Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) famously argued that gunpowder was one of the inventions which, though ‘unknown to the ancients’, had most transformed the ‘whole face and state of things throughout the world’. Just as the printing press had reimagined the book and the magnetic compass had opened up vast new horizons for exploration, he noted in the Novum Organum, so gunpowder had irrevocably changed the face of war.

Bacon was only half right. According to the historian Catherine Fletcher, it wasn’t gunpowder per se that changed warfare, so much as the firearms that used it. Nor, indeed, was their influence limited to warfare. In early modern Italy, as Fletcher endeavours to show, they revolutionised almost every area of life, from politics and economics to court culture and everyday social relations.  

Firearms were admittedly rather slow to reach Italy. First invented in China sometime in the early 12th century, they were most likely brought to Europe by the Mongols about a hundred years later. It took them a similar length of time to make it to Europe. Not until 1326 did