Balkan gun with early turkish barell

[Philip]

Originally Posted by eftihis

Thanks Philipp! The question is when the first "tulip" ottoman barell was made? Was it inspired by the english one, or the opposite happened? BEcause if i read well the barell's inscription has a date that corresponds to "1517"! Here are some more similar ottman barells.

Re the date you observe, how confident are you that the inscriptions can reasonably be dated to the time of manufacture? I'm wondering what the context of the date might be, is there accompanying text that can give us something more to hang our hats on?

My gut impression is that the Ottomans, like virtually all the Eastern cultures, developed firearms in a derivative fashion, based on impetus and technology input from the West.

Europe made the transition away from the "handgonne" (basically a small cannon barrel on a wooden handle, fired by an external combustion source) when the first matchlock arquebuses appeared as early as the first decade of the 1400s, based on dated illustrated manuscripts (see Howard Blackmore, Guns and Rifles of the World (1965). These early firearms contained the basic elements of all portable firearms today: a barrel, a mechanical firing mechanism activated by a trigger, both mounted on a stock that permits aim and controlled discharge.

Do you have Dr Robert Elgood's Firearms of the Islamic World? On p 32, he notes from intensive research into archival material that it is reasonably certain that the Ottomans were exposed to the matchlock gun in encounters with Italian (probably Venetian) arquebusiers in the Hungarian service in the Balkans. This was, according to the texts he consulted, during the 1420s. A decade or so after the first RECORDED appearance in Europe (although this based on surviving documents mentioned in the previous paragraph, we don't know if it could have been a bit earlier).

Surviving Italian guns of the 1400s are few (a number are shown in Agostino Gaibi's Armi da Fuoco Italiane) along with illustrations from a codex from later in that century, and none of the barrels had bulbous or tulip shaped muzzles.

Looking at the subsequent development of Ottoman firearms (16th-17th cent.) one sees an evolution that appears to follow in lockstep certain technical and stylistic stages seen in Europe, especially Italy and the Germanic countries. For example:
1. Rifles: polygonal barrels with swamped (gently flaring muzzles with flat terminus), and rifling with an odd number of round-bottom grooves
2. Miquelet lock of "Spanish" type: earliest developed examples extant dating from 1620s Spain and Brescia (Italy) shortly thereafter, some of those having the long "bridge" between cock pivot screw and priming pan characteristic of all Ottoman, Balkan, and Persian derivations down to the 19th cent.
3. Certain buttstock shapes of north Italian origin appearing later in the Balkans.

Based on the general context of firearms development in the Ottoman lands, I tend to lean towards a Western origin of the bulbous muzzles under discussion, and lean towards the belief that England was the origin of this unique feature, based on Mr Godwin's assertion in his article that this form is strongly associated with the work of English artificers.

To which I would like to suggest -- if you would look at Moroccan guns all the way up to the dawn of the 20th cent., we see snaphaunce locks almost identical to Dutch and English originals, buttstock shapes echoing those of these regions, and in many cases a varying degree of bulbosity to the muzzle

Years ago, I had a nice Moroccan afedali silver-wire-inlaid snaphaunce gun with a very bulbous muzzle rivaling the ones posted on this thread in its proportions. Unfortunately, it got traded away without my taking picture of it and I'm kicking myself now!