I've read bits and pieces of this thread a number of times and I thought I might revive the thread with some new questions.

What do we make of the range of Byzantine and Turkic bows during the Crusades considering Anna Comnena's statement?

Quote:

This cross-bow is a bow of the barbarians quite unknown to the Greeks; and it is not stretched by the right hand pulling the string whilst the left pulls the bow in a contrary direction, but he who stretches this warlike and very far-shooting weapon must lie, one might say, almost on his back and apply both feet strongly against the semi-circle of the bow and with his two hands pull the string with all his might in the contrary direction. In the middle of the string is a socket, a cylindrical kind of cup fitted to the string itself, and about as long as an arrow of considerable size which reaches from the string to the very middle of the bow; and through this arrows of many sorts are shot out. [256] The arrows used with this bow are very short in length, but very thick, fitted in front with a very heavy iron tip. And in discharging them the string shoots them out with enormous violence and force, and whatever these darts chance to hit, they do not fall back, but they pierce through a shield, then cut through a heavy iron corselet and wing their way through and out at the other side. So violent and ineluctable is the discharge of arrows of this kind. Such an arrow has been known to pierce a bronze statue, and if it hits the wall of a very large town, the point of the arrow either protrudes on the inner side or it buries itself in the middle of the wall and is lost. Such then is this monster of a crossbow, and verily a devilish invention. And the wretched man who is struck by it, dies without feeling anything, not even feeling the blow, however strong it be.

Her other comments aside I am mostly struck by her calling it a very far shooting weapon. They were wooden crossbows and spanned by hand. I believe Tod reckoned a trained person could draw up to 300 lbs that way which others have reckoned is about as high as you can go with a reasonably sized wooden prod.

In a recent book Mike Loades mentions a test he conducted with a 300 lbs steel prod crossbow

Quote:

We wanted to compare the deceleration of a longbow arrow from a 150lb bow with that of a bolt from a steel-lathed 300lb crossbow, measured with Doppler radar (see Loades 2013: 66). The radar malfunctioned on the day and the results were not conclusive, but the following was observable. The longbow arrow, a heavy livery arrow, began to decelerate early in its flight but continued to fly for around 200 yards. By comparison the crossbow bolt lost very little initial velocity, having a higher-energy launch, but once it started to decelerate, after approximately 60 yards, it did so rapidly, losing any military effectiveness despite continuing to travel another 30 yards or so.

If this roughly 300 lbs wooden prod crossbow Anna saw had a military effective range of around 50 to 60 yards the bows the Byzantines and their enemies the Turks used must not have been able to effectively shoot much further and possible even less. Perhaps a bow shooting at a long range on a parabolic trajectory was not counted as effective shooting and only close range horizontal/point blank shooting was considered here, in which case the statement about the crossbows long point blank range might be true.

The 200 yards livery arrow shot is also worth remarking on. Christine de Pizan mentions English archers being able to hit a barge at 600 feet (which if they were akin to the later Royal Pied would be close to 212 yards) while a 16th century Englishman also mentions a livery bow and arrow managing 200 yards.

Dominic Mancini wrote in 1485 that the bows used by the English had a range of no less than our [Italian] arbelests, but this also makes me scratch my head. Were these crossbows he mentioned the belt and claw or belt and pulley spanned crossbows which show up in Italian art or much heavier cranequin or windlass crossbows? Besides would these be effective at 200 yards or was Mancini referring to close range point blank shooting?

The various accounts on the battle of Crecy in 1346 are also somewhat confused. Now I don't know if the crossbowmen present there had windlass crossbows or belt and pulley spanned ones but the latter seems likely to me. Froissart and another chronicle have the crossbowmen fire of the first shot/volley at the archers opposite them before the archers advanced a pace and shot back. Now Geoffroy le Baker mentions the quarrels of the Genoese falling short in this battle but at the battle of Poitiers he also has the crossbowmen firing the first volley. If these were belt and pulley spanned composite crossbows did they shoot at the English at around 200 yards or did they engage them at 50-80 yards?

