Technology and the Myth of Conquest

Want to walk the halls of Anne Bleyn's childhood home? or explore the castles that made up Henry VI's English stronghold With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tutor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week coovering everything from the ancient world World War II Just visit history hit. com For slash, suubbscribe I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not just the Tudors from History Hood podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots from Shakespeare to summarize Relieved by regular doses of murdder, espionage and witchcraard. In other words, just the tutors But most definitely also the tudors The fifth group of the army were those with arcbuses. And when they had come to enter the Great palace, the residents of the rulers, they fired them. they repeatedly fired the Acheibuses. They each exploded. They each crackled, were discharged, thundered, disgorged, Smoke was spread Smoke was spread prousely, smoke darkened. smoke massked over all the ground, spread over all the ground By its fettered smell, it stupefy one One of one's senses That is an account from the Florentine codex of the arrival of Hernanda Cortz and the Spanish troops. entering the Aztec city of Teknotchitland The description evokes the effect of guns on a battlefield, Thunders noise, diffuse smoke, stupeperfaction No wonder that Erasmus wrote of them as weapons invented in hell And it's accounts like this that have cemented the idea that technological superiority, especially in firearms Europeans establish their empires. When the truth is more complicated than that The sixteenth century saw a revolution in firearms in their use, proliferation and control And yet, even as they multiplied, they seemed for many to represent the antithesis of courage and chivalry The epic poem Orlando Furiosso describes guns as a foul and pestinate discovery. Weapons through which no more shall valor prove their prowess. Proctly In fifteen seventy three, Leonhard Frunsberger wrote, It is very often the case that a manly and brave hero is brought down by a pathetic little brat with a gun When Pier Luigi Fanesi Duke of Palmmer was murdered in four fifteen forty seven, his assassins used guns to force their way into his citadel to force servants to strip and to threaten but they did not shoot Pier Luigi. They stabbed him This may have been as my guest today suggested to echo the assassination of Judius Caesar It may have been a practical reaction to firing a gun in an enclosed space But one can't help wonder if it was also because guns ultimately seemed emasculating The story of the firearm revolution of the sixteenth century is therefore one of complexity and ambivalence of desire and discomfort. This has been drawn out in a recent book, The Firearm Revolution from Renaissance Italy to the European Empires published by Princeton University Press Our author and my guest is Professor Catherine Fletcher of Manchester Metropolitan University. Her expertise in the early modern period is broad and profound. Her books include The Beauty and the Terror, an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance, and the Black Prince of Florence, the life of Alessandre de Medici Wh she's also published on the Roman Road Network and Henry VIh's Bak with Rome And I'm delighted to say that she's a friend to and repeat guest on the podcast I'm Professor Susan Lipskom and this is not just the tutors from History here. Katherine, welcome back to the podcast. It's good to talk to you again. No, it's lovely to be back with you. I suppose what we need to start with is thinking about the origins of this. So let's start by thinking about when gunpowder technology first began. And when we get the first recorded instances of firearms Powder is around in China in the twelfth century. and makes it to Europe by The thirteen twenties So there is a move probablyrobably with the Mongols, but across the silk roads from China into Europe. and By the thirteen twenties, we have accounts of cannon being used in siege warfare and What I'm writing about in the book is not so much the large cannon that are used in the context of battlefield What happens once they shrink? Once you make this technology smaller, once it becomes portable, once it can easily be carried around by a single individual And that happens over the course of the fifteenth century. So there's a lovely account from fourteen thirty three. of the first time these modern wooden stocked handguns that you can carry over your shoulder were seen in Italy. and they come south with German troops with the Holy Roman Emperor as he's coming to his coronation So we can see at that point that We are beginning to get in the fourteen thirties a recognizably modern handgun But it takes about another seventy years until those hand guns become decisive on the battlefield. That's as much about military training and discipline as is about the technology itself So we've got quite a long period of transition, almost two centuries from gunpowder coming into Europe to handguns really becoming decisive. From that point on towards the beginning of the fifteen hundreds, they really do take off And can't you describe the mechanism of handguns, the literal lockstock and barrel Yes, well that's where we get the phrase from. So there are three parts There's the barrel, the long guard barrel, the hollow tube through which shot is fired There's the stock, which is just the wooden part that holds it in place, and there's the