studied. He was not to change his mark once it was registered, he was prohibited from combining together pieces of Milanese and other makes, and was obliged to declare whether the goods he sold were Milanese or Brescian. The formidable nature of the Brescian competition at that epoch is clear from all this. Similar statutes of the Universities of the Sword makers and the Lance makers of about the same date are cited by Casati.
In the XVIth century the fabrication of swords increased to an immense extent owing to a very great change in fashion and custom which took place about the end of its first quarter. Before that time, with few exceptions, when it was an emblem of state or authority, the sword was exclusively a weapon of war, and was not worn with everyday civil dress. If a man had a right, or needed to be armed, he carried a dagger. But after about 1525[1] the sword became a portion of the everyday costume of every gentleman, or person professing to be one, and, in consequence, the demand for this weapon became enormous. It would be an interesting study indeed to examine into all the changes brought about by this new custom in the manners, intercourse, and even the language and literature of the time, with its attendant rage for duels, its Italian fencing masters, and its new codes of honour.
Milan, of course, produced and exported blades for hafted weapons and swords and daggers of excellent quality. In 1520 Henry VIII purchased one thousand "Myllen" swords for a tourney at 4s. each.[2] Cicogna, writing about 1583, says that in his day the workshops of the swordsmiths were situated in the Castle of Milan,[3] and the Piccininos, father and son, both use a castle as the mark for their blades. That there was a distinct fashion in Milanese sword hilts is shown by a payment to Guillaume de Lesac in 1607,[4] "pour une éspée ayant la garde à la milanoise." Cicogna also mentions some famous swordsmiths of Brescia, sons of an armourer and bladesmith, whom we learn from another source had made a very beautiful suit of armour for Charles V, a fine estoc for Francis I, and who practised "a singular and unique method of tempering steel."[5] Brescia soon became a very important centre of manufacture, especially for firearms, and, in the XVIIth century, seems to have held in Italy the supremacy that had belonged to Milan in the previous one, so much so, that when the Republic of Venice in 1668 wished to present a suit of armour to Louis XIV, it was not a Milanese but a Brescian artist who was commissioned to make it. It is well known how Mr. John Evelyn in 1646 purchased a fine carbine of old Lazarino Cominazzo at Brescia, and he says that the city consisted mostly of artists, every shop abounding in
- ↑ A portrait by Moretto of Brescia, dated 1526, in the National Gallery shows a gentleman in civil dress wearing a sword (No. 1025).
- ↑ Viscount Dillon in Archaeologia, vol. li, p. 245.
- ↑ Cicogna, Trattato Militaire, Venezia, 1583.
- ↑ Comptes royales de P. Leroux (V. Gay, p. 648).
- ↑ Vago e curioso ristretto dell' historia Bresciana del M. R. P. Maestro Leonardo Cozzando (Brescia, 1694).
