'The rascal with his fire stick': gun culture and firearms violence in sixteenth-century Bologna

While on campaign during the Italian Wars the French soldier Blaise de Monluc received news of the death of his friend, the Prior of Capua. Monluc related the end of this ‘true servant of Kings’ as a ‘very great loss’ made worse by the manner of his demise. He writes disdainfully of the ‘Rascal’, the ‘Peasant’ who struck the Prior down with his ‘fire stick’ [1]. In this brief description Monluc introduces both the violence of the Italian Wars but also one of its most iconic weapons – the firearm. Deployed in greater numbers on battlefields in this century the gun took on a pronounced role in battle stratagem. However, the figure of the gun-toting peasant threatened not only to overturn the established military order on the battlefield but also ‘seemed poised to undermine if not overthrow the existing political and social order’ beyond it [2].

Using chronicles and criminal records from the north Italian city of Bologna as a case study, this thesis takes the backdrop of warring states and conniving princes of the Italian Wars to highlight the proliferation of firearms from the period’s battlefields into civilian arenas. Alongside the development of popular gun cultures, the firearm was incorporated into established practices of vendetta, criminality, and honour-based demonstrative violence across the social spectrum. Often without being fired, the gun offered novel, subversive potential to contemporaries as it became a symbolic, empowering extension of identity and a loud, largely masculine medium of agency and communication on interpersonal and political levels as state, people and technology clashed.