lock, which is the firing mechanism And there are two types of lock around this period One is called a matchlop and that works by having a long length of burning cord that you clip into the firing mechanism and when you pull the trigger, the burning cord gets touched to the powder There's also another type of mechanism that's coming in, which is called the wheel lock. and older listeners might remember those cigarette lighters where you have a little wheel that spins with your thumb and That creates a spark that lights the flame. And the wheel lock works in much the same way. It's a spinning wheel that creates a spark. And the key differences with the wheel lock is that the wheel lock can be concealed You can keep it inside your cloat you don't have to have a lighted match carried around with you And so the wheel loock prompts a lot of concerns about the effect on social order, the possibility that bandits and assassins would carry these gums around And it's actually the wheel lock that is subject to some of the early legislation against guns Yes, and we'll come back and have a look at some of that in due course, I hope This I wouldd like to know though How effective these guns are? You quote Michel de Montaine in his essays on the sort of haphazard andpredictability of early hand guns You know, how efficacious On an individual basis, there is always the risk of misfire you know, if you want to absolutely guarantee that you are going to be able to shoot an animal or a person, then a single gun isn't particularly reliable On the other hand, if you're a person who is facing a gunman, you might think, well, that's not a risk worth taking. I'm going to hand over my money. And so there's an interesting thing there about the sort of the imminent threat of the gun. If somebody came and mugged you at gunpoint, well, you might think I'm not going to take the risk that this is the time the gun doesn't go off So there's an issue there about the gun being inherently threatening even if it doesn't always work perfectly. And then once we get onto the battlefield, The way that guns work in this period is on mas. So we have the development of pike and shot formations where you have rows of shooters all shooting together, synchronized one line at a time working effectively like a human machine gun cumulative effect of lots of people shooting at once is that even if one gun misfires You don't have a major problem because all the other guns have gone off as an individual weapon. hugely reliable, you can't count on it. but maybe if the other person that you're pointing att doesn't have a gun to shoot back or doesn't have any other means of defense you cann't get it to work in your favour Thinking about the gun on the battlefield, then Let's talk about the changes that it brought to the battlefield. I mean, someome of those were alluded to the Florentine codex, the smoke and the noise. What difference did it make to have guns in battle So you'd have that spoke. and the noise And in order to manage dealing with that smoke and noise on the battlefield You need a very high level of military training and discipline to really get the most out of these weapons. This is something that's been discussed over the years in many different theories around military revolutions in Europe And the key to this is the people who make this work First very effectively in the Italian wars that break out from fourteen ninety four are the Spanish The Spanish use mercenaries particularly. they have a national army with national units of soldiers, the tertios who are very well trained morale on the whole, work together, live together in the camp. and it's a very interesting book by Eden Sherr for people who are interested in reading more about the Spanish Army in this period. and they become very effective using this pipe in shock Ne to really demolish enemies on the battlefield. I mean, they do it at Cerignole in fifteen oh three against the French when they just sort of shoot down a whole French cavalry charge And that's very key in securing their power in the realm of Naples, for example And they go on and they repeat this tactic in other contexts. But it does, it changes what you need in the army. and that has all sorts of implications for military training in the state and developments as we go along And what are the advantages and disadvantages of guns in battle They are great if it rains. You have the perennial problem of keeping your powder dry. and a lot of people who write critically about gardens in this period we'll say you know, this is a major problem. You can't rely on this technology if there's suddenly a thunderstorm. You have to carefully about when you're going to use them You have to maintain the guns. you know they need to be cleaned, they need to be oiled. You have to have that army who knows what they're doing. I mean, you can't have the risk of people shooting each other in the back. H they tried to maneuvre around, you've got to be very well organised and The rate of fire at this point is still relatively slowy. the reloading time for any individual done. I mean you hear all these different sort of statistics but probably around a minute. B the time you you know, you've cleaned out the barrel, you've reloaded your back being able to shoot again That takes a level of practice. So although in some senses the gun requires less training to use than the bow, which is very physical requires a higher level of physical strength To make it work on the battlefield, you need that collective