[Timo Nieminen]

[Lafayette C Curtis]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

The thesis suggests that the pressures of mobile warfare provided significantly less incentive to develop firearms in China than in Europe or Japan. I suggest reading the book to get a proper impression. Chase provides a compelling case.

[William P]

I find it interesting that most of this thread is bow musket bow musket, and ignoring the middle ground of the crossbow in comparisons largely.
I mean why not the crossbow it was pretty lethal against armour in the 15th century where the musket had just started, and took not too long to train was prolly far more accurate than a musket or handgonne.

So why not the crossbow? while its agreable that because of ammunition size the need for very partiicular woods and the massive training times, plus the fact that longbows quickly began to lose out in terms of armour penetrating ability by the time of the Renaissance its generally agreed that most warbows only had a hope of killing a man in plate armour at quite close ranges by then 50m or less, (part of the benchmark is the longbow and armour episodes of mike loades weapons that made britain.

another thing regarding the longbow is that the crossbow and the gun, particularly the wheellock, allowed someone to load and prime his weapon hours in advance making someone much better equipped to react to surpise attacks. since a bowmen can only put the bow under full tension comfortably for mere seconds. if that

Simple thing is that the crossbow is A LOT harder to make and maintain,

as I remember reading in The Renaissance at War (Smithsonian History of Warfare) By Thomas Arnold
he goes on saying

"it became equally clear (to the importance of the pike) that gunpowder weapons became an important part of infantry warfare this is not to say that traditional bowed weapons became obselete a crossbow could probably shoot with almost as much deadly force as a gun and could be aimed with greater accuracy their effective ranges also essentially overlapped,
soldiers seemed to prefer firearms to bows was there some sort of sense of fun or psycological satisfaction with blasting away....

But most importantly guns were simply cheaper than crossbows, a gun barrel was only a tube of iron, while the bow of the crossbow had to be made from high quality spring steel, and the necesary crank orlever apparatus needed to bend a steel bow was more expensive than the simple lock on a gun."


another history enthusiast Nikolas lloyd points out in a comparison between longbow and crossbow. By looking at pros and cons of the crossbow.
“If the string gets wet, the power of the crossbow is greatly diminished, and to put a new dry string on requires a visit to a workshop with vices. An archer could carry a few spare dry strings in a little rain-proof pouch, and change the string in the field." http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/weapons/crossbow.html

Its worth noting that the position of attiliator (crossbow maker) was one of the more highly paid professions in medieval society. particularly within the confines of a castle

So a crossbow was a lot more expensive to manufacture. Notonly that but mechanisms like the windlass would likely take the same time or longer to load than it would take a man to load and fire a matchlock musket.

its also worth noting that for the point about accuracy, rifling had DEFINATELY been achieved in firearms by the turn of the 1500's nd its mentioned in a book " imperial austria, treasuresof art arms and armour from the state of styria" which was released in 1998 ahead of a exhibition of some of the armouries contents in the powerhouse museum in sydney that year was that
"from 1566 detatchments of wheel lock riflemen supplemented large bodies of heavily armoured pikemen and musketeers" asking my fellow reenactors who had actually visited the exhibition at the time confimed that the book inded refers to a unit not unlike the jaeger and 'greenjacket' regiments of napoleonic times.

this suggests that even though the crossbow was indeed more accurate than most matchlocks and arqubus guns, te discovery of rifling limited the crossbows use as a battlefield sharpshooters weapon.

[Randall Moffett]

William,

Crossbows have been discussed in this thread previously, so no one is ignoring them. I doubt anyone here would forget them as they were the main missile weapon of the 15th century in 90% of Europe during the medieval period.

Some things you might find interesting. Crossbows have been tested by submerging them under water for hours and still not had significant loss of draw weight.

Beware TV as a source for information. I''d take a look at the Royal Military Academy's article in the Arms and Armour Journal. from 2006 I believe.

Where as rifling does come around by the 16th century there are some major disadvantages. One is the rifling itself made the barrels super expensive. Second one is that the balls needed to be basically hammered into the barrel unlike other guns, so reloading took nearly 3-4 times as long as a smoothbore musket or arquebus of the 16th century. Lastly because the rifling it was more prone to being fowled and more difficult to clean. This is what limits these weapons use until fairly recently. The costs associated and the fact that with much larger number of musketmen you can simply use volley fire.

No doubt tough the crossbow was an awesome weapon and did its job with efficiency until it drops out of use for war.

