Bee Bombs and Other Artillery Weapons from a 17th Century Weapons Catalogue

The ‘Kunst und Artillerie Buch’ is a 1622 manuscript attributed to Hans Georg Schirvatt, and possibly produced in Prague. It’s illustrated by contraptions deigned to kill people in war, often in the most bizarre and painful ways. Other than muskets and hand-to-hand combat, weapons available to armouries in the 17th Century included grenades filled with shrapnel, barbed bombs and bee bombs, that when detonated release swarms of what one imagines to be angry bees. It was the kind of weaponry American police in the 19th Century could only dream of using. Some of these may have been use in Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648).