Ca. 1500 to 1650: Bandeliers for Arquebusiers and Musketeers

[Matchlock]

These items range among the extreme rarities in historic weaponry and in collections, both public and private.

Generally, a bandelier is defined as a soldier's shoulder belt of leather on which small flasks are suspended on strings; these flasks contain the exactly measured amount of black powder for one load of a firearm. This solution greatly simplified the loading procedure and made it superfluous to carry an additional powder flask.
These soldiers were named after the type of firearms they employed.
The characteristic portable long arm before ca. 1550 was the relatively short (overall length ca. 80-120 cm) and small bore (ca. 10-16 mm) arquebus, ignited by a tinder- or matchlock mechanism.
By about the 1560's these firearms became notably longer, heavier, had a bigger bore (ca. 150-170 cm, ca. 7-10 kg, ca. 18-21 mm) and were called muskets, still commonly ignited by a matchlock mechanism.


The invention of the bandelier meant a considerable relief for the soldier. Instead of cumbersomely measuring the correct amount of black powder from his horn or flask for each shot, the bandelier provided him with both exact and ready-to-use powder measures.

We can but speculate when the first bandeliers showed up but we may assume that it was around the turn of the 15th to the 16th century, more than 500 years ago. The first preliminary stage of development seems to be a record in a source of period artwork from Lower Bavaria, some watercolor illustrations called 'hultzein ladung' (wooden load), in the Landshuter Zeughausinventar (armory inventory) by Ulrich Beßnitzer, dated 1485, University Library Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 130, fol. 47r (top attachments). Here we see some wooden powder measures/containers of different sizes, formed like all characteristic Late Gothic vessels: they were drilled and shaped in a lathe, swamped at the base and top, with concave mid section. They do not yet have either caps or string loops, and there is no hint that they were carried suspended from a belt at that period of time.

This, however, must have happened rather soon afterwards as three unusually fine detached caps of such early powder measures prove that have been dug up near a Medieval castle site in Bavaria and have been in my collection ever since. They are of astoundingly high quality, made of brass, embossed with lettering in Gothic minuscules, pierced with Gothic trefoil tracery and finely engraved, and they are fitted with loops for suspension. They are all different, so they probably belonged to the bandeliers of various persons. Their highly decorated design though suggests that they should be dated 'ca. 1500' and must have been part of bandeliers of high-ranking arquebusiers, most probably guardsmen. As is often the case with Gothic script, these inscriptions do not really make much sense, as records of various samples prove: suits of armor, sword grips (cf. the grips made by Hans Sumersperger for Maximilian I), a world-renowned crossbow/wheellock combination of ca. 1521 preserved in the Bavarian National Museum Munich, and a large number of brass bowls (German: Beckenschlägerschüsseln). On one cap the inscription seems to read 'maria', a religious conjuration common in the Late Gothic/early Renaissance period. The reason is easy to explain: most craftsmen could neither read nor write, so they just combined letters and words frequently seen in churches etc. as a kind of decoration.

By the early-16th c., the measures for each load on arquebusier's bandeliers were mostly made of tinned iron, and were suspended on strings from a leather belt, as the tapestries with scenes from the Battle of Pavia, 1525, depict (attachments).

In my collection is the only known complete bandelier that consists of a narrow leather belt retaining a portion of hide complete with hair, an iron buckle and, suspended on their original brown woollen strings, eight extremely fragile tinned iron powder measures with removable caps and a match hider, the cap of which retains a damaged leather covering. So fragile are these measures that, trying to remove the cap, I once touched the one of which only the upper portion is present now, and the recalcitrant iron literally fell to tiny pieces in my hand!



Best,
Michael