I wanted to promote a really good Hungarian channel (I'm a patreon supporter) that does great, very detailed research into a variety of firearms topics, in particular historical European firearm history. Its run by Balázs Németh, and he just published a video on if a arquebus could penetrate 16th century armor.
If you had followed on Patreon, he actually went to the trouble of getting a piece of historical armor, recreating it authentically (in terms or carbon/iron/hardness etc) and then recreating historically accurate powder (Critically he has several varieties of black powder, representing basically excellent quality to mundane/munition grade) and then testing it at various ranges. The armor here is munition grade, not hardened proof armor, which honestly is fairly rare. Even the bullet is recreated, I was a bit surprised to find that pure lead apparently worked a bit better then a mostly lead bullet with a bit of tin.
If you ever watch Tods Workshops, he is a admirer of his work as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIC3MMw8T6I
TLDR, it depends, high grade powder at close range and near right angles will not only penetrate the armor but also the backing layers to a potentially lethal depth but varying any of these rules will change the results, lower grade powder, modest offsets of angle, thicker or harder armor, etc will result in the armor wining.
AI summary here, (I've watched the video, this is a fair summary.)
That video is “Did the early 16th century arquebus penetrate armour?” (29 Aug 2026), the wrap-up of Balázs Németh’s Mohács 1526 experimental series. It tests a reconstructed early-16th-century tinder-lock arquebus (~12 mm / ~11.3 mm ball from battlefield finds) against a reconstructed shoulder plate based on a pauldron from the Sátorhely mass graves, plus period-style under-layers.
Setup (as presented in the film)
Charge: powder mass equal to the bullet (period recipes, not modern sporting powder).
Plate: ~1.6 mm, very soft bloomery-style iron matching the find (not hardened “proof” armour).
Stack behind it: leather, mail, gambeson, shirt, pigskin, then ballistic gelatin.
Distances simulated by impact velocity: roughly 50 m vs 80 m.
What happened
Worst period powder at an ~80 m equivalent (~283 m/s): the ball almost punched the plate but was stopped. The armour system held; he treats that as a survivable hit on the day of battle.
Best period powder (Spanish 1534-type mix) at the same ~80 m equivalent (~313 m/s): the ball went through plate, mail, gambeson, shirt, and skin, and into the gelatin about 20 cm. That is framed as a potentially lethal torso hit.
At ~50 m, even the weaker powder was judged able to defeat that whole stack and produce a lethal wound. With the better powder he stretches a lethal effect out to about 80–90 m.
After the plate fails, mail + padding quality still changes wound depth: one test only went a few centimetres (serious wound / later infection, not instant kill); the full stack with the stronger load went much deeper.
His bottom line
A common Mohács-era small-calibre arquebus was not magic against all armour, but against this munition-grade plate and clothing it could kill at typical infantry ranges (especially inside 50 m, and with good powder out toward 80 m). Better, thicker, or proofed armour would change the picture—which matches period talk of both “no armour can stand it” and surviving proof dents. Earlier alloy tests in the series also suggested pure lead often penetrated stacked thin plate better than the harder lead–tin battlefield alloys.
View count on that upload is on the order of ~300k. Tod’s Workshop left a complimentary comment on the work.