Horrible, unmanly, indispensable

Renaissance Italians saw the gun as the Devil’s work. But soon they embraced this unchivalrous – and necessary – weapon

by Catherine Fletcher  BIO

Detail from The Battle of Pavia, 1525 (c1529) by Robert Heller. Courtesy the Nationalmuseum, Sweden/Wikipedia

is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her books include The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (2020), The Roads to Rome (2024) and The Firearm Revolution (2026).

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........

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