training of the units How does the weather factor apply for wheel locks as well as the matchor It's the powder staying dry that's key. So if the powder has got damp, even if that's in a wheel lock, I mean obviously the wheel lock isn't quite the same as keeping a cord smouldering, but you can actually keep cord smoldering through somewhat damp weather point But yeah, the problem is more of the powder stores in general getting damp because waterproofing in the sixteenth century is not what it is today. You know can you really seal in powder? peopleople do their best, but there are limits. So I think we've got questions therere about the reliability. but alsoso on the other hand, most wars at this time are fought seasonally primarily fought in the summer months and makes and particularly in southern Europe, that makes the immediate problem of rain a lesser issue than it might have been people are alert to this limitation of guns And of course, guns are rarely deployed on their own at this stage. They're deployed in the context of pike and shop units, there would be other things going on the battlefield There will be cavalry, for example There are cannon. So this is one type of weapon and If the guns don't work out, there are other resources to draw on. And I mentioned in the introduction this theme of kind of cultural ambivalence What are sort of late fifteenth, early sixteenth century attitudes too firearms and their use on the battlefield. So they are, on the one hand, valued as a military technology for the reasons that I've been outlining On the other hand, they're very frequently spoken of as diabolical. and as unchivalrous. So there is a great image that I include in the book from a French book of Oours of an image of two little demons on a balcony shooting down at the figure of the risen Christ after his resurrection. and That I think sums up in visual form some of the idea that theseese weapons are not particularly godly pererhaps because of their lethality that you know human beings are appropriating to themselves that the power of life and death and that is problematic, although I have to say the church had 've previously been very critical of crossbows And actually there were various int against crossbowats in the medieval period. So the idea of the church being critical of weapons is not new crosposed similarly get labelled as the deevil's work. And I think there's a broader idea around there's a broader idea with missile weapons They are. unchivalrous ly because proper men should fight up front and together with swords or with knives in physical contact And if you are an ordinary soldier shooting somebody from a distance, then Really give your opponent the opportunity to fight back in a fair way And it also challenges some of the lines of social status and rank on the battlefield Be becausecause coming back to that Fransberger quotation, it means that any ordinary person with a gun can shoot down one of the leading commanders from his horse And that, I think, is idea that you know that isn't easily accomplished even with a b and arrow possible for knights in armour to fight back after being hit with arrows I mean not absolutely all the time, but it's much less easy for them to fight back after they've being hit with a bullet because a bullet is so much more of a powerful force coming against the armor. than an arrow would have been Now to have guns on the battlefield, one needs a gun industry and arms dealers and Can we talk about one of the first of those you've identified? Giovanni Batista Portilaga? How did he operate? was a member of the office holding class in the town of Breresch in northern Italy. So Brech is located between Milan and Venice. and it's a little closer to Milan, but it's run by the Venetian authorities at this point So his was a patrician family, people who were eligible to be on the ruling council of the city, really quite well off from what we can tell from his account books. and I managed to turn up in these account books rather speculatively having gotone into the archive to hunt through what might be there relating to guns. a set of records of arms transactions that he is facilitating between In one case, a purchaser on behalf of the papacy, an important mercenary commander called Kamilla Osini, who's buying guns to fight on behalf of the Pope. And on the other hand, gunmakers in a place called Gardo de Val Trompia, which is a small, very small town, even a large village in the foothills of the Alps. And Gardena Vale Trump has a very, very long history of gun making It's where today you find headquarters of the Beretta Company. And Beretta actually datesself back five hundred years to fifteen twenty six So weirdly for an early modern historian, there's actually some sense of there being living actors in this story because that company has such a long heritage They are not directly connected into any of the transactions that I discuss in the book. There aren't many records for them at that very early stage. Portchilaga is somebody who gets into this new industry and is clearly s directly taking money because that would be incompatible with his role on the city council. It's not done for a patrician to engage in trade directly, but he's receiving favours for his son. He's making connections, he's networking with important people in Venice through these different gifts of types of weapon and through facilitating these arms purchases. And you mention there We start to see a shift in that gifts become part of elite culture. which has