Sulle pretese testimonianze documentarie italiane di armi da fuoco anteriori al 1326 (e su una spingarda perugina costruita nel 1320)

Abstract

With this contribution, the author intends first of all to demonstrate the groundlessness of the historiographical narratives, which would like to anticipate the evidence of the use of firearms in the Italian battlefields at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In reality, at least at the present state of knowledge, they cannot go back further than 1326, the year to which the oldest written and iconographic documentation on the subject that has been preserved dates back. However, on the sidelines of this discussion, and taking a cue from a testimony by Pellini who, regarding the term spingarda reported by a Perugian source of 1320, misunderstands its meaning, considering it referring to a firearm, while in reality it was a a neural ballistic launching machine, a digression was deemed necessary and appropriate to make known new documents, such as to enrich the knowledge on the characters and on the diffusion of such a war device, widely present in the European battlefields up to the 15th century.