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You do realize Imperial City in the Classical era of Athens, Sparta or Rome and “Imperial City” in the medieval period mean two completely different things, right?
Imperial city is a modern technical term for cities which go down the path that Babylon and Athens and Carthage and Rome went down of conquering their neighbours. Many cities in medieval Italy did this on a small scale (Florence and Sienna and
PisaPrato).Venice’s empire in Crete, Cyprus, and at one point most of the Peloponnese (not to mention the terrafirma and Dalmatia) was not just a snack! I think they got into a big fight with Maximillian in the Alps.
Most towns with an artisan or partially artisan government had pretty liberal weapon laws for citizens. Again, this is because the citizens made up the bulk of the town watch and the militia.
That does not follow at all. A very common solution, in the country I was born in and others, is requiring people to own weapons and keep them at home but sharply restricting how and where they can be carried. People usually pass these laws themselves because they are tired of armed people making trouble.
The talk had some great details I had not heard before, but it made some broad claims about weapons in daily life and then supported them with evidence which was overwhelmingly from the 16th century. Maybe it was delivered for someone like the Meyer Freifechter folks who are focused on the 16th century, but the sixteenth century is not medieval! Everyone agrees that swords and weapons are much more visible in everyday urban life in 16th century Europe than 14th century Europe, so we can’t just extrapolate back from the 16th century any more than we can extrapolate forwards from those early medieval law codes about every free man having to carry their spear and shield to the assembly.
Towns like Zurich or Hamburg were quite a bit more republican in their outlook and more democratic in their system of management. Not to say they had Universal Suffrage or anything, but the rulers ruled at the sufferance of the governed and were routinely overthrown.
And the same in Thucydides’ Athens and Cicero’s Rome: they had elections every year, and both Thucydides and Cicero were exiled because they got elected to an office and messed up (Thucydides was away from his post when the Spartans attacked, Cicero executed Roman citizens without a trial). Both were imperial cities like Venice, because that kind of city is the one which leaves us the best evidence. Its really only in the last thousand years that we know much about life in the kind of town where people minded their business and did not dream of taking over the next town.
It looks like if I ever have time I should look at this other Tlusty book. Matt Easton does not really answer email and I don’t know if he is willing to dig up the sources from England which he found all those years ago. But even in England, France, and northern Italy, the question about when and how carrying swords becomes common is still open.
Yes, and it was the city which over and over bans the carrying of arms. When people live scattered across the land and there are few recognized authorities, its often customary for men to carry arms, partially because they usually have weapons in reach for hunting or field work anyways, and partially to assert their claim to be free men who can enforce their rights in an uncertain world. These societies usually present the keeping of arms in individualistic terms, like honour, or as a way to enforce hierarchies within society: rich over poor, men over women, free over unfree, and community members over resident foreigners.
When large numbers of people start living together in close quarters and seeing many strangers come and go, they usually notice that carrying arms leads to many woundings, robberies, and bullyings and start to restrict it and push other means of settling disputes. These are the societies which usually present the keeping of arms in civic terms: the community against its neighbours, against wannabe one-man rulers, or against kings. That is the logic behind the Athenian customs which Thucydides describes and the Roman customs which Cicero, the canonical gospels, and Petronius take for granted.
It sounds like in the 16th century some of the German towns had a hybrid of the individualistic and the civic approaches that depended on special customs around violence.
These kinds of discussions can be difficult because everyone has a view based on the sources they have read which come from different periods and different parts of Europe. Here are some sources from the period I am interested which ends around 1410.
- You can find a selection of militia laws in this Armour Archive thread on Aketons, Pourpoints, and Gambesons There are also some from Scandinavia around the 12th and 13th century which require people of a certain status and property to own certain weapons or pay a fine. Acta Periodica Duellatorum has a 14th century list of who had what from Germany or Austria, a list from Troyes in 1474 in Fasciculi Archaeologiae Historicae 5 came up on MyArmoury
- The London Coroner’s Rolls from 1300 to 1340 are available in a book from 1913 or a complicated website, the London Medieval Murder Map.
