking questions totally amongst European historians very much later.
- [43:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's interesting, isn't it, because I think many people who listening to this, might have read or come across that book Guns, Germs and Steel, that was quite formative in people's understanding of what was happening at the time of conquest. And yet what you're arguing here is that this narrative of technological superiority in the violent creation of European empires is a well worn trope, but it's simplistic and it's actually more complicated than that. Beyond that initial psychological value of the smoke and the noise.
- [44:25]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Yes, exactly. I mean, I think that as I put it in the book, it's not so much that guns made empire. Guns had a relatively limited role in making empire. I'm not originally saying that I draw on the expertise of many historians of the Spanish empire who've come to that view, having studied the documents in detail. But what I think we might recognize is that although guns didn't make empire, made guns, made guns legitimate in certain ways, and provided a positive narrative back in Europe of look what these things can achieve. And even though that was only a small part of the story, the shock value, the novelty and so forth. And there were other factors that were very much more important, not least the fact that very often Europeans were turning up and allying with one side of an existing conflict and thereby sort of leveraging an advantage through making alliances with different indigenous powers. You know, back in Europe, the story that gets told is, well, look, our exciting new weapons were able to help us do this. And so they put a positive gloss on guns that helps to cut against those older ideas that guns are unchivalrous and diabolical.
- [45:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So to recap then, what was the firearm revolution?
- [45:47]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
I use this phrase to describe a series of processes through which guns went from a quite obscure military technology to being an ordinary, familiar and widely accepted object in European societies. And that happens through numerous different routes. It happens through economic routes, it happens through military routes, it happens through governmental routes, it happens through cultural routes as well. But I think it's a process that transforms human relations in important ways. It's a process through which people have to come to terms with how to manage the wide availability of a lethal object in the hands of many of their friends and neighbors. And that has an impact on human relations. And it's a very complicated impact to navigate, and it's one that I don't think society really ever quite got to grips with. I mean, it is still arguing over how to deal with guns in 1570s, 50 years after the first gun control legislation came in place. But I think, you know, the firearm revolution is about a change in society to allow the presence of more lethal technology and with that, to allow a change in the possibilities of human relations.
- [47:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
There's an argument among scholars about whether early modern Europe went through a civilizing process. And you quote Montaigne, raising a really interesting point of the question of whether rational decisions could be made in the context of warfare speeded up dramatically by the use of firearms. How do you think the firearm revolution contributes to this debate?
- [47:48]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Ironically, one of the things that you have to have if you are going to allow many people in society to have routine access to very risky weapons is that you have to rely on them to have a sense of personal restraint about using them. If you're going to say, okay, we trust you to have this gun in your house because you're going to need it for militia service, you're also saying you have to trust that person not just to go around and start using it in irresponsible ways. So I think there's a way in which that idea, in the theories of the civilizing process around personal restraint, self control, actually can be put into dialogue in interesting ways in relation to the proliferation of firearms. Because when you give somebody a lethal object and say, you know, we want you to be in the bottom parts, a responsible gun owner, actually, that that implies something about personal comportment and behavior that I think fits quite well into an idea about the civilizing process, but also works with the more recent arguments that have been made by people like Colin Rose or Stuart Carroll about the limitations of the civilizing process and the high levels of violence in early modern Europe, and the fact that this is not a linear process and can quite easily break down in moments of crisis. And we absolutely see in the 17th century, in some of the Italian states, in those moments of crisis, that gun violence and violence in general surges again. And so I think, you know, through looking at what happens with guns, we can really identify some of those broader processes of social change and the fact that we are not necessarily going through a straightforward linear process of everything slowly becoming more civilized and better. That we have moments when society drops back.
- [49:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, we do. So to end then. Catherine, what do you think your study of the firearm revolution has taught you about how societies should respond to new technologies?
- [50:06]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
I think the first thing it taught me is that societies are often very, very slow to respond to new technologies and to work out what to do with them. And my strong impression with questions around firearms is that firearms got there first. And 50 years on, people were still having these big political arguments about what on earth do we do with this technology? It is causing social problems. And so I think the idea that the genie gets out of the bottle quite fast, it's very, very hard to put it back in, particularly once, you know, you have this spiral effect in some cases whereby we have people say, well, no particular desire to have a gun, but I've got a feud with my neighbors and my neighbors have got guns, so I want to have one, too. And without very, very, very hard action, I think, by the state. And there was just no way that the states were going to do this. They weren't strong states where we were talking about very kind of minimal policing powers in this period without very strong action by the state, putting a lid on these technologies, particularly when the state is actively wanting to develop them for military purposes, is incredibly hard.
- [51:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much. This has been really interesting sort of brand new series of ideas for us to engage with and, you know, fascinating to think about this new technology of the 16th century and the impact it was having in all manner of ways, not just on the battlefield, but throughout society. Thank you for taking us there.
- [51:45]
Professor Katherine Fletcher
Thank you very much.
- [51:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintle, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddow, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on not just the Tudors from History. Hit. Foreign.
- [52:23]
Paige Desorbo
Hey, I'm Paige Desorbo from Giggly Squad, and I want to talk to you about arm and Hammer Hardball cat litter. Because when it comes to fighting cat odor, they are the champs. Like what smell the litter box was my biggest fear when I got my kitty, Daphne. But since I started using arm and hammer cat litter, I don't notice any cat smell. I always feel confident about anyone stopping by, whether it's my friends or my family or even people in my building. So for my fellow cat parents, be guest ready with arm and hammer. Hard ball cat litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.
- [52:55]
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