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
It’s simple really, a musket ball has much more energy than an arrow does. A musket ball will go clean through plate armor that an arrow would bounce off of. There’s always evolving strategies. Archers with longbows would stand way off and pelt the enemy, so they started using heavy cavalry to run down enemy archers. A few big dudes in heavy plate armor with armored horses. Kind of like medieval tanks. They could ride right up on the archers with that armor. The musket made the heavy cavalry obsolete. You’d get a few dozen musketeers firing in volly, with reloads happening behind the firing line. Even a charger at full gallop would be exposed to one or more volleys while within range. If you put your musketeers in some armor good enough to stop arrows, they’re all but unbeatable, except by other musketeers, so now everyone needs muskets.
Bows are not more efficient or more effective in battle. Before asking the question, you should ask if the premise is true.
The people who used muskets realized and even wrote down how much more effective they were at killing targets and causing panic than mere archery.
Range: Muskets have been badly underrated for how far they can shoot, while (longbow) arrows have been overrated. A musketball can travel over 1000 meters, while longbow arrows can not.
At 300 meters you can still hit targets in formation.
At 100 meters you can hit single targets fairly reliably.
At less than 50 meters most soldiers can hit their targets, which makes volley fire absolutely devastating.
Damage: Musket balls travel much faster than arrows and are heavy enough to do tremendous damage. A body hit will likely kill or incapacitate a man. Meanwhile a soldier hit with an arrow in the chest might even be able to fight back for some time before blood loss and infections take them down.
Speed: Arrows can be shot faster than Musket. However, to shoot deadly arrows with good range and penetrative power you need heavy warbows and strong archers. But even these can’t keep up fast reload for long before becoming exhausted. Reloading and shooting muskets , while complex, can be kept up for a long time.
There are other factors in favor of muskets, but these will do for now. Most importantly, they tried both, and the sides with muskets won more.
* Ease of use. It took two weeks to train a musketman to the point where he could participate in battle. It took a lot more time to train a crossbowman and years to train a longbow archer. The favored tactics of the late 16th and early 17th century, the Pike&Shot, was mostly adopted because how fast you could train large armies. Pike drill and musket drill were very simple compared to how difficult it was to train a decent archer or swordsman.
* Armor penetration. There wasn’t a lot of armor that could resist a musket bullet. The cuirassier remained in armies for quite a while, but the cuirassiers armor was mainly there to resist the bullets from cavalry pistols (giving them an advantage in fighting other cavalry), not those of a full-length musket.
* Gunpowder and lead balls were cheaper. It was expensive to manufacture arrows and bolts (and they required specialized craftsmen, both arrowsmiths and fletchers and sourcing feathers for fletching was a project in itself). Meanwhile gunpowder could be manufactured on an industrial scale and lead balls were so simple to make that anyone could do it with the proper molds (and hundreds of them could be made in a single hour). Lead was also plentiful and a byproduct of many types of mining (silver mines for example tended to produce a lot of lead).
Muskets were used in warfare before they were bigger and had more powerful shots than the arquebus and other primitive firearms that preceded them, and was better at penetrating heavy armor that might be “proof” to an arquebus’s ball.
But I’m guessing that’s not really the answer to the question you wanted to ask, and that what you’re really asking is why did those primitive firearms replace bows and arrows and crossbows.
And the answer is, despite all the testing people do and all the theories about ease of training and cost effectiveness, and such, the people who were writing around in times and places where they were considering adopting the arquebus almost all of them seemed to have recognized that the arquebus was a superior weapon, and that was that. Arquebuses just killed people better than bows do. Common factors you see brought up on reddit like the training requirements for bows and arrows or costs are complete myths. This is what the historical records show and this is what historical people said in their writings.
I think the best proof of the material superiority of arquebus as a weapon compared to the bow is if you look at its introduction in Japan.
The Japanese who were first introduced to Portuguese arquebus did not have any shortage of expert bowmen. The bow and the spear were the strongest battlefield weapons in Japan at the time, and it was a time when skilled bowmen were in very high demand and there were very many of them. Nevertheless, when daimyo saw the arquebus, they seemed to have instantly realized their military value and tried to buy or make as many as possible. And not only did they equip common soldiers with the weapon, they also equipped their samurai with it – those same samurai who had already been practiced in the bow and who were already hardened bowmen. This was a society at the height of bow culture, and any argument based on ease of training would have been laughed at here. There were many people you could find who had skill with the bow, and there were not many guns that you could get your hands on because they were an import, or something which you had to build up manufacturing for from the ground up. Yet daimyo still sought guns in quantities of “I will buy as many as you can sell, please and thank you.”
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