Arquebus

Origins

The first handguns of the fourteenth century, like the Hand Cannon, were simple tubes fired by touching a hot wire or a match to the touchhole by hand, which made aiming almost impossible. In the fifteenth century German and Italian gunmakers added a curved lever, the serpentine, that held a slow-burning match and lowered it into a priming pan at the side of the barrel. With the lock, a shaped stock and a barrel light enough to hold, the result was the arquebus. The name probably comes from the German Hakenbüchse, "hook gun," after a hook under the barrel of early heavy versions that could be braced against a wall to absorb recoil. By the 1490s arquebusiers were a regular part of Spanish, Italian, German and French armies.

Design & Construction

An arquebus is a smoothbore muzzle-loader with a wooden stock and an iron barrel, usually of around half-inch bore, firing a lead ball of an ounce or less. It was loaded by pouring powder down the barrel, ramming a ball on top, priming the pan and blowing on the match to keep it glowing. Pulling a lever or trigger swung the serpentine forward into the pan. Early stocks were held against the chest or cheek rather than the shoulder. The arquebus was lighter and smaller in bore than the heavy Spanish musket that appeared in the 1520s, which needed a forked rest; in the later sixteenth century the words were often used loosely, and the arquebus developed directly into the Matchlock Musket. Rain, wind and the glow of the match at night were its constant problems.

Combat Use

Its reputation was made at Cerignola in 1503, when the Spanish general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba placed his arquebusiers behind a ditch and parapet and shot down the attacking French gendarmes and Swiss pikemen. At Bicocca in 1522 and Pavia in 1525 arquebusiers again decided battles, and the Spanish tercio grew around a partnership of Pike and shot that dominated European warfare for a century. In the Americas the Conquistadors had few arquebuses — Cortés had perhaps a dozen or so in 1519, Pizarro only a handful at Cajamarca in 1532 — but their noise and smoke, together with steel, horses and native allies, made a deep impression. Portuguese traders brought the arquebus to Japan in 1543, where it was copied as the tanegashima and transformed samurai warfare within a generation.

Legacy

The arquebus ended the dominance of both the armored knight and the archer, and began the age in which infantry firepower decided battles. Its matchlock mechanism lasted until the flintlock replaced it around 1700, and the drills for loading and firing it were the first written weapons drills of modern armies. Genuine sixteenth-century arquebuses are rare and are mostly held by museums and armories, such as the Landeszeughaus in Graz and the Royal Armouries in Leeds.