Your arguments are sometimes circler. At some points you claim other weapons were better then muskets, and at other times the reverse. This is an obvious truism, since muskets overtook pikes, and bows, along with making armor obsolescent. You quote a source from 1593 favoring muskets over Longbows, but that was in a time Longbow Armies had already faded away, and the yeoman culture that supported them was dying out.
Culture is a major issue in these discussions, arms that people use during their normal civilian lives made their rapid mobilization in war possible. A yeomen bowmen class, knights, riding horses across society, There's a reason the English wouldn't let Irishmen ride horses, they didn't want them to be able to raise cavalry. Southern Country Boys had more of a hunting shooting, and riding culture, then Northern urban boys, and could be more quickly trained as cavalry, and infantry. They had no advantage in training artillerists, since nobody does that in the civilian world. Long pikes, and crossbows were largely reserved to mercenary companies, and long term service soldiers, because civilians didn't commonly use them, and they take a great deal of practice to use efficiently.
In the early modern period muskets were more expensive then other weapons, a whole new industry, with supporting supply chains, and skill sets had be developed to support them. It was worth it because of their greater utility, and recruits didn't need background weapon skills to train in them. What made the bigger armies possible in the early modern period were three factors. First the rise of the nation state, meant kings had higher, and steadier revenues to pay for regular armies, and navies, equipped with new weapons and technologies.
Second firearms didn't require a Social Class to support them. There was never a Musket Class, like the Yeomen Social Class to draw recruits from. Thirdly improvements in agricultural efficiency freed up more of the population for other purposes. Needing fewer farmers made the growth of urban centers possible, and wealthy towns were sources of money, industry, and manpower. Cannon became the final argument of Kings because the industry to produce them was solely under their control, not even the highest nobles could own a cannon foundry, and they tended to be in cities.
So armies got bigger because of increases in royal revenues, enabled kings to support more soldiers on a permeant basis. improvements in agriculture led to greater urbanization, and the rise of cities. New industrial technologies enabled mass gunpower weapons production to grow. Finally musketeers, and cannoneers could be raised from a broader social base.
Agree. Of course, it should not be forgotten that the yomen class in its English form was not a commonplace on the continent and that a longbow was not necessarily a weapon of preference of the personally free peasants or we would have the Swiss archers instead of the pikemen and the German Landsknechts were not archers either. The same goes for the Spanish military organization.
Nostalgic ideas of few Brits about advantages of the longbows are really of no importance because the English switched to the firearms as everybody else.
Even the French Franc-archers started switching to the Swiss style pike formations started from 1466 (only 16 years after their first units were created) and when they were restored (after being disbanded by Louis XI in 1481 for bad performance and lack of a discipline) in 1522, the Decree of 17 January 1522 listed the updated equipment of the franc-archer as comprising a
corselet, a mail
gorget, arm-pieces, a mail skirt and a helmet. Two-thirds were to be pikemen and the rest would be armed with
halberds,
crossbows and arquebuses. However, these troops were used mostly as the border guards and the last time they were raised as an act of a desperation after Pavia.
Needless to say that the archers used by Charles of Burgundy in his army were professionals.
So there is no trace of them being widely used in the
continental Europe after the firearms kicked in and actually well before this happened. Which is quite understandable because (a) you need a lot of them to achieve some effect, (b) effectiveness of the bows as a killing weapon against the armored opponent was quite low comparing to the firearms ( the contemporaries were quite clear on that account) and the pole arms and (c) on their own they were pretty much helpless. The main reason for the whole archery subject is that conversations are routinely dominated by the Anglophones and, as I found on SHM, even the professional medievalists tend to confuse “Bermuda Triangle” (England, France, Netherlands) with the whole Europe (no offense to anybody, the fact was recognized, accepted and ignored 😂 ).
But, anyway, before the firearms became a dominant weapon (as in “used by more than 50% of the combatants”) the pike formations were dominating the field from the late 1470s till at least early 1600s. The firearms were gradually growing in numbers
within initial pike formations with the gendarmes gradually fading away (with the PLC being an exception). Even the French by the start of the Italian Wars were aware of the pikemen importance and had been hiring as many Swiss (and sometimes landsknechts) as they could afford in an addition to their gendarmes and artilleryThe archers, when present, were not numerous and did not play any noticeable role (at Novara in 1513 out of 20,000 infantry they had 2,500 archers and they were seemingly irrelevant; at Fornovo and Ravenna they are not even mentioned ). Even prior to that at Guinegate the French archers (seemingly numerous) did not produce any noticeable effect and the “marksmen” of Burgundy proved to be helpless against the Swiss pikes. So the “choice between bow and musket” was not quite relevant for most of the
Western Europe. The choice there was “lance vs. pike”.
It was realistic for the
Eastern and Southern Europe (Russians and Ottomans) and in both cases we see switch from the bows to the firearms as the
primary infantry weapons as soon as the hand-held firearms became practical. In both cases the pike period had been skipped (in the case of Russia the pike was introduced as the infantry weapon only in the 1650’s, being a part of the “westernization”).
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(*) It is important to notice that the pikemen in question were high quality troops with the strong fighting discipline, not just the ad hoc peasant levies. Socially, the Swiss could be mostly peasants but they were clearly trained to act in the formations. The landsknechts became professionals soon after they had been created. The Scottish shiltrons are not necessarily a good example of anything because they seemingly were not composed out of ...er... “peaceful peasants” and their performance, with a famous exception of Bannockburn, which was a massive screwup of the English leadership while Robert the Bruce “drilled his troops in the offensive use of the pike (requiring great discipline)”, hardly was an encouraging example because more often than not the Scots tended to lose their discipline when going o; offensive. The Flemish
city militias had been well-trained (not to mention that they were seemingly preferring relatively short pole arms like the halberds and goddendags). During the Italian wars the French had been hiring the pikemen from Switzerland, Germany, Gascony and Italy but rarely from France (judging by Bayard’s biography, there were some attempts during the reign of Louis XII).
Quality was the main factor for hiring and you hardly can expect it from the untrained peasants.