[Pedro Paulo Gaião]

[Ryan S.]

[Augusto Boer Bront]

[Pedro Paulo Gaião]

[Sean Manning]

please delete

[Sean Manning]

[Sean Manning]

[Graham Shearlaw]

[Anthony Clipsom]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

As Augusto Boer Bront notes, a number of period sources suggest that crossbows spanned in methods that relied on the spanner's strength, like belt hooks & goat's-foot levers, had similar power to warbows. The description of encounters Iberian & French crossbowers had against English archers in El Victorial would be one example. In the 1590s, Sir John Smythe appears to have thought English bows & goat's-foot-lever-spanned crossbow would perform about equally on horseback; he wanted mixture of mounted archers & crossbowers. Other authors, like Raimond de Fourquevaux, generally lumped crossbows & bows together. I suspect this reflects how good military crossbowers who used spanning methods like belts & levers conditioned themselves just as much as good military archers. They probably could span heavier crossbows with these methods than most anyone can today, because nobody trains spanning heavy crossbow from the belt or with a lever as intensively as people do with bows. Perhaps someday more people will attempt to recreate the martial art of the crossbow at a high level.

Steel prods remain a bit of an enigma. Even if period ones performed better than current replicas, it's unlikely they were more efficient than high-quality horn prods. & horn prods weigh much less at any given draw weight, so crossbows with steel prods must have been at a disadvantage against in horn prods in terms of performance. Bichler's horn crossbow that draws 1,200lbs & manages 146 foot-lbs with a relatively light bolt only weighs 7.7lbs. That's probably light enough for convenient use on horseback. By contrast, the steel crossbow Ralph Payne-Gallwey used for his famous shot weighed 18lbs. Thus, the use of steel prods must have resulted from economic & reliability considerations rather than pure performance. Horn prods perform better or worse depending on the weather & how carefully they're maintained, such as being kept dry. Steel prods have fewer issues in that regard.

The history of the crossbow overall contains many confuses elements. It's not necessarily true that crossbows improved with time. Some evidence indicates they got worse. The subject remains heavily contested, but it's possible that ancient Chinese crossbows hit about as hard as Bichler's cranequin-spanned horn crossbow. If so, this required strength, rather awkward spanning movements, & more space than most later crossbow designs. Ancient Chinese crossbows unquestionably had sophisticated trigger mechanisms & grid sights. By the Ming era, at least many military crossbows were simpler & generally weaker; that one manual I previously mentioned & linked to recommended crossbows it explicitly described as weaker than a 50lb bow. It made this recommendation on the grounds of cost & the ease of shooting crossbows compared with bows. Likewise, a number of earlier European rave about the power the crossbow, such as Anna Komnene's famous hyperbole, while 15th-century texts seem less excited & tend to praise English bows more than crossbows or consider them equivalent. One account supposedly even calls a close-range volley from over a thousand crossbows as inflicting about as much damage "as a shower of rotten apples." Across the world & especially in China, the bow ultimately far outlasted the crossbow as a military weapon employed in large numbers. It's not an easy record to make sense out of.

My tentative conclusion is that historical crossbows had the advantage of accuracy (all else being equal) & greater ability to shoot from cover. These are key benefits. At least the good ones spanned with methods that required strength roughly matched the power of a yew bow, although perhaps not a Manchu-style bow. Even modest cranequin- or windlass-spanned crossbows with horn prods matched the heaviest yew bows, while the largest of these probably equally or surpassed the mightiest Manchu-style bows in kinetic energy. As with bows, many historical crossbows used for war weren't of the highest quality or used by the strongest soldiers; thus, some had mediocre or worse performance. Simple crossbows with wooden or light steel prods still launched a bolt with sufficient power to hunt medium-sized game & threaten unarmored or poorly armored humans.

[Wilhelm S.]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Just a couple of quick points -

There is ZERO period evidence that steel prod crossbows were less effective than composite prod. To the contrary, they seemed to be preferred except for use in very cold weather.

There is no distinction in any military regulation I know of, or any of the shooting contest records, which suggests that there is any difference in power between steel and composite prod weapons. The distinction that is made is between crossbows spanned with different devices.

Cranequin and windlass spanning still does require strength. The only weapon that really didn't require strength to reload was a firearm.

Windlass spanners were not used very much in Central Europe as they were considered slow and clumsy. The Germans called them "English-winders"

Crossbows were still being used alongside firearms on the battlefield well into the 16th Century in places like Switzerland, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Scotland, and Scandinavia.