- Two Prague city laws from 1327 and 1331. On 8 September 1327 (law no. 19), the judges and burgers of the city of Prague decreed that no one present or living in the city of Prague shall carry sword or stabbing knife in the city of Prague unless they have at least ten marks of property. In 1331, they expanded this: “Sword and stabbing knife and all forbidden weapons and harness, as they are generally called, shall be forbidden to the poor and rich, the lords and country people, the burgers and to all in general within the city, so that no one from now on shall carry them.” (law number 37)
- A number of English royal or parliamentary decrees from around 1330 against bringing swords, daggers, axes, bows and arrows, aketons, steel caps, etc. to Westminister to disturb peace and the holding of parliament (probably on British History Online, I can’t find them in the time available)
- The Luttrell Psalter, the Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Sienna, and the Tacuinum Sanitatis MSS
- English civic laws, from Matt Easton:
Which was the topic of my lectures at both SWASH and Dijon. People were not allowed to walk around in the streets with swords in any English city, unless they were a knight, the squire of the knight, an alderman or one of the Mayor’s other officials, or a traveller arriving or leaving the city. However, ownership of swords was never mentioned in law, because everyone owned swords and were expected to for the defence of the realm (and longbows, of course). … Inn keepers were required by law (between the 13th and mid-15th centuries) to keep safehold of travellers’ weapons during their stay in the city. That law was repeated several times during the 14-15thC. Outiside of the cities anybody could carry whatever weapon they wanted.
One of the reasons that fencing and jousting was conducted at Smithfields was that it was on the edge of the City boundary, so outside the law.
By the 16thC sword carrying by anybody and everybody seems to have been socially acceptable in cities, and the old laws were ignored.
He is not great at citing things, but in one thread he cites Calendar of letter-books of the city of London: H: 1375-1399 (1907) Folio lxiii
Ordinances for safeguarding the City, to the effect (inter alia) that the gates of the City be fortified with portcullises and chained, and have “barbykanes” in front; that the quays between the.
Folio lxiii b.Tower and London Bridge be bretasched (bretassez), and the keys of the City gates kept by two persons of the neighbourhood; that the Aldermen keep the names of hostelers in their Wards, and cause each inhabitant to swear that he will be ready with his harness (hernoys) to maintain the peace, if affray arise; that all hostelers and those dwelling with them be taxed according to their estate, except servants and apprentices, at the discretion of the Aldermen; that special guard be kept at the gates in view of the forthcoming expedition; that no one carry any arms except a baselard by day, but a Knight to have his sword borne after him, his page having a baselard, but not a dagger; that each Alderman put his Ward into array under his pennon, bearing his arms in relief, and lead his men whithersoever commanded for the defence of the City
This was passed when Edward III was dying and there was fear of a French raid or invasion, I’d love to see what other sources he found but he’s more interested in Victorian stuff these days.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales where anyone of substance carries a knife in a fancy sheath but only a few travellers carry swords and bucklers and the ?miller? who carries too many big knives is mocked
- “Prenegard, prenegard, Thus bere I myn baselard” which makes fun of someone who gets a fancy knife in a fancy sheath and starts parading around with it and causing trouble https://archive.org/details/songscarolsfromm00wrigrich/page/84/mode/2up
I am not as knowledgeable about the late medieval and early modern Germanies as you are, and a lot of the things we ‘know’ about medieval Europe are true for England or France but not Florence or Bohemia (or true in one century but not another). But what I see in those laws from Prague and 14th century German and Austrian art is not so unfamiliar.
So what evidence from the 14th and 15th centuries do you have? There is all kinds of evidence that the wearing of swords and big knives was very common and respectable in most parts of 16th century Europe, not so much in the 14th.
Citing a painting from 1530 does not help us understand where this peculiar custom in many parts of 16th century Europe came from.
Could you give sources from before the 16th century? The only types of laws I have read in the 14th century are ones requiring free men to have arms for the militia and bring them to practices or musters, and ones restricting the carrying of arms within city limits or near parliament. That supports what we see in the art and the 14th century English coroner’s reports where a typical killing is a stabbing with a knife or a bludgeoning: working people who want to look tough in 14th century art or poetry wear a dagger, knife, or basilard. Sydney Anglo made some noises about how this might not be the whole story in Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, but he did not have much evidence to cite.
