Do you agree with the theory that Chinese guns didn't develop to the size and complexity of European ones due to their massive earthen walls?

[dandan_noodles]

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.

They only appear circular if you don't grasp the nuance. I never said they were better than muskets; I said they don't require more training than muskets to use. In every other way save rate of fire, the musket was unequivocally superior. This superiority more than counterbalanced the greater complexity of the manual of arms and the slower rate of fire. Moreover, in 1593, there were still plenty of archers, and many of the authors who wrote most strongly against the longbow had themselves practiced with it in their youth, as the mandatory shooting laws were still being enforced; in the 17th century, the Stuart kings at times raised thousands of archers for expeditions. When these authors write that bows are good for untrained men compared to the musket, we should accept that they knew more about their use than we do.

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.

Not really. Scottish schiltrons, Flemish guild militia, and the Swiss all show that pikes were perfectly serviceable for non-professional soldiers. Again, six days vs sixty.

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.

The bow didn't need a social class for its manpower pool either. The time and money spent training musketeers could quite probably furnish more bowmen; the reason this wasn't done was because fewer musketeers was more effective than more archers. Better to use your finite resources to raise 500 musketeers than 1500 bowmen.

 

[alexmilman]

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”).

____
(*) 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.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

If bows were really better but harder to use than muskets, we should expect bow-based armies to routinely trounce handgun-based ones, expect when the handgunners significantly outnumbered them. Instead, we see the complete opposite. Plus, crossbows had equal or greater range, accuracy and penetration power compared to bows, but don't require great physical strength to use, so ease of use were the issue, it would surely have made more sense to adopt the crossbow than the handgun.

Also, historiography of 18th-century armies usually suggests that generals of the period tried to avoid battle because soldiers were expensive and difficult to train and replace. By the 18th century, of course, muskets had become the dominant weapon in European warfare, so if any peasant could become a proficient musketeer within a couple of weeks, then logically it should have been far easier to replace casualties than in previous eras.

 

[Jürgen]

If bows were really better but harder to use than muskets, we should expect bow-based armies to routinely trounce handgun-based ones, expect when the handgunners significantly outnumbered them. Instead, we see the complete opposite. Plus, crossbows had equal or greater range, accuracy and penetration power compared to bows, but don't require great physical strength to use, so ease of use were the issue, it would surely have made more sense to adopt the crossbow than the handgun.

Also, historiography of 18th-century armies usually suggests that generals of the period tried to avoid battle because soldiers were expensive and difficult to train and replace. By the 18th century, of course, muskets had become the dominant weapon in European warfare, so if any peasant could become a proficient musketeer within a couple of weeks, then logically it should have been far easier to replace casualties than in previous eras.

they were different in structural, scale and economical make up. Mercenary companies were private companies, 18th Armies was run by the state, which meant they was far more able to replace losses, an was far more able to deal with unhappy soldiers, which ironic made them less internal brutal, because their power was more absolute. If a mercenary leader lost most of his soldier or loot,he would risk being lynched, if the same happened to a officer, he wouldn’t be at the same risk.

States simply does violence far better than private actors.

 

[alexmilman]

If bows were really better but harder to use than muskets, we should expect bow-based armies to routinely trounce handgun-based ones, expect when the handgunners significantly outnumbered them. Instead, we see the complete opposite.

The logic is convincing but, with the exception of medieval England, there were no “bow-based armies” anywhere in the Western/Central Europe so the whole issue of “bow vs. handgun” is almost purely theoretical. 🤗

 

[Fabius Maximus]

The logic is convincing but, with the exception of medieval England, there were no “bow-based armies” anywhere in the Western/Central Europe so the whole issue of “bow vs. handgun” is almost purely theoretical. 🤗

To be fair, I think you could make an argument that there weren't really "musket-based" armies during the bow-to-musket transition period, either, given that most soldiers were still armed with pikes rather than any kind of missile weapon. Regardless, I was being a bit imprecise in my terminology: for "bow-based" read "armies using bows as their primary missile weapon", and the same, mutatis mutandis, for "handgun-based". The point being, of course, that when such armies met, the one with the most handguns generally came out victorious, even when they didn't have huge swarms of cheap peasant levies at their disposal.

 

[snerfuplz]

The Testudo original comprised of shot, musket, and long sword but the number of shot increased as firearms improved and long swords were dropped. Once volley fire was adopted the Testudo was less effective

 

[dandan_noodles]

I think the place where the logic of big walls -> small guns falls down a bit is the fact that big guns aren't only useful for knocking down walls. As anyone from a Napoleonic battlefield could tell you, guns in the 500-1000 lb weight class were really, really good at killing people, too, so if the Chinese were just improving anti-personnel weapons, you'd think they'd arrive at relatively heavy field artillery too, just from the other end of the stick.