to do with gift giving And this is, I suppose, but thinking about guns is material objects, objects of decorative beauty, objects of desire. Can we talk about how guns looked at the elite level, what sort of imagery we see use on them and the ways in which they were given. There's a really interesting example of the way that guns move into this set of gift giving exchanges that have made at the Pincely courts that are made in the context of diplomacy. So there's an example from the court in the city state of Manta in fifteen fifty is where a gift that has traditionally been given on almost quite a regular basis through the sixteenth century switches from being a gift of crossbows to a gift of guns in the fifteen fifties and We have examples of these gifts from multiple different Italian courts. partarticularly we have very good records in Florence and we have a number of the surviving guns. In fact, there's a castle outside Prague, weirdly, it's outside Prague that called the Colapiche castle that has The only intact surviving collection from a Renaissance Italian armourory because the Este family ended up moving up to the Holy Roman Empire from their original base in Ferrara And here we have these incredible guns that are inlaid with ivory, with gold. They are decorated with all sorts of imagery Sometimes it's religious imagery. So we would get images of the crucifixion, for example, on the side of a gun. Sometimes quite often we see images of women. so you have Judith, Judith cutting off the head of the General Holophides, we have Cleopatra, sometimes classical imagery. Cleopatra comes in there. There's an amazing gun in the Art Institute of Chicago, which was a wedding gift to the Archduke of Syriia in the fifteen seventies And that has the judgment of Paris. So it has Paris and the goddesses, you know who he's choosing between where of course he chooses Helen and the whole Trojan Wall off and I suppose that is in a way an association of war, but also an excuse to put some glamorous looking women on the side of the gun. And then we have scenes of the hunt We have these very luxury materials and all of this I think helps to situate the garden in the broader decorative context of the court. So these objects that are quite suspected as unchivalrous and the deevil's work start to be assimilated into a visual and material culture of You the court in general, the materials reflect other objects. they can be made to match your sword or your dagger the sheath in which a gun might be stored can be made of luxury velvet, for example. So lots of ways to help make guns fit in both through the giving process and also through the materials themselves I it the depiction of Christ on Does that indicator shift away from remmbers? Have we come full circle from diabolical to divine? I think one of the things that happens in the sixteenth century to shift that attitude is pererception that guns are beginning to be used in religious war and war that is expressed very clearly as being war in God's interest And those wars are happening in two different contexts. They are happening in Europe in a context, for example, of conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, particularly but not only the French wars of religion, but also earer on Wars in Germany So there for the first time we at the end of the fifteen forties after the Battle of Mlberg we get a very big equestrian portrait of the Holy Roman emmperor Charles V portraits in the Prado. you look online for the Prado Charles V fif, you'll find it. and he is painted in the style of Spanish cavalry with a wheel lock pistol at his hip And this is a battle that Charles and his troops have won against The Protestants So here you can start to see the idea of the gun doing the right sort of God's work And we also have that in the imperial contexts. So obviously one of the big justifications underpinning imperial and colonial projects in this time is that The Europeans are bringing the Wd of God people who have, as yet had no access to it. So in that context the use of guns can also be seen as godly because it is part of a mission So there are different ways in which know the religious change of the sixteenth century helps to You know, contextualize guns in ways that I think the earlier idea of all guns is diabolical it was somewhat distinct from As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. That's really interesting. So We know that guns are proliferating over the course of the sixteenth century Is it possible to put a number on that proliferation It's quite tough to be specific about numbers because we don't know how many guns. stayed in use, fell out of use and so forth give you an indication of how many guns are being produced We know that we are talking just in Gardo de Val Trompy, I mean the one main Venetian production center that we are production in the fifteen seventies when there's a war with Ottomans going on of about a hundred thousand guns a year. Now if you imagine that's one center producing that number of guns. And you multiply across that across the different factories around Europe that have expanded by this time Even if you write off quite a lot of those, that's a broad gun ownership. And This is a society as well that is developing a militia system for civic defence of its different towns. So It's actually an active attempt to arm the citizens so that in the event of an invasion they will be able to defend the place that they live So we see an awful lot of people coming into contact with guns