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William P
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 Posted: Sun 21 Jul, 2019 11:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Jean Henri Chandler wrote: | | Sean Manning wrote: | Hi Jean,
if you ever have time for another email that would be great. |
I'm sorry my friend, I will follow up this weekend. I went out of town for almost three weeks after our last exchange and got distracted with work afterwords.
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Many of the old armouring centres were in trouble by the mid to late 16th century, as the going price was just too low to pay a big-city wage, but the shapes and constructions were just as sophisticated as ever. And I could show an Almain rivet as my example of an early 16th century armour and it would be just as dreadful as your 17th century close helm. |
I see what you were getting and and yes, of course we can each pick an example of very crude armor or weapon from any era that had it. But I think perhaps we can agree that in aggregate, the quality of that kind of fighting kit declined across the board and armor in particular.
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As you know, people in most parts of Europe were significantly poorer in 1650 than in 1450, so of course many of the things that ordinary people used fell in quality. |
Yes, you and I know that - but most people do not. The historical shorthand or Tropes which appear in popular media or in high school or undergraduate Uni courses barely touch on this if at all, in fact the general assumption is of steady progress.
This is actually my point - conditions for the vast majority of people declined after the middle ages and that included people who did most of the fighting. Their autonomy, pay, and status slipped a notch in comparison to earlier eras, and so did their kit. I don't necessarily want to get into a huge debate about it with anyone so I will agree to disagree if this is an unpopular idea, but in my opinion this is the real reason armor like you saw in that Nova show went away, and that crude, thick, very very heavy wrought iron cuirass of the 30 Years War took it's place. Which in turn due to it's inefficiency led to almost all armor going away... for a while. Though it's back to stay now I'd wager.
There have been many detailed studies on craft guilds, for example by Stephen R. Epstein of the London School of Economics, or Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maartin Prak from University of Utrecht who have tracked the economic changes in cities from the 15th Century through the 18th. Those agile enough to stay in business, for example the glass and textile (such as silk) production in Venice, had to shift very rapidly in the 16th Century. In a word it's a story of shifting from producing for a mostly middle class market in the 15th Century (burghers, gentry) to a market split between the very very rich and the very poor in the 18th. For example Venetian glass manufacturers shifted from making window panes, drinking vessels and eyeglasses for mostly middle class markets, to making giant gilded baroque mirrors for Russian Boyars and French courtier-nobles, and vast quantities of those cheap glass beads used for trade goods such as what they allegedly traded away New York for according to popular legend*. Same with textiles, it went from middle class goods to those for the very rich and the very, very poor, i.e. servants and serfs.
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Heroic Armour of the Italian Renaissance argues that most 16th century armouring shops, even the famous ones, did most of their business making standard types of armour wholesale, and that fits what I read in earlier periods. If Alan Williams is right that the price of plate armour continually fell, that suggests that plate armourers were skilled at giving their main customers what they wanted, which was cheaper and cheaper armour.
Edit: I agree about technological change not heading in one direction or always improving the same things! |
I think the emphasis was not so much for just cheaper, but for the cheapest viable armor. In other words armor that was utilitarian but met a certain minimum standard of pretty high quality. For example I can show that before roughly 1520, ordinary burghers, artisans and mid-level merchants and so on, owned and in many cases were required to own armor of proof. According to the Balthasar Behem Codex you could purchase a cuirass with pauldrons for 39 kreuzer and a half armor "of proof" in Krakow in 1505 for 60 Kreuzer. That is expensive, but well within the reach of an ordinary burgher or even a mid-level peasant in that part of the world at that time. It's roughly the equivalent of one and a half sides of bacon, two cubits of fine linen, or four pairs of shoes. Or three swords.
Fast forward 150 years and how many people could afford the 'export grade' equivalent?
* not saying that is true, just referencing the legend as such. |
I find that VERY eye opening as an assesment
Which leads me to ask the inevitable. Drawing back to the original premise i.e no gunpowder weaponry or explosives
Whats your reckoning on how the face of warfare would have changed. Would we see a relative abandonment of very heavy crossbows due to as you say armour declining in use for monetary reasons.
Im absolutely sure wed see a lot of push of pike because if it aint broke dont fix it and theres no explosives to discorage tight blocks of men and cavalry would remain exceedingly viable for much longer
And thats not even counting the restricted progress of world economics due to the fact we cant just blow up ore deposites to make them easier to mine, same with fortress design
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Mon 22 Jul, 2019 12:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Benjamin H. Abbott wrote: | Some of these are quite powerful.
