Firearms and the State in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Gun Proliferation and Gun Control

Abstract

Abstract Small firearms proliferated on the Italian peninsula in the context of the Italian Wars of 1494–1559. States were faced with significant challenges in managing this new technology. On the one hand, guns swiftly became important to civic defence. On the other, they raised serious concerns about social order. Archive material from Bologna, Brescia, Florence, Modena and Rome illustrates the routes through which firearms proliferated and sometimes were actively promoted as a means of defence, for example via the development of civic militias and shooting contests. Yet state promotion of shooting skills led to a dangerous expansion of access to weapons, and regimes began to restrict the use of firearms, especially wheel-locks, which could be concealed on the person and thus posed a particular risk to public order. Rank and social status were important in negotiating exemptions to the gun laws, but increasingly those outside the nobility began to assert a need for firearms for self-defence. Guns offer a prism through which it is possible to discern significant tensions in the priorities of early modern regimes and to shed light on the processes through which, in the later years of the sixteenth century, Italy came to suffer high rates of violence.