 

[alexmilman]

To be fair, I think you could make an argument that there weren't really "musket-based" armies during the bow-to-musket transition period, either, given that most soldiers were still armed with pikes rather than any kind of missile weapon. Regardless, I was being a bit imprecise in my terminology: for "bow-based" read "armies using bows as their primary missile weapon", and the same, mutatis mutandis, for "handgun-based". The point being, of course, that when such armies met, the one with the most handguns generally came out victorious, even when they didn't have huge swarms of cheap peasant levies at their disposal.

Sorry, you did not quite understand what I was saying. There was no meaningful “bow-to-musket transition period” in the Western Europe outside England because none of the continental armies had it as a primary missile weapon, this role had been taken by the crossbows. With, as you yourself noticed, most of the troops being armed with the pole arms, it make sense to talk about “pike-to-musket” transition.

I’m not sure how these “huge swarms of cheap peasant levies” are relevant to anything because it does not look like the English during the 100YW had these levies used in France and the armies of the Wars of the Roses involved, AFAIK, reasonably small armies. The closest thing to the “peasant levies” in France, the Franc-archers, were not too numerous (each parish an archer should be chosen from among the most apt in the use of arms) and had been quite expensive for their parishes (the 1448 ordonnance specified the equipment of the archer as a sallet helmet, dagger, sword, a bow, a sheath of arrows, a jerkin and a coat of mail). And while they initially started as the archers, in less than two decades (16 years) they started switching to the pike and then had been abolished for a lousy performance and a lack of a discipline. When later reestablished, they were pike and firearms.


Not sure if the bow-vs-handguns (within your definition) armies ever met in the big battles of the Western Europe (plenty examples for the Eastern with a variety of outcomes): the 2 last battles of the 100YW involved artillery on the French side and even if we assume that some of the alleged 300 firearms at Castillon were some kind of the early hand-held weapons, the bows on the English side had been irrelevant because Talbot, instead of the traditional defensive tactics, was storming a fortified position. While at Monthlery the archers were present at least among the Burgundians (Louis seemingly had mostly cavalry) there is no mentioning of the handguns, the whole battle was extremely chaotic and at least on the side of the League of the Public Weal the "winning" English tactics was not used because most of the knights refuse to dismount. During the Burgundian Wars the losing side had all available types of the missile weapons and the winning one relied upon a pike. At Guinegate (1479) the French side had numerous "marksmen" while the Hapsburg side relied upon the pike formation (no mentioning of the firearms). The French lost.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

Sorry, you did not quite understand what I was saying. There was no meaningful “bow-to-musket transition period” in the Western Europe outside England because none of the continental armies had it as a primary missile weapon, this role had been taken by the crossbows.

So what? The same dynamic can be seen in the Middle East, India, Japan, Korea, and the New World. Even if we exclude Western Europe from consideration because they used crossbows rather than "real" bows, there are still plenty of data points to choose from.

 

[alexmilman]

So what? The same dynamic can be seen in the Middle East, India, Japan, Korea, and the New World. Even if we exclude Western Europe from consideration because they used crossbows rather than "real" bows, there are still plenty of data points to choose from.

Why should we exclude it? Just because there were no examples of the scenario you were talking about? Conversation, so far, was exclusively about the Western Europe, not about the whole world because warfare was not uniform all over the world and had been different even in the Eastern Europe where, as I pointed out more than once, bow-vs.-handgun was a realistic scenario all the way into the XVIII. Needless to say that in that region the armies with the handguns were not always winning against those with the bows until 1730s. We can discuss this specific region if you wish.

BTW, proposed replacement of the bows with the crossbows does not change anything unless you can describe tactics of which European armies had been built around the extensive usage of the crossbows along the same lines as the English tactics was built around the bows. The fact that some weapons had been present does not make them tactically decisive or we would have to consider "rapier armies", "Katzbalger armies", etc.

If you want to broaden the subject by including the rest of the world, it is fine but you'd need to go area by area and define time frame for each (in Japan the hand-held firearms started appearing in big numbers only post-1453, in India Babur "introduced" them in 1526 but most of Aurangzeb 's soldiers still used bows, which makes it late XVII century) because it is quite obvious that eventually the firearms won everywhere and that makes discussion pretty much pointless.

 

[Jürgen]

Why should we exclude it? Just because there were no examples of the scenario you were talking about? Conversation, so far, was exclusively about the Western Europe, not about the whole world because warfare was not uniform all over the world and had been different even in the Eastern Europe where, as I pointed out more than once, bow-vs.-handgun was a realistic scenario all the way into the XVIII. Needless to say that in that region the armies with the handguns were not always winning against those with the bows until 1730s. We can discuss this specific region if you wish.

BTW, proposed replacement of the bows with the crossbows does not change anything unless you can describe tactics of which European armies had been built around the extensive usage of the crossbows along the same lines as the English tactics was built around the bows. The fact that some weapons had been present does not make them tactically decisive or we would have to consider "rapier armies", "Katzbalger armies", etc.

