[Stephen Renico]

I'm rereading The Religion, by Tim Willocks, about a German adventurer named Matthias Tannhauser at the Siege of Malta.

Twice the author mentions Turkish muskets:

p.221

[Romulus Stoica]

Well... I don't know about the turks but in medieval & renaissance romanian countries we have an unit of measure called palm ... and we were neighbors with the Otoman Empire and sometimes we were vasals of them, sometimes we were enemies.
The old romanian palm has about 24,6 cm in Walachia or 27,8 cm in Moldavia or approximative 1 foot.
1 palm = 10 fingers.
So a nine-palm musket would have been 2,2 m long and a seven palm musket would have been 1,7 m long. I don't think those are normal musket dimension ...
The facts are:
- There is a historical measuring unit called palm
- The dimensions calculated in palms are not realistic

Maybe the author is mistaking the measuring unit "palm" with the measuring unit "width of a palm". The second one equals half of a palm so 1 palm = 2 width of a palm. In this case a nine-palm musket would have ~ 1,2 m and a seven-palm musket would have ~ 0,97m. Those dimensions seems to be more appropriate ...

[Joel Minturn]

Wow, you have big palms in Romania

So doing a little looking around. Horses are measured in hands which is standardized at 4 inches. The palm as a unit of measure is slightly smaller ( considered to be the width of 4 fingers) and is about 3 inches.

So if they are using that as the base than a seven palm gun is between 21 to 28 inches (.53 to .71 meter) depending if he meant just the fingers or he really was talking about the hand length (and considering different hand sizes)

A 9 palm musket would then be 27-36 inches (.68 - .91 meter)

Which makes me wonder if he was just talking about the lenght of the barrel then.

unfortunately I couldn't find any German Anthropomorphic units (German equivalent to Palm, Hand etc.) So not sure if would have used the same ideas or if it would entirely different. Like the old Romanian palm for example

[Romulus Stoica]

@ Joel Minturn:

If you are considering the walachian palm (smaller one) :

1 palm = 10 fingers = 24,6 cm ... so 1 finger is 2,46 cm, roughly a little smaller than 1 inch.

The palms that you are talking about ( you haven't mentioned in which country this palm is used ) has 4 fingers and it's about 3 inches so it's pretty close to 4 walachian fingers that is a bit less than 4 inches. So, it seems that a palm is not so different from country to country. The walachian palm is roughly equal to both palms with all 10 fingers standing thumb by thumb and also I have mentioned that there is another measure, "width of a palm" or "palm width", equal to 5 fingers. It seems that the "palm" you are talking about is similar to walachian "palm width" if you include the fifth finger ...

So It seems that we can consider a medieval "generic" palm having roughly 4 to 5 inches...

[Joel Minturn]

Romulus-
Sure makes sense that a generic palm could be considered 3-5 inches. Depending on if the unit Palm was different from the unit Hand.


I was basing my information on the English system, were the palm unit is slightly smaller than the hand unit. but close enough that before standardization a large palm could be about a small hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_%28length%29 has a nice picture describing the differences.

[Stephen Renico]

Thanks for the answers, gentlemen.