Bows could shoot faster and further but you would tire out. You also had to be a trained archer vs a random nobody with a gun. Becoming an archer was hard, and arrows were a lot more expensive.
1k longbowmen beat 1k musket bros, but that’s not the comparison that really mattered.
They were at least 2000 years behind Europe in weapons and armor technology. Some cultures had bronze weapons, but no iron smelting or steel.
Even before muskets started becoming common, European professional infantry had largely abandoned shields. Mass produced plate armor provided sufficient protection from arrows, and two-handed pikes were better than a pike and a shield.
On the other hand, bows became more effective again as muskets improved. When a musket could penetrate any reasonable armor, personal protection became less important.
> The reason could not have been a better technical performance, because preindustrial firearms were in almost every respect inferior to bows.... The only technical advantage of early firearms was their lethality.
shame; there's a lot more you can do with a bow and arrow than a bullet and gun, like throwing a guide line over a tree
And unlike armor, a musket is not made to fit. Even if you tried, you wouldn't have been able to stockpile quality armor for a time of need, outside a privileged warrior class (who did wear armor to battle)
> The only technical advantage of early firearms was their lethality.
The article doesn't mention it - but firearms generally have a far greater psychological "punch" than bows & arrows. Especially when used at any scale, or against opponents unfamiliar with them - as would be the case for all but veteran troops, back in the early firearms era.
This is not very good history. Firearms didn’t replace bows and crossbows, nor did crossbows ever fully replace bows. Almost all premodern and early modern Western armies predominantly used melee weapons; eventually, they standardized on the pike. Most Western armies first used firearms in pike-and-shot formations that combined pikemen and arquebusiers. Over time, especially as the arquebus gave way to the flintlock musket, the relative proportions of pikes to firearms shifted towards firearms more and more. The invention of bayonets, which allowed the musket to be used similarly to a pike in close combat, led to the end of pikes.
The musket, and especially the arquebus, was not the lethal and precise kind of firearm we have today. There is a reason the Patriots at Bunker Hill held their fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes: if you lost your nerve and shot any sooner than that, you were unlikely to make a lethal hit. The reason musket battles took the form of formations of line infantry exchanging volleys of gunfire is because that was the best way to use the musket, not because Western armies and the men who organized them were stupid.
Which also ties into the training question. Most training at the time focused on close-order formation drills, not on individual prowess. This was true for Napoleonic infantry just as it had been true for pikemen, Roman legions, and Greek phalanxes. Victory depended on line infantry working as a cohesive, disciplined unit that wouldn’t break or shatter easily.
Okay, so what about archers? In the Western context, archers were part of what we today would call “combined arms” to supplement line melee infantry. The idea that “it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare” is partially true. It was especially true of the English longbow, but that was an outlier in many ways in being an unusually long and heavy bow which could pierce armor. The English longbow requires years of training mostly because of the extreme draw weight, which was atypical among Western bows. It was kind of true for steppe horse archers, except it was less training and more of a way of life for them.
As for “expanding the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers”, training was never a meaningful bottleneck for that in the pre-firearms era. Training time was important for professional soldiers, but the bulk of medieval armies were poorly trained peasants armed with melee weapons, and the bottleneck on calling them up had more to do with the need for farm labor.
"I don't know, maybe because bow is a peasants' weapon, and France had knigts?"
If you read the abstract (I'm not saying you didn't), you'll see that this is what they are saying. The TL;DR version is that using longbows meant training peasants, which will pose internal security problems. England was more stable at this time so it was less dangerous for them to train peasants to fight.
Nostalgic - Mongols using silk shirts to make removing arrows easier was a favorite anecdote of my World History teacher in High School. Movies and stories always make pre-gunpowder war seem like a face-to-face battle between warriors, but arrows were always the biggest killer, both in battle and through attrition due to infections and laming. Another anecdote I always remembered was that the lead balls fired by early muskets were often more deadly than modern firearms because they were so slow and heavy that when they got into the body they wouldn't pass through but instead roll around along the bones and mess up the insides, similar to the modern street lore about .22 pistols being the worst to get shot with.
At the very least though, you'd have thought they could have sacrificed crossbowmen to achieve that improved rate of fire from longbows. Presumably the reason they didn't had less to do with fear of better bowmen and more to do with inability to provide the quality of longbows and training that would convince crossbowmen to change their weaponry.
Not to mention the advent or heavily armored pike formations that shrugged off arrows. Muskets we’re after som trial na error able to punch through the best plate armor.
Sounds like a slippery slope. First we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows, then somebody will want to replace bows and arrows with slings and rocks.
> For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior cross-
bow.
> England alone, for a 150-year window in late medieval Europe, was politically stable enough to render the longbow its rulers’ optimal technology choice. In contrast, in France and Scotland political instability prevailed, rendering the crossbow the optimal technology choice for rulers in these nations.
not even then - the English longbow went through armor like butter - it pissed the Aristocracy off to no end that a commoner could kill them from a distance.
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