The only somewhat contemporary account I know which is absolutely clear on this is that of Pero Nino who drew a very strong ballestas a cinto and also brought along many other strong crossbowmen who bend strong bows from the belt.

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Clearly the archers who attacked the men equipped with belt spanned crossbows did so at a range where the crossbowmen could hit them, effectively enough for them to bring improvised shields, let down quite the arrow storm upon them but still waited for these crossbowmen to empty their quiver.

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Trying to make sense of all this I can only really come up with three explanations

1: Mike Loades completely messed up his test, crossbows could be fired on a parabolic trajectory just as effective and just as far as arrows shot from bows

2: The Belt spanned crossbows used by Pero Nino and whatever bows used by the crossbowmen at Crecy and Poitiers were much more powerful than the bows used during the early part of the Crusades and had a much longer effective distance.

3: English archers could lob arrows up to 200 yards but chose to engage crossbow men at 50-70 yards distance anyways because that was were they were most effective.


The latter makes the most sense to me. Close to zero elevation, horizontal, point blank range shooting was the measure of effective range and crossbows, as attested or implied by Anna and Dominic nearly four centuries apart were better at that than most bows. Heavy warbows shooting clothyard shafts being a special case in that their heavy arrows could match crossbows when it came to point blank shooting.

I hope someone else will be able to give accounts that back up or discredit this suggestion.

Could it be that we are looking merely at bolts for handheld crossbows and rampart/great crossbows? The latter certainly require much more substantial bolts easily twice the weight of others and hence could be quite a bit more expensive and required in lower numbers because there were fewer of them.

Mike Loades refers to one where a two foot crossbow was spanned with a windlass and there's a single reference to a three foot crossbow which I suppose the whole one or two foot thing is not necessarily related to the loading method but rather some measure of strength or prod width. At any rate do we know if people still spanned sitting down and drawing back with two feet in the 13th and 14th century?

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This is the closest I've found to a replica of the Berkhamsted Bow (it's ~8cm longer and 3mm thinner), and it provides what I think is the closest approximation of early crossbows. The results in that thread can be compared with these tests, which suggest a similar range with about 50lbs less draw weight and the possibility of a longer range. More importantly, the relatively long point blank range (~70m with a 50g bolt) and 240m+ range contradicts Loades' tests with steel prod bows and puts the range of the crossbow with both light and heavy bolts on par with 15th-16th century bows and light and heavy war arrows.

Whether the large wooden prod style of crossbow was still drawn with the feet or with a hook and belt after the 11th century is pretty much impossible to answer without finding a manuscript miniature or other artwork, but by the mid-13th century hooks seem to be the only method of spanning shown, if any method is shown at all. It's not impossible that the lack of a belt and hook means that some of the crossbows meant the audience would assume they were foot drawn, but even large wooden prod bows seem to have been drawn by the belt and hook method, so the artist might merely have though the detail was irrelevant and omitted it.

With regards to Crecy, the crossbows were almost certainly belt spanned. The interesting thing with the Geonese is that the earliest mention of the Genoese being outranged by the English is Geoffrey Baker. Prior to this the Genoese are said to have "demonstrated feats of arms" (Chronicle of the Este Family), been cut down by the disordered men-at-arms after they began to shoot (Chronicles of Artois and Saint-Omer), failed to make an impression on the English (the Rhyming Chronicle), had their efforts defeated by the protection offered by the wagenburg (Villani), were cruelly wounded (Pistoian History), were all killed in the first attack (Jean of Winterthur), were driven to flight because they lacked armour and shields (Gilles le Muisit), were put to flight by cannons (Grand Chronicles), were put to flight by an English counter-attack (William of Dene) and were "dealt many a bow" (Laurence Minot). Only then do we come to Baker's story, and the roughly contemporary Anonymous of Rome tells it yet another way, with the crossbowmen unable to draw their crossbows due to the thick mud making it impossible to get a firm foot in the stirrup (a more plausible version of the "rain made the crossbow strings too tight" story that started around this time).

