Firearms from the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein (Paperback)

The princely collection of Liechtenstein includes one of the last great armories in Central Europe to survive in the possession of the original family. The armory comprises plate armor and edged weapons, firearms and artillery, but it is the hand firearms (guns and pistols) that are of greatest historical and artistic interest. The firearms collection is one of the largest extant, comprising more than one thousand examples ranging in date from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century and coming from every corner of Europe: France, the Netherlands, Spain, England, Denmark, Italy, and the territories of Central Europe that constituted the Holy Roman Empire. More than three hundred firearms by Viennese makers are still present in the collection, as is an important group of arms made by the otherwise little-known gunmakers active in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. There is also a small group of oriental guns that are probably booty from the Austro-Turkish wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The international character of the collection can be accounted for, on one hand, by an active trade in firearms and, on the other hand, by the existence of the princes' interest in weapons of different origins and mechanical types. Though the Liechtenstein armory contains fewer examples of richly decorated arms than are found in the great dynastic collections in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Copenhagen, and Stockholm-all now state-owned public museums-it presents a more accurate picture of the firearms collections assembled by the high nobility in Central Europe in the age of the Baroque. [This book was originally published in 1985 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]