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This is ironic given that the building used to be an arsenal, a storehouse for the cannons, gunpowder and arquebuses that ensured Portuguese explorers arrived in the new world with a bang.

FOR all the centuries of refinement that separate a modern rifle from a Renaissance arquebus, the basic idea has not changed.

Cervantes was shot three times by a gun known as an arquebus at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, leaving him with no use in his left hand.

It is not impossible that the arquebus- and sword-wielding soldiers in Rembrandt’s celebrated “The Night Watch” were protecting tulip bulbs from 17th-century tree rodents.

The front row, indeed, was well furnished with arquebuses, while pistols, swords, daggers, and pikes gleamed in abundance behind.