Baker may well have had access to a now lost source - as well as oral histories - that described the English outranging the Genoese, but it's also possible (as Andrew Ayton has argued) that he wasn't overly well informed about the battle of Crecy (as opposed to the campaign) and was extrapolating the reduced range from the stories of Genoese having difficulties shooting following the rain storm. The Chronicle of Normandy is really the only other chronicle to specifically say the English outranged the Genoese without any qualification re: the effects of the rain, and Froissart in the B/C version of his Chronicles has the English simply walking forward a little - possibly to get into better range - and shooting the Genoese. I think it's more likely that the combination of the English field fortifications and the rain - whether because of the mud or damaged crossbow strings - impacted on the Genoese ability to return fire, rather than any inherent disadvantage in the range of the crossbow.

Hi Jonathan, that's a very nice crossbow they made.

I'd have to do some digging to find the paper on the original experiment by Mike Loades and find the parameters but my guess is that he never bothered to fire on a 40 degree angle. Furthermore I'd guess he attempted to shoot as heavy a bolt as possible and likely a shorter one than used with the wooden prod reconstruction. Beneficial when trying to actually wound someone but not so great for long distance shooting.

The tests by Bichler were nice to read too but do we have any idea what kind of impact the bolts could deliver at the upper end of the range? i.e. would a bolt fired 'a crossbows shot distance' actually translate to an effective attack? I know that in later times a musket shot distance was reckoned to be around 300 yards but most line infantry did not shoot before closing to half that distance.

I will report back tomorrow if I can find Mike Loades's paper.

Bolts are way stiffer than arrows of the same weight., so they flex way, way less. Being 40% shorter makes huge difference.

Thus they don't waste as much energy "archer paradoxing", and have more stable flight.

On the other hand, they should generally be experiencing more drag.

They're also balanced differently.

With modern ballistics, I don't think differences in flight trajectories, though someone who knows what he's doing with math is required. ;)

I always go back and forward on whether or not crossbows and bows were used at their maximum range with any frequency. The 16th century evidence is pretty clear for longbows, with multiple sources from the 1540s on attesting that long range shooting was an expected part of their usage, and even the most inveterate opponents allowed that this was so. Similarly, manuscript miniatures can be found of archers shooting against ground forces at an angle or shooting flat/downwards when the rear terrain wouldn't have allowed this (especially over some rivers), so I don't think the evidence against long range shooting being common is as secure as Loades makes out.

With that said, we also don't know how gunpowder changed the use of archers, and they may well have begun shooting at long range on the battlefield in imitation of some skirmishers armed with firearms. It's plausible that most archery and crossbow fire was done at ranges of a hundred yards or less prior to the 16th century, and we simply don't have the records that would let us see the change.

As to the long range performance, I really don't know. I don't think enough practical long range testing has been done with good replica crossbows, and unless someone can get a few of the great crossbow makers together and fund it, I'm not sure we're going to get reliable data.

Also, the original 2012 thread speculated that some crossbow strings could have been of rawhide or sinew. In the late 13th century, the crossbowmakers of Venice said that all strings shall be of hemp cord of a minimum quality or better. And if the Venetians had a rule, you can bet that the Genoese were at least as strict!

The problem with using art to say "only belt-spanned crossbows" is that from the 3rd Crusade onward, documents and accounts of sieges tell us that there were multiple spanning mechanisms and types of small crossbow in use. So we know the art only shows a fraction of what was in use. I would expect to have some marginalia showing the drop-on-your-bum-and-push-with-your-legs method if it were still common in the 14th century, but this research is still in early days.

Thanks for the very extensive answer, it had certainly given me some more things to ponder!

Those mobilization percentages seem awfully high though. Prussia, Sweden and the Dutch Republic managed around 7% between having very high taxes, war loans, mercenaries and forms of conscription. Using Villani's population figure for Florence and the size of the militia the city of Florence proper also managed to raise around 6 to 7 per cent but that meant having almost the entire arms bearing population march out and they could only do that for a short while within a very close radius to Florence itself. The numbers drawn from the Florentine countryside were inevitably lower and after a devastating loss it was decreed only a part of the urban militia could be send out at once.

