Talk:Miquelet lock

History
''Please leave the references as they are.. None of the historians have ever mentioned them!! ca:usuari:Roger_Liart found them before leaving ca.wiki due to the abuse of authority of the administrators.''.--Mcapdevila (talk) 18:53, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

After the disastrous campaign of Algiers (1541) where "wind and rain" prevented firing his arquebuses, firstly by blowing away the gunpowder -on both wheellock and matchlock-(when opening the pan cover to shoot), or secondly, by wetting matches and gunpowder (Robertson 1857:382), Charles V has expressed to his gunmakers the urgent need to devise an ignition mechanism less prone to be rendered useless in bad weather. In less than three decades (documented, but very probably less), a lock did appear that is known today as the Miquelet Lock.

The poet/novelist Ginés Pérez de Hita, in his historical novel Civil Wars of Granada, alludes to "su escopeta de rastrillo" being in common use in Xativa and Valencia prior to 1571 and during the Alpujarras Rebellion that ended in 1571.

From about 1580 on, estate auctions became continuous with listings for arcabuces de rastrillo and escopeta de rastrillo.Rastrillar, to comb or rake, perfectly describes the action of a flint down a battery (frizzen) face. Some listings used the termllaves de chispa (meaning spark locks, applied to all manner of flintlocks, miquelets included). Contemporaries did not use the term miquelet to describe any type of lock or firearm. (Lavin 1965:158-159)

Cervantes says in the "Don Quixot" (in 1604) that in Catalonia their name was pedreñal, to the extreme that pedreñal lock (1585) means miquelet lock, the long cannon wheel lock pistols they were not called pedreñals.