By contrast, 21st-century crossbows struggle reach even 175 foot-lbs with light bolts. However, with heavy bolts & allowing for less convenience, speed, accuracy, & safety, I'm confident you design a modern crossbow that could also defeat any practical steel armor. 173 foot-lbs (235 J) would already penetrate most historical armors. |
How many joules a historic crossbow (from the simplier to the heaviest windlass types) could achieve? All these units make me confuse.
| Quote: | | The curious thing about 15th-century European crossbow tech is that theoretically you could construct a crossbow powerful enough to use somewhat like a heavy musket, at least in the sense of piercing good armor at close or medium range. The 1,200lb-draw horn crossbow Andreas Bichler made that manages around 200 J with 81g bolts (at least in cold weather) only weighs 7.7lbs & may well perform worse than a high-quality historical example. Much heavier (20+lb) windlass-drawn steel target crossbows were apparently shot without rests for sport 17th/18th century. |
This draw horn crossbow is historical? Is it stronger than a steel crossbow?
I would also like to remember the existence of heavy beasts of walls, usually placed on the battlements or mounted on wooden supports. They apparently outperformed any personal beast, like mini-ballistas. From what I see of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hungarian castles, there were also heavy guns with long barrels mounted on brackets.
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A larger horn crossbow or even merely one of those giant steel crossbows might conceivably deliver enough punch to employ in approximately heavy-musket fashion. Heavy muskets were remarkably slow (1-2 shots per minute, if that) & awkward (requiring a rest to shoot), yet still key weapons in the 16th century. |
How much energy in joules does an arquebus or musket delivers?
I read in a very amateur source that muskets weren't used in open battles before more or less 1540-50's, when the Spanish Tercios used them. They would be, in other occasions, be used in wall or, like in the example of Mary Rose's fragments, on the ships' buckheads.
“Burn old wood, read old books, drink old wines, have old friends.”
Alfonso X, King of Castile (1221-84)
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Mon 22 Jul, 2019 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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I didn't have read all the comments yet, but I will nevertheless give my opinion in the subject:
Implying gunpowder didn't exist or wasn't used for personal use at war, and implying anyone wouldn't invent any technological equivalent of gunpowder propulsion (like compressed air), warfare would look almost exactly as 15th century non-gunpowder war.
There wouldn't be any missile weapon that could penetrate plate, perhaps by heavy crossbows at close range (I'm quite ignorant of that efficiency so I will not comment it). Plate armor would still be a matter of military advantage. Since tecnology was improving and people were getting better purchase prospects, armies would be progressively heavier in terms of passive protection, whether or not they were becoming smaller or bigger due a number of aspects like financial advantage, and so. Swords, pikes and halberds would still have some use (specially if there were still lesser unarmoured soldiers). Cromwelian cavalry was advised to use sword cuts against unarmoured parts of cavalrymen harness or simply to push the enemy's fluffy belts in order to unhorse them. That's usefull specially because, from what I have read, pistols sucked to penetrate cavalry armor, even at point-blank shots; a royalist knight took three shots from a puritan ironside and escaped alive and well, some of the shots (2 of 3 I guess) were given with the barrel touching the steel itself.
Still, that doesn't means that lightly armored troops couldn't have been a treat: Swedish Cavalry did a military revolution at the 30YW by dropping armor for fast action and ambushes; even catholic cavalry that actually had armor was dropping it in favor of agility in such actions. So, no determinist approach at all.
For those saying armor necessarily dropped from use by latter 16th and 17th centuries: the Dutch Army's Ordinance of Orange necessarily requires that all pikemen had a minimum degree of plate armor which was quite bulky. Of course the musketeers and harquebusiers were more numerous, but compared to the Spaniards (which had Picas Secas and Picas Pesadas), they were way more armoured. The Republic even stocked massive amounts of armor of their soldiers, and even in Brazil, VOC's soldiers were mentioned using the same heavy armors they used in Europe, while the Portuguese and their subjects (blacks, indians, some italians and spaniards) were all armed with just arquebuses, long knifes and some swords; both Guararapes' battles were won by ambush tatics against the troublesome pike-and-shot formations of the Dutch.
“Burn old wood, read old books, drink old wines, have old friends.”
Alfonso X, King of Castile (1221-84)
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Benjamin H. Abbott
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| Posted: Mon 22 Jul, 2019 9:42 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="Pedro Paulo Gaião"] | Benjamin H. Abbott wrote: | | How many joules a historic crossbow (from the simplier to the heaviest windlass types) could achieve? All these units make me confuse. |
Honestly, we don't really know. We have such limited data on historical crossbows. We have been data on hand-drawn bows, so I'll give a little of that for context. I'll stick to one measurement system & round a little for convenience. 1 ft-lb = 1.3558 J.
