Lorenzo de’ Medici’s 1492 inventory listed five firearms; his descendant’s storerooms held 91 by 1539
Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ de’ Medici owned five portable firearms, listed in his 1492 postmortem inventory. Within half a century, by the early months of 1539, his descendant Duke Cosimo de’ Medici had 91 firearms in his Florentine storerooms. The 1506 provision establishing the Florentine militia held that ‘little hope’ could be placed in ‘foreign and hired arms’. It set up a magistracy with authority to enlist men from Florentine territory, at least 10,000 of them. One in 10 of those men were to be equipped with firearms, and 500 handguns, schioppetti, were to be kept in the Palazzo della Signoria along with money earmarked for the schioppetti.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Inventories are wonderful because they count things people bothered to keep, not things they boasted about. Five portable firearms in a Medici inventory is a household fact; 91 in a descendant’s storerooms is still a household fact, just a louder one. The numbers are striking without being a national survey.
Household facts can still be institutional signals. The militia provision put one in 10 of at least 10,000 enlisted men under firearms and stockpiled 500 handguns at the city hall. That is a public commitment to arming a population, not merely a collector’s taste.