Portuguese handheld firearms in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

Handheld firearms have been little studied in the military history of the Portuguese in Asia. Historians have centered on naval and siege warfare, in which cannons feature extensively. The way artillery was used in ships and sieges has been depicted as an important innovation of European origin, which gave the Portuguese a decisive advantage over their Asian opponents. Yet, this approach has confined harquebuses and muskets to a secondary role. We reconsider this historiographical imbalance using Jeremy Black’s idea that fitness-for-purpose is the best standard to measure military effectiveness. We argue that even if handheld firearms were not used by the Portuguese in a particularly “innovative” way, they were important and effective at the time.