Firearms and the state in sixteenth-century Italy: gun proliferation and gun control

Fletcher, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2055-154X (2023) Firearms and the state in sixteenth-century Italy: gun proliferation and gun control. Past and Present, 260 (1). pp. 3-37. ISSN 0031-2746

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Abstract

In 1552, Vincenzo Vaccaro, whose name indicates he was a cowherd, obtained a licence from the Bologna authorities that allowed him to carry a gun for the purpose of hunting. Vincenzo was taking advantage of a technology that had proliferated rapidly in the preceding decades. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, guns had been a relative novelty on the Italian peninsula, but after decades of conflict they had become far more familiar and were causing the authorities considerable anxiety. Attempts at regulation, however, failed to convince the population. The anonymous author of a proposition for international gun control observed, probably in the late 1570s, that ‘if the Pope, as chief, and then the other princes do not make some prompt provision, life will so badly be corrupted in this matter, that it will become even more difficult, and soon there will be no place nor state with personal security, given that every low herdsman or shepherd you meet in the countryside today has a wheellock arquebus over his shoulder’. Wheellock firearms  particularly those of smaller sizes  were extensively regulated in sixteenth-century Italy. Unlike the traditional matchlock (which worked by application of a lighted match to gunpowder) they were fired by means of a self-lighting mechanism, could be concealed beneath clothing and were thus a handy weapon for assassins and bandits. Yet acquisition of firearms technology had been driven by the need to defend the state against attack. How early modern states squared the circle of civic defence, maintenance of social order and the desire of men like Vincenzo to manage their cattle with the most up-to-date means available is the subject of this article. It takes as its case-study the states of north and central Italy, a key theatre of European warfare for the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and not coincidentally the location of an internationally important centre for small arms production at Gardone Val Trompia, outside Brescia, in what was for most of the period Venetian territory. It is well-established that the second half of the sixteenth century saw high levels of violent crime that the Italian states struggled to control. The story of their engagement with the new technology of firearms offers a new perspective on how that situation arose.