Introduction

Abstract

In 1601, an artisan in Nördlingen named Hans Schwarz was arrested by the local council because of a weapons violation. The problem was not that Schwarz had kept or used an illicit weapon; rather, his crime was that he did not own a sword. Schwarz was only one of a number of local householders arrested in that year for failing to keep sufficient stores of arms and armor in their homes. The men were given 14 days to “honorably arm themselves.”¹ In other towns, presentation of proper arms was a requirement for marriage.² Throughout Germany during the early modern period, men who failed to keep and bear arms faced fines, imprisonment, banishment, and loss of citizenship. No wonder, then, that the Italian humanist and diplomat Enea Silvio de Piccolomini wrote of his German hosts in 1444 that “every burgher in the guilds has an armory in his house … the skill of the citizens in the use of weapons is extraordinary.”³ At the same time, local authorities also regularly curtailed the right of certain men to wear their swords for a great variety of reasons. In 1543, a military officer in Blaubeuren lost his sword for life for attacking an opponent who had already fallen to the ground; in the same year, a baker in Augsburg was disarmed for a year because he stabbed a sword into a door; and in 1551, a peasant in the village of Haberschlacht was condemned to carrying no weapons other than a bread knife with a broken tip as punishment for oath-breaking.⁴ Other reasons for banning men from bearing arms included not only political insubordination but also financial irresponsibility, adultery, theft, idleness and wife-beating. Clearly, the relationship of men to their weapons in early modern Germany was symbolic of something more complicated than mere self-defense.