The oldest known handgun in existence, ca. 1400-10

[Matchlock]

Hi Jim,

In trying to understand the meaning of color paints on arms (mainly red) I have experienced it to be very helpful to study contemporary paintings in churches and museums, but also illuminations in books. Thus, you will much better grasp the common 'fashionable' attitude of the Gothic an Renaissance periods.

Looking at such historic illustrations will make it obvious that especially red and green, but also, to a certain amount, blue seem to have been the prevailing colors some 500 to 600 years ago, not only in garments but in wood and iron hands and crafts alike. Wooden chests were painted in red and green, with red lead (minium) to their iron bands and locks. The interiors of churches were red, green and blue.

So I should say that minium paint on iron parts of arms mainly served as an anti-rust protective, but at the same time reflected the fashionable 'trends' of the respective period.


The attachments comprise 500 year-old pieces such as

- a haquebut with its stock painted red and green and with the Nuremberg coat-of-arms
- details from two 15h century cupboards
- and details from the interior of the Gothic cathedral in Brixen/South Tyrol

Try and enjoy them just for their beautiful colors and you will get the idea!

Matchlock

[Matchlock]

More examples of period artwork illustration of ca. 1430, Alamannic-Swabian, Ms Rh hist. 0033b, Swiss Central Library, Zürich.

Illustrated are tiller arquebuses with iron barrels, very close in shape to my gun, with reinforced breech section and not yet equiped with a hook (!) but fitted with what is recorded to be the earliest mechanical igniting device for a piece of tinder or coal, known to have been in use since at least the first years of the 15th c.
Please cf. similar illustrations posted above.

One barrel is shown being cleaned with a scourer.


I realize that in English this type of arquebus should actually be called a long gun or longarm; what is defined as a handgun would be called Faustfeuerwaffe in German.


Best,
Michael