simply you by virtue of the fact there's' an obligation of men of military age to undertake militia drill every month and to undertake militia service. And you know there are estimates that it's one in three households in the countryside, possibly, have a gun. It may well be even more than that because they start to become very standard, for example, in agricultural work You have a gun in case the fox attacks your headhouse And so the normalization of guns through over the course of the sixteenth century, I think is one of the striking parts of this story, whereby they go from being quite an unusual specialist military technology to becoming veryer, very standard and very broadly available across both rural and urban areas Of course, once you've got guns in society like that, then you run into potential problems. and we see guns starting to appear in the criminal records at this time in what sort of cases do we most commonly find them There are a number of different types of cases where we see guns. so we see them in context of feuding in vendettas. So this might be quite low level gun crime. It's like I have a feud going on with my neighbours. We've had an argument about it. so I went round and I shot up the front wall of their house. So it's kind of you know the more casual implication in gun violence We also have quite a lot of bandatory the state. There been wars going on. There are quite a lot of spare guns around. There are also quite a lot of demobilized soldiers who might be undere employed And so we have people basically doing highway robbery and one of the places my gums become quite widely accepted is for self defence during travel So for more elite people, they will have bodyguards and outriders, but even more generally there start to be systems put in place to allow people to carry guns with them when they are going, for example, from the town to a country residence because O of town is perceived to be quite dangerous when you're going along these roads And then of course, there is some use of guns inter personersal violence, but as yet That's really a minority of cases of interpersonal violence. It is much more common for people to get into knife fights. notot least because that's the weapon that Everybody has to hand because people at early botn Europe routinely carry eyes for eating and for general use. Is it fair to say that guns are solely a preserve of men at this time Not absolutely fair to say that, but they are gendered male very quickly, I would say. So when we have references to women using guns, They tend to be in fairly specific circumstances. So one of my favorite ones from my sources is the tale of the women in Gardo de Val Trompia, the gun producing town at a point when the Venetian officials are getting very nervous that they are turning towards Lutheranism, Protestantism, the new sort of religious radicalism. And he writes a description of these Lutheran women who are all going about with two guns each, one in their hand and one at their belt. So this is definitely a representation of women with guns but in a context of religious disorder from the writer's point of view We also know that some women in Ferrara to householders had guns in their house for which they were responsible And that we know that from a sort of survey in the city that was taken anticipating a possible siege And it is in those context of siege warfare where often there are exxceptions to the rules in terms of women being allowed to fight in self defense and in defense of the city that's under attack on the h It is quite Uncommon to hear stories of women with firearms And you mentioned earlier that With these increasing number of guns and particularly with the wheel locks, there came attempts to control their use. What sort of measures were being introduced? There are two types of gun control law that we see quite early on and the first is around particular types of technology. so there are quite a lot of restrictions on wheel locks that simply say, cannot have a wheel lock unless you are either a high ranking person or delegated as one of their servants or you're a bodyguard or such like. So there's quite a lot of generalized restrictures justre saying wheel locks are simply not allowed And those can extend across quite a broad range of society. I mean, as one by the Juda Ferrari says, even people at court cannot have wheel locks. There is an outright ban. and that's tied into the fears around assassination and political violence and so on And then we have restrictions around where you can take a gun Oten and this sort of builds on earlier and more generalized weapons restrictions. You can't take a gun to a market to a fair or to a church, And as the sixteenth century goes on, we start to see developments whereby you can't bring your gun as a traveler into the city, you have to deposit it at the gate And then you can move around the city freely without your gun and you can pick up your gun when you leave and go back on the road again So it's avoiding having too many guns in places that are busy. and avoiding having the particular types of technology that are perceived to be the most dangerous. In your book, you consider a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations that involve the use of guns You know, we start to see reasons why people might want to control their possession. There are a number of interesting stories here, but perhaps tell me about the first assassination of a European ruler with a gun and when the first head of state was executed