Item ref: 5174
Private collection, United Kingdom
This pistol will have been made expressly for Archduke Matthais of Austria, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II and brother of his successor, the Emperor Rudolf II. The pommel of the stock is inset with a roundel engraved with the personal quartered arms of the Archduke Matthias: on the in-escutcheon the Bindenschild of Austria impaling Burgundy ancient, together with additional quartering for the period 1608-1612, during which he was also Habsburg ruler of the Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia.
Under Rudolf II the Habsburg court was moved from Vienna to Prague; this pistol was likely taken into the imperial armouries there and eventually into the court armouries in Vienna.
Archduke Matthias succeeded his brother as Holy Roman Emperor on 13th June 1612. At the point of his succession his coat-of-arms changed, to involve the additional quarterings of arms of the wider territories of the empire. Matthias reigned as Holy Roman Emperor until his death in Vienna on 20th March 1619.
With these preceding dates of Matthias’s archduchy in mind, the pistol is in the first instance unusual in being stylistically anachronistic, that is when viewed against the rapid advancements and changing fashions in German gunmaking within the early 17th century. The construction of the lock and the configuration of the pistol butt and its pommel are all quite rooted in the period circa 1575-80. The pistol butt and its distinctively shaped pommel are in fact related to the stocks of a significant series of both belt and holster pistols predominantly with Augsburg barrels, removed from the historic Geneva city arsenal and now in the Museum of Art and History, Geneva.
Among the Geneva series are several pistols with pommels which are integral to the stocks, a notably unusual feature shared by the present pistol (for example, inv. A 174, A 41, A 49, A 48).
In support of the historical extended use of the earlier type of lock, a known strong precedent exists in another partly anachronistic German wheellock firearm, dated 1605.
In the example of this rifle (bearing the owner’s arms of von Hatstein zu Weilbach), the lock and its component parts are of the same 16th century type existing on the pistol under discussion. Each include the salient early feature of a domed iron wheel-cover; the lock is undoubtedly original to the rifle (The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, acc. 2240-1855).
The stock of the present pistol is lavishly decorated over its length with white staghorn inlay, making an attractive contrast with the warm tones of the fruitwood. The inlaid patterns are noticeably more in keeping with an early 17th century origin. In this respect the inlay differs considerably from the mass of ballflower scrollwork and often coarsely drawn larger engraved plaques which form the basis of many German inlaid stocks in the latter decades of the 16th century.
In the present instance the horn inlay is dominated by neat rows of small engraved expanded flowerheads alternating with leaf clusters, strung on tightly symmetrical arabesque arrangements of very slender tendrils, on a ground of pellets again sown in symmetry, and all ordered within plain narrow segmental lines. Positioned within this plan are larger finely engraved plaques inspired by published designs for Rollwerk and grotesques conventional to the period. These comprise three plaques forming a sophisticated Rollwek design about the barrel tang, two addorsed pairs of monsters with scrolling bodies opposite the lock, and corresponding single monsters flanking the ramrod aperture.
The most striking technical feature of this pistol is a concealed extension of the butt running from behind the barrel tang, flush-fitted into its spine and the pommel and released by a small spring catch above the pommel roundel.
The left side of the extension is fitted with a spring-loaded wooden fillet preventing its accidental closure when the extension is raised. The extension and fillet when deployed form a means of holding the butt to the cheek, a device probably intended to improve aim when shooting from the saddle. In view of the possibly unique nature of the invention it would seem to have attracted little popularity.