A Myth Busted: the Famous OTTHEINRICH Wheellock Arquebus Dated 1533!

[Matchlock]

Up to this day, the museum has completely rejected each and every attempt to ask them to take out the lock and photograph its inner mechanism in detail. As the gun is in stable though horribly acid-cleaned condition there are no practical reasons for such a rejection because neither the stock nor the iron parts will obviously fall into pieces when two screws get detached ...

My explanation, and that of other people as well, is that the curators are afraid of a myth being busted as the lock is far from being identical today to what it looked like when it was made almost 500 years agao. The fact that this gun in a way is a Bavarian local hero piece adds only very little to my understanding for the museum people: science and objectivity is what counts after all. These museum guys have done enough violent barbarity to this gun by acid-cleaning it around 1970.

I will, however, prove in detail by the outer appearance of the lock and surrounding wood, plus the posted images which I took myself, that that myth is overdue to be busted, and I will do so now. Who needs museum people for scíentific purposes anyway? Here we go.



First of all, this gun is the forth oldest dated wheellock in existence: 1533. In the Army Museum Brussels is a another arquebus, dated 1532, with combined wheellock and snap-tinderlock mechanism, and with the very same type of lock but unaltered and completely original in all its parts.
The comparison of these two locks and other related specimen will prove the crude and quite modern alterations that the HOTTH arquebus underwent.

For the sake of completeness of argumentation, the other three known dated predecessors are:

- the combined crossbow-wheellock, datable because of its inscrition to between 1521 and 1526, in the Bavarian National Museum Munich, inv.no. ...

- two arquebuses dated 1530 and 1531 respectively, bought by King Charles V from the Marquardt workshop in Augsburg, and both kept in the Real Armeria Madrid, inv.no.s K. 32 (the older) and K. 30.


I will post more on these four guns (including the 1532 Brussels piece) in due course.



Best,
Michael