with a gun and also Were these firsts commented on at the time? Yeah, so the first of these assassinations is James Stewart, the Earl of Murray, who is the regent of Scotland, and he was assassinated in fifteen seventy and This is an assassination that really takes full advantage of the potential for a gun to be shot from a distance because the assassin who is from a politically opposing family in Scottish politics, shoots down from a window As the El is passing in a procession And so this is an early example of a political assassination by firearm Further down the line in the fifteen eighties, we have the assassination not just of a regent, but of head of state, and this is the case of William Silland slightly different case there because William the Silent is assassinated by somebody who has actually infiltrated his entourage and he's able to get close the shock So we have a little bit of a distinction there. I mean obviously that if you can get up close to make the shot, you can potentially also get up close to use different kinds of weapons. But I think with the Earl of Murray, you really see that potential for the lone shooter from a distance which is also then tried and fails against the Admiral de Collignu in France in fifteen seventy two then when the gunshot doesn't work, they resort to the more usual method of stabbing. But this is again, you can see the potential for copycats around this time and for people to think, oh, this is an interesting method of disposing of a political opponent As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodysiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. Yes, disposing of them and not being seen, being able to be at a distance and get away with it. Yes, exactly and escape. And I think that's the time the distance gives the assassin the possibility of escape in a way that's an up close attack makes much less likely But I'd like to go back to the imagery that you mentioned earlier of Charles the F and lusion of a gun in his portrait. because it feels like we're having guns are much more in common with appearing the militia are using them, peopleeople may be using them hunting, they're given as gifts. they're sort of everywhere And yet Extraordinarily, you write that that portrait is unique in the sixteenth century as a depiction of a European ruler with a handgun Why? I mean, this is the dog that doesn't bark in the night. Why the visual silence The visual silence is really interesting and it's something that I think we see more generally in terms of warfare, particularly for southern Europe. and there are some exceptions in Northern Europe I'll come on to, but The fashion in Italy which carries over more broadly, I think is very much for classicizing portraits. And so we have A lot of rulers who want to be seen in the context of a classical tradition that excludes firearms. Obviously firearms are not an object you can put in the picture. If you' trying to appear in the style of a Roman emperor then you are not going to have a gun. And even if that's more metaphorical because you are in modern dress, The idea of the Dun as something that fits into a royal image doesn't really come in until the seventeenth century when we start to get some of the Vilathwith portraits of royalty, Spanish royalty out hunting. And that sort of slightly more informal aspect of royal life that we see in those portraits can include a gun, but not yet in the sixteenth century whereere we start to see guns in portraits in Northern Europe, Okay two very interesting cases. One is in relation to the Dutch revolt, men who have fought in relation to the Dutch revolt, where I think we perhaps have some of that quality of the gunners godly coming back in. And then we have a number of examples of men who are involved in the Elizabethon campaigns in Ireland who are shown with guns in their official portraits, including Thomas Butler, very striking portrait that's now in the gallery in Dublin. And Finally, in terms of where we do have visual representation is again in relation to empire. And there is that marvevelous portrait of Sir Martin Frobysire pistol in one hand and a globe behind him that commemorates his attempt to find the Northwest Passage and was commissioned by the Cathe Company. and I think that portrait really sums up positive associations that are made between firearms and exploration in this period, in the contemporary culture, You know there are exceptions to the rule of silence, but I think those ideas about the gun being somewhat unchivalrouous and unmanly still rule it out unless there's a really compelling reason to include it. So yeah, so why is the gun significant in narratives of conquest Is it that religious question that this is godly work? I think it's partly the religious question, but it also I think comes to signify ideas about European superiority quite quickly. It is a convenient shorthand to say we are more technologically advanced than the people we are encountering. And in a lot of these early narratives, there you get stories about the shock value of guns, the fact that you know the different conquistadors and the navigators and so on have counted people who don't have iron All their weapons are made of wood and such like. Now Obviously quite quickly, many, many indigenous people acquire firearms, many indigenous people ally with the Europeans and the shock value is in fact quite brief because these narratives are repeated and printed and rehearsed back in Europe. the idea of the gun as a really important technology