Two Very Fine Landsknecht Swords, Southern Germany, ca. 1490 and 1525

[Matchlock]

Originally Posted by laEspadaAncha

Hi Michael,

Sadly I had a similar experience with AI last year (albeit with a significantly less expensive item).

I understand an auction house's willingness to show some love to the floor bidders, but you do that by dropping the hammer before a high bid is accepted from elsewhere, whether it be from cyberspace or an absentee bidder, and not by accepting a high bid and then disallowing it after the fact. Sorry to hear about your experience...

Thank you for coming in; so we are not the only ones.

In more than thirty years of international bidding practice, nothing like this has ever happened to me. We have expierenced that our high bids were used till the last cent but an item hammered down to a much lower bid - I feel this is not only unfair beyond words, it also means a financial loss to both the auctioneer and the consigner. To me this means double cheating.

But now back to the swords.

Jim, I am attaching images of a 500 year old barrel and stock of a haquebut wall gun in the reserve collection of the Museum für das Fürstentum Lüneburg, Northern Germany. You will see the same Gothic majuscule A for Augsburg struck on the barrel. So this seems to be the older Augsburg city proof mark; the wellknown pyr (pine cone) seems not to have been used for firearms before the mid 16th c.

Best,
Michael