RPM

[Björn Molin]

Hi all, I am bumping this thread abit, can you guys name a few exampels of battles where bows and musket or muskets and crossbow or crossbows and bows (other then the 100 years war, we all know of crecy and agincourt)

The exampels that I can come upp with is the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%9398)

With an interseting account:

"[Shi-eon Lee] then answered, "The Korean soldiers cower before the enemy and flee for their lives even before they have engaged the enemy. As for the commanders, they seldom leave their positions because they fear that they might be executed for deserting. However, there is a limit to executing deserting soldiers since there are so many of them. Truly, the Japanese aren't good musketeers, but they advance so rapidly that they appear right in front of the Koreans in the time Koreans can shoot only two arrows. It is said that Koreans are good archers, but they seldom hit the targets when the enemy is too far away, and are too scared to shoot when the enemy is near because they fear Japanese swords. Archery often becomes useless because Koreans, fearing the Japanese arme blanche, can barely shoot. The Japanese are reputed to be good swordsmen, but it is possible for Koreans to draw swords and hold their ground. However, the Koreans seldom do this and merely run for their lives."[113]"


Battle of lepanto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto

1637 swamp fight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield_Swamp_Fight



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sarhu


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar%E2%80%93Qing_War


Some interseting paintings of qing 18th centry mounted cavelery in action againts muskets!:
http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/e/hist.htm

http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/pict/1-4VictoryOfKhorgos_L.jpg

http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/pict/1-5Ba...ngui_L.jpg


In the book "My service in the army by Dzengseo


http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Manchu-Soldier-Se...0415544475

Witch in part is a kind of journal from a manchu commander during the 1680:s manchu war against han chinse rebels.

There is a part where fisrtt the green banner men attack a rebel hold village and are repulsed by canon, arrows and musketry, and then Dzengseo unit dismount and fire arrows til the enimies surrender,

Thats the only live account of bows prevailing against muskets that I have found, if you guys konow of any more plz share!

[Timo Nieminen]

There was plenty of overlap of the use of bow and crossbow in China, with the crossbow and bow still being used into the 19th century. IN much of Asia, cavalry retained the bow, while infantry might use bows or crossbows. Later, one sees muskets as the main infantry missile weapon (alongside cannons) and cavalry still used the bow.

So plenty of Chinese battles up to and including the Boxer Rebellion had a mix of bows and crossbows, or bows and guns. Plenty of Asian battles from the introduction of firearms had a mix of bows and guns. However, it's not always easy to find much in the way of detail about the battles. To pick just one battle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Assaye

There were some notable battles with mixed bows and guns outside Asia as well, often between European/US forces and native forces armed with a mix of firearms and bows (and other weapons). Archery was still in use in battles as late as Little Bighorn (i.e., Custer's defeat), mostly due to shortages of guns and ammunition. One notable battle with mixed weapons which didn't involved Western forces was the Battle of Gallabat/Metemma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallabat
between the Mahdists and Abyssinia/Ethiopia. Firearms had a major influence on the outcome, since Emperor Yohannes IV was fatally wounded by gunfire.

[Robert Morgan]

I have to say that over the past hour of going back and reading all of the posts, some from many YEARS ago, this has to be one the most illuminating threads I've read.

As a student of American History, I have to wonder what the effect of the longbow would have been on a closely packed formation of Revolutionary or Civil War opponents. I'm assuming the bow would have been used more as an indirect fire weapon behind suitable protection or as a direct fire weapon from a position of tactical advantage. Without even chain mail as protection, how would a soldier of the era had fared had Ben Franklin's idea to revive the longbow been followed, and had there been enough time to train? The British were very leery about Colonial marksmen with their Pennsylvania long rifles; how would they have felt about a weapon that loosed without sound or a betraying puff of gunsmoke? What would have happened to Civil War infantry and cavalry charges if a hail of arrows were tossed in?

Intriguing "What If," scenarios...

[Timo Nieminen]

One archer can hide and shoot by surprise. It's much harder for 1,000 archers to hide and shoot by surprise. One archer hiding and shooting isn't going to do more than one musketeer/rifleman hiding and shooting. While the bow will be quieter, and smoke-free, it does suffer from the arrow being visible in flight.

As for archery in battle against close-order infantry of the time, we have examples. IIRC, Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) said of Assaye that the men were more disturbed by the arrows than the musket balls, because they could see them. But given that good infantry of the time would stand and fight while subject to musket fire and cannon fire, throwing some arrows into the mix won't make the battlefield significantly more terrifying - it's already pretty extreme.

As for US Civil War forces, many of the opponents of the US Army before and after the Civil War used bows. Might surprise new soldiers, but the Army knew about facing archery.

[Pieter B.]

[Michael Brudon]

Most of the points have been covered but I think the superior ballistic properties of ball vs arrows are not understood by most. As ex-army and using both item types for hunting I'll add some comparisons.