gets established, I think, in the popular imagination and in this set of narratives because it doesn't really get challenged. I mean, it's only really very recently that we have had many historans writing up about this sort of the myths of conquest And I think the gun as a key factor in conquest is one of the myths that set in the storytelling very fast in the sixteenth century and never really went away until people started asking questions y amongst European historians very much later. It's interesting, isn't it? because I think many people who listening to this might have read come across that book like Guns, Germs and Steel that was quite formative in people's understanding of was happening at the time of cononquest, and yet What you're arguing here is that this narrative of technological superiority in the violent creation of European empires is a well worn trope, but it's simplistic and it's actually more complicated than that beyond that initial psychological value of the smoke and the noise Yes, exactly. I mean, I think stop As I put it in the book, it's not so much that guns made empire. Guns had a relatively limited role in making empire. I'd not originally'd say that I'd draw on the expertise of many historians of the Spotish Empire who've come to that view, having studied the documents in detail what I think we might recognize is that although guns didn't make empire made guns and made guns legitimate in certain ways and provided a positive narrative back in Europe of look what these things can achieve And even though that was only a small part of the story, the shock value, the novelty and so forth, and there were other factors that were very much more important least the fact that very often Europeans were turning up and allying with one side of an existing conflict and thereby sort of leveraging an advantage through making alliances with different indigenous powers. You know, back in Europe, the story that gets told is Well, look, our exciting new weapons were able to help us do this And so they put a positive gloss on guns that helps to cut against those old ideas that guns are unchivalrous and diabolical. So to recap then, what was the firearm revolution? I use this phrase to describe a series of processes through which guns went from a quite obscure military tenology to being ordinary familiar and widely accepted object in European societies And that happens through numerous different routes. It happens through economic routes, it happens through military routes, it happens through governmental routes. it happens through cultural routes as well I think it's a process that transforms human relations in important ways. It's a process through which have to come to terms with how to manage the wide availability of a lethal object in the hands of many of their friends and neighbours and That has an impact on human relations and It's a very complicated impact to navigate and it's one that I don't think society really ever quite got to grips with. I mean, it' still arguing over how to deal with guns in the fifteen seventies fifty years after the first gun control legislation came in place. But I think you know, the firearm revolution is about a change in society to allow the presence of more lethal technology and with that to allow a change in the possibilities of human relations This An argument among scholars about whether Elywn Europe went through a civilizing process. and you Montent raising a really interesting point of the question of whether rational decisions could be made in the context of warfare speeded up dramatically by the use of firearms How do you think the firearm revolution to this debate Ironically, one of the things that you have to have if you are going to Allow many people in society to have roouted access to very risky weapons is that you have to have rely on them to have a sense of personal restraint about using them If you're going to say, okay, we trust you to have this gun in your house because you're going to need it for militia service, you're also saying you have to trust that person not just to go around and start using it in irresponsible ways. So I think there's a way in which that idea in the theories of the civilizing process around personal restraint, self control, actually can we put his dialogue in interesting ways in relation to proliferation of firearms because when you give somebody a lethal object and say, you know we want you to be in the modern parts, a responsible gun owner, actually that implies something about personal comportment and behaviour that I think fits quite well into an idea about the civilizing process, but also works with The more recent arguments that have been made by people like Colin Rosos Stu care about the limitations of the civilising process and the high levels of violence in early modern Europe and the fact that this is not a linear process and can quite easily break down in moments of crisis And we absolutely see in the seventeenth century in some of the Italian states in those moments of crisis that gun violence and violence in general surges again And so I think you know, through looking at what happens with guns, we can really identify some of those broader processes of social change and know the fact that we arere not necessarily going through a straightforward, linear process of everythingvery slowly becoming more civilized and better that we have moments when society drops back Yes, we do. So to end then, Catherine, What do you think your study of the firearm revolution has