1,200lb replica 15th-century horn crossbow by Andreas Bichler with a medium-weight (1250-grain) bolt in the cold: 145 ft-lbs
150lb Mary Rose replica with heavy arrow: 110 ft-lbs
Tod's 1,250lb replica 15th-century steel crossbow from with medium-weight bolt: 105 ft-lbs
82lb Manchu bow with very heavy arrow: 100 ft-lbs (supposedly)
150lb Mary Rose replica with light arrow: 80 ft-lbs
110lb Turkish bow with light arrow: 70 ft-lbs
| Quote: | | This draw horn crossbow is historical? Is it stronger than a steel crossbow? |
Yes, there are lots of big horn crossbows in period art & some in museums. In theory, horn prods should be more efficient than steel. Testing so far does support this notion, but then Ralph Payne-Gallwey claimed to have gotten impressive performance out of an original 15th-century steel prod.
| Quote: | | How much energy in joules does an arquebus or musket delivers? |
At least 1,500 J for the arquebus & 3000 J for the heavy musket, though I believe the numbers were much higher based on my reading of 16th-century sources combined with the Graz tests. I'd say 2,000+ J for the arquebus & perhaps 8,000 J for the heavy musket. Around 4,000 J for the caliver, which was in-between the arquebus & musket in size.
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Tue 23 Jul, 2019 7:26 am Post subject: |
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The discussion certainly took an odd turn...
Keeping in mind that a bullet requires a rather vastly higher number of joules for the same amount of penetration, compared to an arrow or crossbow bolt, or a thrown weapon like a dart or javelin. I forget the exact ratio but Alan Williams has stats on it (among others).
Firearms were used in the open field on a large scale from at least the 1420's. Muskets, depending on how you define them, start showing up around 1450 or 1480. Most gunners used lighter weapons than a musket though - generally known as hacken-busche, arquebus, and later caliver etc..
Still later on (18th Century) muskets were smaller and more like lighter firearms.
It may be worth noting that from the 14th Century Italian armor makers proofed their armor (i.e. with marked dents) with two grades of crossbows: the 'small' and 'large' crossbow. This was also later done with pistols of course in the 16th Century.
Books and games on Medieval Europe Codex Integrum
Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic Now available in print
Last edited by Jean Henri Chandler on Tue 23 Jul, 2019 8:57 am; edited 1 time in total
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Jean Henri Chandler
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| Posted: Tue 23 Jul, 2019 7:36 am Post subject: |
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| William P wrote: |
I find that VERY eye opening as an assesment
Which leads me to ask the inevitable. Drawing back to the original premise i.e no gunpowder weaponry or explosives
Whats your reckoning on how the face of warfare would have changed. Would we see a relative abandonment of very heavy crossbows due to as you say armour declining in use for monetary reasons.
Im absolutely sure wed see a lot of push of pike because if it aint broke dont fix it and theres no explosives to discorage tight blocks of men and cavalry would remain exceedingly viable for much longer
And thats not even counting the restricted progress of world economics due to the fact we cant just blow up ore deposites to make them easier to mine, same with fortress design |
These are hard questions to answer, but I would say this.
Armies throughout history which gradually became highly effective, adapted to a range of enemies and became something akin to the modern concept of 'combined arms'. Often there was an emphasis on one troop type but they also had many others.
We think of the ancient (late Republican or early-Imperial) Roman Legions as heavy infantry armies but they did also have and make use of cavalry, archers, light infantry, and artillery. The latter (torsion based) type of weapon proving important in several engagements such as Caesars invasion of Britain, according to his own memoir.
The Huns were known for cavalry but also had strong infantry in their armies (some of them Ostrogoths etc.).
Mongols were known as horse-archers but also had heavy cavalry. Heavy cavalry in fact goes way back on the Steppe, that is where it originates.
The Franks were known as light infantry but also had heavy infantry (Alemanni etc.) light cavalry (Gauls) and heavy cavalry (Alans and Taifals from Iran) with them. And so on.
There is almost always a role for heavy missile weapons, and for spears, and for light infantry and heavy infantry and light and heavy cavalry and other specialists. What is emphasized in a given army is dictated by available technologies and associated cultures, and what the enemy is using. But all the niches gradually seem to get filled in.
Pikes were very effective but also had their weaknesses - Roman armies cleaned up on Hellenistic / Macadonian phalanxes. Spanish Rodoleros had their moment against Late Medieval pikemen too.
When it comes to crossbows, we don't precisely understand their merits, either on the technical level with individual weapons, or more broadly what their battlefield niche precisely was. We can see a lot of data but don't agree on what it means. If you read a book about longbows you would think they were the ultimate weapon so why would anybody bother with a crossbow? If you read about Steppe horse archers you would think they are the ultimate weapon and were unstoppable. But in between, you find the crossbows all over North and Central Europe and Italy. It certainly can't be said that they didn't have access to recurve bows or longbows, quite obviously they did. For some reason they fixated on the crossbow, more and more. Only the firearm took it's place, and only very gradually.
Books and games on Medieval Europe Codex Integrum
Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic Now available in print
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