(Musket smoothbore versus longbow (or crossbow)

1.'mobility kills'. Either will kill to vital areas. But ball can break bones and on extremities, which arrows have much less chance of doing, tending to skim around large bones. Fractures provide a significant % increase to rendering an enemy target ineffective, both tactically and long term.

2. Balls effectiveness on bone also applies to horses(cavalry), including extremities and potential to penetrate the skull on both angling or frontal shots.

3. Ball at close enough range can penetrate a human body and still strike a target behind with lethal energy.

4. While individual range of the smoothbore is similar to bows this is due to poor smoothbore accuracy.Massed fire against ranked enemy takes accuracy out of the equation and then enables use of the muskets 4-5 times higher velocity. Smaller adjustments for range estimation and exponentially greater ranges with massed fire.

I am sure there are plenty circumstances the longbow or crossbow carves up musketeers tactically, but for pure punch a line of reliable muskets is in a different league of destruction to men and cavalry.

[Lafayette C Curtis]

[Henry O.]

The commentaries of Messire Blaize de Montluc describe encounters against English Longbowmen just prior to when the Mary Rose sank in 1545. He outright states that the longbow is a short-ranged weapon compared to the harquebus.

[Michael Wiethop]

For what it's worth, those Bashkirs were irregulars, presumably with little training or combat experience. I imagine that properly trained, experienced, and led horse archers (like 13th-century Mongols) would have been at least useful against Napoleonic-era cavalry; they would have been able to keep out of reach while shooting up the unarmored men and horses chasing them.

Of course, by the 19th century, there were few, if any, such competent horse archers left.

[Alexander B.]

I think there is also a slightly skewed perception in both longbow and musket.

For Longbows, many tend to look at replicas of longbows being shot with arrows that are painstakingly made individually and someone who made it his lifelong pasttime and calling to shoot longbows is taking careful aim and letting lose. If the Arrow can make it 200yards at best, that's it's effective range, and if the archer can loose an arrow every 5 seconds on his 120Lbs bow, thats the rate of fire.

For muskets, it is assumed they must be super easy to shoot, so some random bloke goes to a field with a borrowed pistol and misses a fridge at 20 feet away, e presto, firearms suck. The range is only 50 yards long so naturally that must be the max. range for firearms. And if the novice or the sportsman can fire one shot every two minutes, that's our rate of fire.



I would assume that the mass produced arrows for longbows in actual military used varied noticeably in length, weight point of balance and just how straight they were, thus induding a very high amount of variation in starting velocity and thus trajectory/range.
Any sort of wind or rain etc. is likely to affect an arrow much more than a musket ball. A mold cast musket ball is comparatively consistent in a batch from shot to shot, so is powder premeasured.
And just because the projectile can reach a certain point, that does not mean it is 'effective' range as in high power and resaonable accuracy.
Rate of fire estimates seem to be all over the place and those for archers generally err on the side of everestimating what is possible with a full draw weight war bow to start eith and then fail t account for rapid fatigue and exhaustion.
Likewise, it is not uncommon to be a musket shooter and being told by self-proclaimed experts that you can't fire more than once a minute, when you have lkiterally just done that. And though certainly an effort, reloading a firearm is nowhere enar as tiring as the extreme workout an archer has to perform.
When people go shooting muzzleloaders at the range, the procedures are more geared towards modern safety concerns than historical efficiency. I have the privilege to be on a range where I can indulge in historical loading techniques, alongside recreational shooters and I can easily get anywhere between 4 and 8 shouts out for every one of theirs, without rushing it. The point just being, reloading is more sedate on ranges today than it was on battlefields.

The next thing is, that people often try muskets etc. and think they ought to be easy to shoot, and when they miss, it's the guns inaccuracy. In fact, even with military grade ammunition and undersized balls, though not sniper weapons, muskets and pistols would still hit rather well what you aimed for, if you had not twitched from the ignition of the pan, which is a tough natural reflex to overcome.

I struggled for a long time to overcome that reaction, and I would not have hit your fridge at 20 yds. with a full scale musket. After learning to stay on target during the flash in the pan, even a smoothbore pistol would knock that fridge at some 50yards.

Finally, very often some statistics and numbers from actual chaotic warfare from the musket era are dragged into comparisons with calm peaceful range trials and recreational shooting with bows, further skewing the image.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Interesting discussion. i have a few points, forgive me if some of these were already covered.

Firearms

Guns were very hard to use at least initially, and required skilled labor (well trained troops) until a series of inventions in the 15th Century made them easy to use for infantry:

Corned and filtered powder
The slow match
The match-lock
The arquebus 'shape' in it's various variations.

Firearms didn't become widely adopted for cavalry (or mounted infantry / dragoons) until the advent of the wheel lock.