As I said in the other thread, there is a big difference between having arms and carrying arms, because the social implications are very different.
Actually, Thucydides (1.5ff) has a really nice digression on how there are some places where men have to carry their weapons everywhere they go like Athenians did in the olden days and non-Greeks do in his day. Athenian aristocrats were very strong believers in their right to self-help by force and to keep arms and serve in the army, but this one thought that carrying arms in everyday life was a sign of primitive life and a world where everyone robbed their neighbours on land or on sea.
“Typical” might be a bit strong but this thinking – arms strengthen the community against external threats, but lead to woundings and killings within the community, so create laws to encourage the civic bearing of arms and discourage the private – comes up again and again and again from Britain to Iran. So its at least one very common way of thinking about the problem from antiquity into the present, and one that many English-speaking people today are not familiar with. (just discovered the edit button- ed.)
Here is Ariella Elema’s update to the potted history of the duel in Italy 1350-1550 which Tom Leoni was giving back in the day.
If I wanted to fit the policy of a typical pre-1917 Eurasian state on weapons into a tweet, I would say “all free full citizens have to keep as many weapons as the state can make them in their homes, and carry as few weapons as the state can make them in public.” (That is a massive oversimplification, but its close enough often enough to get people thinking).
So there was a big difference between having arms and carrying arms. From the Roman Republic to 19th century North America, we tend to see laws requiring citizens to own arms, and banning anyone from carrying weapons, especially swords and knives, within city limits.
I have been out of the loop for a long time, but apparently Ariella Elema is leaning towards the idea that as book-educated lawyers in Italy France and England turned against duels and trial by battle, men started to appeal to the right of soldiers to settle their disagreements for themselves or under the supervision of a senior soldier. One reason fencing training in northern Italy had to be versatile was that the person who chose the weapons could chose any weapons customary amongst soldiers. So if there was a tradition in the HRE north of the Alps of claiming the right to commit violence in defense of the honour of a citizen / landowner, that would be a different world.
I had time to listen to the first half of the IGX Higgins Armoury Lecture 2013 ”The Sword in Daily Life.” Lots of interesting details, I never got around to reading “The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany.”
The thing I always wished I understood was how we got from the situation in the 14th century, where people rarely carry much more than a dagger or a ballstaff except when they are hunting and town laws are focused on limiting the bearing of arms in town, to the situation in the 16th century that people like William Harrison describe where anyone with any standing wearing at least a dagger and often a sword and buckler, sword and rotella, or a rapier when they are in public. I don’t see much sign of it arising in the 15th c., but it must come from somewhere.
Actually, I think ep. 131 of the Ask Historians podcast might be Hans’ cup of tea? It is by Adam Franti on the US militia in the War of 1812 https://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-133-we-have-met-the-enemy-and-they-are-us-the-militia-and-the-war-of-181
I hope James Arlen Gillaspie has time to explore his ideas about cruciform swords, theology about the sword as a cross, and why so many single-edged blades in the later middle ages have dots or crescents in the blade near the tip. When I was in Graz, I saw that they were still doing that on staff weapons in the 16th and early 17th c.!
After a quick search I have “Weapons of the Ancient World Vol. 1” which I read back in 2010 or so, I don’t remember a second volume or see a PDF.
There are also Doug Cole’s spreadsheets for calculating the properties of various bows and crossbows using his engineering degrees to simplify the model in a Dutch PhD thesis.
What if the total of the modifiers is negative?
I just know John Michael Greer as someone who translated a 17th century fencing manual I have never read (but yay him! every translation is important!) Apparently he’s better known in different geeky communities. He does not have a RationalWiki page, so his sites The Archdruid Report and Ecosophia give the idea (but I’m told that he sees his philosophical writing as ritual Magick to make something which is not yet true come into existence). Chris Scott Thompson also publishes magickal tomes next to books on 18th century fencing. I am definitely not judging, I just did not realize that so many of the early historical fencers were nerdy about this!