If you want to broaden the subject by including the rest of the world, it is fine but you'd need to go area by area and define time frame for each (in Japan the hand-held firearms started appearing in big numbers only post-1453, in India Babur "introduced" them in 1526 but most of Aurangzeb 's soldiers still used bows, which makes it late XVII century) because it is quite obvious that eventually the firearms won everywhere and that makes discussion pretty much pointless.

Honestly a interesting aspect is how much do sources outside the Anglosphere talk about archery. When I have read about the military importance of different weapons Europe in Danish literature, the longbow is completely ignored. The obsession with the longbow seem very much a English thing, and it honestly remind me of the people who keep talking about the Katana. I suspect that if French had stayed the Lingua Franca, pretty much no one outside UK would know how glorious a weapon the longbow was.

 

[snerfuplz]

The longbow was the cultural symbol of England. Hence why it was so hard to let go and why they kept using it long after they should have given it up

 

[alexmilman]

Honestly a interesting aspect is how much do sources outside the Anglosphere talk about archery. When I have read about the military importance of different weapons Europe in Danish literature, the longbow is completely ignored. The obsession with the longbow seem very much a English thing, and it honestly remind me of the people who keep talking about the Katana. I suspect that if French had stayed the Lingua Franca, pretty much no one outside UK would know how glorious a weapon the longbow was.

The bows as a military weapon had been quite common in the Eastern Europe but they had been different from the longbows and varied from the simple small wooden bows to the powerful composite bows. At least by the XIII century they were mostly (but not exclusively) a cavalry weapon. It is more or less clear that in the pre-Mongolian period bows of both the the European nomads (Kipchaks) and their Russian neighbors were weak and the horse archers on the Russian side had been used just as the advance troops while the Kipchaks (Polovtsy) were considered rather weak opponent.


The only (or almost only) mentioning of the English archers in the Eastern European context was related to Tannenberg: the Order army had some English longbowmen but they were kept in a wagenburg and mostly exterminated when it was stormed on the last stage of a battle.

The bow remained the main weapon of the Tatars (the Golden and then Crimean Horde) until XVIII and, while it was quite popular weapon in the post-Mongolian Russia, I’m not sure if it was the main weapon for any considerable period and they started introducing the firearms (artillery first) as soon as they became available because in archery they were clearly inferior to the Tatars. The whole situation was rather complicated and changing over time so I’m not going to go into the details.



There was a band of the English mercenaries under John Hawkwood operating with a noticeable success in Italy in mid-XIV century and probably more cases here and there but definitely no cult of it.

Quite agree with what you wrote about Lingua Franca: Shakespeare and Walter Scott provided unbelievable PR for that weapon 😂

 

[Belisarius II]

Fabius Maximus said:
So what? The same dynamic can be seen in the Middle East, India, Japan, Korea, and the New World. Even if we exclude Western Europe from consideration because they used crossbows rather than "real" bows, there are still plenty of data points to choose from.


"alexmilman, post: 20889549, member: 112942"]
Why should we exclude it? Just because there were no examples of the scenario you were talking about? Conversation, so far, was exclusively about the Western Europe, not about the whole world because warfare was not uniform all over the world and had been different even in the Eastern Europe where, as I pointed out more than once, bow-vs.-handgun was a realistic scenario all the way into the XVIII. Needless to say that in that region the armies with the handguns were not always winning against those with the bows until 1730s. We can discuss this specific region if you wish.

BTW, proposed replacement of the bows with the crossbows does not change anything unless you can describe tactics of which European armies had been built around the extensive usage of the crossbows along the same lines as the English tactics was built around the bows. The fact that some weapons had been present does not make them tactically decisive or we would have to consider "rapier armies", "Katzbalger armies", etc.

If you want to broaden the subject by including the rest of the world, it is fine but you'd need to go area by area and define time frame for each (in Japan the hand-held firearms started appearing in big numbers only post-1453, in India Babur "introduced" them in 1526 but most of Aurangzeb 's soldiers still used bows, which makes it late XVII century) because it is quite obvious that eventually the firearms won everywhere and that makes discussion pretty much pointless.
[/QUOTE]

I've been liking both of you because I don't think your really that far apart. You both always make excellent comments, and your analysis are well backed up by with interesting facts. I think it's clear the transition to firearms was a long steady process, with some bumps along the way. Rapier Armies, that's funny, but yes even today soldiers carry knives, and bayonets, but we're not going back to swordsmanship. My wife's great, great, great grandfather fought at Gettysburg, as a cannoneer in a Pennsylvania battery. My nephew was proud to take his sword to school one day to show the class. It looked something like a Roman Gladius, with a different hilt. I guess he picked it up somewhere for personal protection, if the enemy got to close. My point is it was hardly standard Issue for the Union Army. Till later both of you take care, and keep your powder dry, and your blades sharp.