content_output-074_5 (Q6578)

Sigismund, who led 500 men armed with “rest-guns,” in his Roman campaign in 1430, when they created a great sensation, although similar guns had been made at Padua as early as 1386. Hand-guns figured conspicuously in the Hussite wars, and at the siege of Lucca by the Florentines in 1431. All these early hand-guns were, however, roughly constructed, for their accuracy in hitting was as small as the trouble of loading was great, and their imperfections as numerous as those of the gunpowder with which they were fired, which was veritably powder, resembling dust—powder not being granulated till the sixteenth century.