The few medieval extrapolated demographic pyramids and early modern ones I have seen all suggest adult males made up roughly 25-30 per cent of the total population. Take away the priests, paupers, elderly and I can see how 6 or 7 per cent, a quarter of the adult male population, might be the best you can get. Of course this would be different for otherwise unarmed rowers who could be paupers but I am not sure if we should expect huge numbers of specialist crossbowmen to appear outside of the urban city limits of Genoa. If the military population of Genoa and countryside is around that mark (28,000) and one in ten carried a crossbow we arrive at scarcely 3000. We are using 19th century population estimated though so maybe we should allow for some leeway. Another thing I wonder is whether or not the rowers could be fielded as infantry, if they were truly poor I cannot imagine them showing up with much in the way of weaponry but I do know some later crews had rowers equipped with jacks and polearms or sword and shield.

Having 8 to 13 per cent of the Genoese population active in France would surely be a herculean effort and a major economic, security and demographic risk. Not without precedent or rather antecedent though, Hesse also had an army of around 5 to 6 per cent of its population and rented it out to Protestant nations.

The galley crews and crossbowmen numbering altogether 8000 drawn from a total population of 400,000 would still represent a level of mobilization for a long distance campaign rarely seen in Europe.

I am curious if you have seen demographic estimates and mobilization percentages that differ wildly from the above.

Using the estimates population of Florence in 1252 and 1280 calculated by W.R. Day Jr. in his thesis, Florence might have had a total population of 70 000 in 1260, and mustered somewhere in the order of 8000 men for Montaperti, assuming David Waley's extrapolation of the records is correct, putting over 11% of the total urban population in the field. Villani claims 25 000 citizens capable of bearing arms in 1338, and modern estimates put the total population around 120 000, so roughly 20% of the total inhabitants could be called on for military service. In the countryside, the proportion seems to have been a little higher, based on an early 15th century Pistoiese chronicler cited by Day, who assumes that the population of the countryside was four times that of the number of men eligible for military service.

Based on this, I think my estimates of available military manpower in Genoa are in the right ballpark, although we are using slightly different population metrics (I'm talking about percentage of total military manpower, while you're talking about percentage of overall population). The actually percentage of overall population is significantly lower, about 2%, although if the split between urban and rural is the same as in the records for Montaperti then we're looking at around 4% of the urban population being involved vs 1.33% of the rural population.

But, to be clear, a proportion of these won't be Genoese, so it's not entirely reflective of the demographic impact. Some of the galleys might not have even been Genoese, but are just labelled as such because a Genoese contracted them. At any rate, we know for certain that 37 galleys were in French service in 1337-8, so there could be quite a large number of men serving away from home.

With regards to the rowers, Grimaldi's 1338 contract specifies that the "180 armigeri are to be “well armored” with cuirasses of plates (coirassis sive platis), helmets (cervelleriis), and mail gorgets (collarites de ferro), pavises, swords, and daggers (spatis et cultellis)" (quoted from Livingston and DeVries). Doria's earlier contract only specifies plate bascinets, gorgets and shields for the crew, so whether the CoPs were assumed or Grimaldi's contract was overly optimistic is hard to tell. There does seem to be some good evidence for the rowers being fairly well equipped, at any rate.

The Montaperti debacle was what I was referring to when I mentioned the devastating loss. I then worked with the figures suggested for Campeldino and a population of around 80.000-100.000 but I hadn't considered the population of 1260 would be lower leading to a higher mobilization percentage around 1260.

I skimmed Day's thesis and his figures seem on point although I cannot help but think Villani's estimate of 25.000 to 30.000 arms bearing citizens is accounting close to the entire adult male population.

My reason for taking mobilization relative to the entire population is chiefly that it is how such figures are usually given in literature but I think it also accounts for the important fact that even when hired hands are involved the cost of them still has to be borne by the population.

Is there actually any known battle or campaign that involved more than circa 1500-2000 crossbowmen from the period?