In the late medieval period, the time when firearms and crossbows and bows were most often used together, firearms were mostly used by highly skilled troops, elite among the Swiss, German, Flemish, and Italian urban militias, and Bohemian (Czech) Hussite heretics, both on their own land and fighting as mercenaries. Bohemians and German urban militia made up the bulk of the Fekete Sereg or 'Hungarian Black Army' which was arguably the most effective late medieval army, certainly the most heavily invested in firearms.

During the late medieval period, gunners were protected by pavises, mantlets and war-wagons. This was pioneered by the Czechs who were the first to make widespread use of firearms in the open field. Medieval firearms were typically also mixed with light cannon and volley guns etc. Before the Hussite Crusades firearms were mostly for siege warfare. In the west firearms seem to have shifted to protection by pike squares in the 16th Century. It's not clear to me why, but maybe it's due to the increasing ubiquity of medium caliber cannon.

In the 14th through 16th Centuries, training for guns and for crossbows was mostly done by elite shooting societies and put to the test in these rather expensive formal shooting contests, mostly organized by Free Cities and City States. Still a remnant of the tradition in Switzerland and Italy. The Germans called these 'Schutzenfest'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%BCtzenfest#History

If you dive into the records of the Schutzenfest and Italian equivalents you can learn a lot about actual capability like ranges, accuracy etc. in the periods roughly 1350-1550 for both guns and crossbows. i think there is also the equivalent type of records from England for longbows, they had all kinds of archery contests both for individual targets and clout shooting.

It's worth noting, that rifling was not invented in the 19th Century but existed in the early 15th - rifled firearms were considered cheating in those shooting contests and records show they were sometimes confiscated (but subsequently kept in arsenals by the towns). Same for several other inventions we associate with the modern period or the 19th Century like rifling, revolvers, breach-loading firearms, and many rather other startling innovations, which you can see in the 15th and 16th Century.

I mention this because it speaks to the mystery of why certain weapons and systems were abandoned in the Early Modern period. I think the reason were more social, political and economic than technical but I admit that is just a theory, i don't really know.


Bows

Effective range for well trained archers seemed to be much farther than 200 meters. Look at the records of the medieval warbow society. It sounds like the effective range for 'clout shooting' is more like 300 meters. Archers always had both 'direct' and 'area shooting' modes, the Mongols and Ottomans did that too, as did the Mughals. Not sure about the Manchu etc. but I assume it's the same.

http://www.theenglishwarbowsociety.com/

I'm sure it varies greatly by the exact time and place but I do not think they had low quality arrows. Craftsmanship particularly for weapon was at a generally very high level, controlled by the guilds, at least in Central Europe and Italy. I don't know about England but I'd be very surprised if they had substandard quality arrows.

Bows seemed to retain a niche in naval combat for a while after they had declined in use on land. The Mary Rose comes to mind of course, but archery was still a major component of war in the Med in that same era. Some military historians speculate that the loss of skilled archers at Lepanto is a major reason for the subsequent decline in Ottoman naval power.


Crossbows

Crossbows seem to have gotten very effective, even for mounted troops, by the late medieval period, but they were expensive to make, as were the spanning devices, and training was expensive too. I suspect their decline had again, more to do with social changes than for technical reasons.


Armor also comes into play in all this of course, but that is almost a new dimension of complexity. I think both armor and expensive weapons like the higher end crossbows declined with the shift toward more 'unskilled labor' for the bulk of armies very generally speaking in the period roughly 1550-1650.

J

[Henry O.]

[Timo Nieminen]

[Alexander B.]

The thing with clout shooting and most other range practise is, that the archer knows what the distance is. He is -told- reliably that the target is 250 yards away.

On the battlefield, which rarely is the exact same landscape as the range, the lay of the land and action of the field make gauging the true distance to the target tricky at best. And To correct for it, I'd deem nigh impossible. The archer would need to follow his arrow throughout it's flight with his eyes, and at 200 yards or more make out if it went to far, too short or spot on, not on a calm day on an unmoved field, but under stress of battle, with the fiel teemind with soldiers and movement.

With the naked eye it is interesting to see just how small humans are from 200, 300 or more yards away.

With smooth bore cannons, if well maintained and loaded, even lighter field cannons could easily consistently hit a cannon sized board cutout at 400 yards and more. SCRAY stuff.

And you do not have the sway and shiver as with any handheld implement.

Still, even at some battles 100 yards and less proved too much, as in the stress of battle the people operating the cannons did miscalculate or not aim as carfully as they should have.

Theoretical achievements of range weaponry are always miles ahead of what actual combat results show. Becaus humanses screw up in combat.

[Dan Howard]

Agreed. 200 yards seems to be the maximum effective range of warbows and war arrows on the battlefield.