From a layman’s point-of-view it seems like the Bow & Arrow would be better for war since they, shoot much more efficiently, are cheaper to make and in even some cases significantly stronger.
I know that learning to shoot a bow is no easy task so would that be the main reason muskets became so popular?
In my simple man’s brain I’m wondering why you don’t see or hear anything about bows being used during something like the American Revolutionary war. Could it be that by then muskets had reached a certain level of design that made it more useful than a bow?
In: Engineering
so, theirs a few factors,, but the two biggest are:
**armour penetration:** while bullet proofed metal amour was a thing (indeed, some suits were sold with the dent of a pistol shot in them, as proof they could stop it) It *significantly* increased the weight and cost of armour, and muskets got better at piercing armour pretty quickly. This is part of the reason for the decline in plate armour usage in the early modern period, though not the only or even primary one.
**training time**: this is a biggie. quite simply, it takes a great deal of effort and training to handle high power warbows in combat conditions for a useful period of time. Their was a saying along the lines of “to train an archer, start with his grandfather”. It really was something you had to grow up with as a cultural thing, and needed literally life-long practice and exercise to develop and maintain the musculature for prolonged high power bow useage, as being able to do it once was not really useful, compared to the dozens of even hundreds of times a battle they might be called upon to fire, this meant that their was something of a hard limit on how many archers you could raise, and significant losses among them might cripple your army for a literal generation or more until new archers could be grown form childhood.
compared to this, a musket was dirt easy to train on, you could learn it to an acceptable level in a few weeks. losses in musket men could be made good pretty quickly assuming you had the muskets to give them. This helped a wider trend of armies growing larger and more centralised, both of which hindered archers.
that said, it soldiered on for a good while. both bows and guns co-existed for many, many decades, and even as late as the 1600s their was significant numbers of archers in service, so it wasn’t a total and instant change.
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