Horse ownership was not restricted to nobles! Even wealthier peasants routinely owned multiple horses. Most mounted crossbowmen in Central and Northern Europe, and Italy, were burghers. In Flanders burghers of a certain class were typically obligated to serve within the lance of barons (or patrician equivalent)

Training varied based on which part of Europe, but in Central Europe and Italy it was mostly based on shooting sports.

The guild regulations posted by Augusto Boer Bront are very similar to those for the armorers craft in Venice, which stipulated testing different grades of armor with the 'piccolo' and 'largo' crossbow, and marking the dents.This was later changed to pistol and arquebus proofing in the mid-16th Century.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

[Mark Millman]

Folks,

I note that at this moment in the discussion, we risk reviving a point of confusion that has occurred in previous discussions of crossbows. Please remember that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing and should not be confused. Efficiency is a measure, based in physics, of how well the crossbow's stored energy is transferred to the bolt and is generally not a good criterion for comparison of one crossbow's usefulness to that of another. Effectiveness is an assessment, based on overall real-world performance, of a crossbow's advantages or disadvantages compared to other crossbows. For example, a steel-prod crossbow, which is less efficient than composite-prod crossbows, will need a higher draw weight to shoot the same weight of bolt the same distance as composite-prod bows. But as long as a steel-prod crossbow and a composite-prod crossbow shoot the same bolt the same distance, regardless of the draw weights, they both shoot equally effectively. (I neglect here other factors, such as expense of production, ease of maintenance, and effect of climatic conditions on performance, that may influence decisions about which sort of prod may be preferred by any organization or individual at any particular time.)

I hope this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Good point about effective vs. efficient, but...

The idea that the steel prod weapons are less effective or efficient is, as far as I'm aware, totally new. It seems to be based on the very new data (as in the last ten years) that has begun to be aggregated about tests with replicas. There are a fair number of tinkerers and replica arms makers who have made relatively high draw-weight steel-prod crossbows, but the composite / or horn prod types have proven to be much harder to produce. So far as I know, only one person has successfully made some that worked for a sustained period, and that would be Andreas Bichler.

There have been a couple of other attempts to create composite prod weapons in the past, I know of one University study where they made three such weapons, but they all delaminated after about 4 shots. Prior to Bichler, around here and in some other online venues, the general consensus was that the medieval records and the famous experiment by Ralph Payne Gallwey were wrong, and that our modern tests with replicas proved that medieval type (i.e. short power stroke) crossbows simply didn't work nearly as well as their reputation (and reams of medieval records) suggested.

Then Bichler posted some videos showing a few of his composite prod weapons being tested and producing high energy levels (for example 69 m/s velocity with an 81 gram bolt) certainly in the ballpark of the medieval records. But he doesn't (so far) post any videos with steel prod weapons and he may not have made any. Unless this guy is faking his results, which I doubt as he seems to be a serious academic, this overturns the previous (lightly arrived upon) theory.

So now there is a new theory that steel prod weapons are less efficient.

The thing is, what distinguishes Bichler is not just that he makes wood and horn prod weapons, it's that he is an academic who has done very deep study of the construction methods of original weapons and has examined numerous antiques (he's also done some fascinating work on antique pavises). So far as I've been able to determine, the people who have made steel prod replicas have not done this kind of deep dive, very much to the contrary. Those I have corresponded with or talked to have made them with thoroughly modern methods and materials and not necessarily even to the exact dimensions of the antiques. It is possible to make a steel prod crossbow that won't snap let alone 'de-laminate', and I think much easier to do so than with a horn prod weapon, but that does not mean that it's been created the same way as a period weapon or will perform the same.

Benjamin is right about one thing - the steel bows which were quite ubiquitous in Central and South Asia, and which were considered efficacious enough in the 16tth-17th Century to have been in wide military use including by the Mughals, also deserve more study. As with crossbows, there appear to have been many different grades and subtypes of these bows, even though to the modern eye they all look very similar. I think this is a source of confusion about their nature. There is no doubt that when it comes to ferrous metallurgy, South Asia and the Indian Subcontinent were far ahead of most other parts of the world.




I think so far what I see in all this is just people tending to disbelieve the period records, or assume that they are
incomplete or lacking (based on what?) when in fact, they are just tailoring a theory to fit quite scant modern evidence, and because it fits certain preconceptions. Crossbwos have not had the nationalistic significance of longbows (the ones used by France in their various catastrophic defeats against the English were not, for the most part, carried by French marksmen, but by foreign mercenaries) or "Orientalist" appeal like the the recurve bow. They instead tend to fall under the negative tropes about all things medieval, which also impacts medieval firearms and until just a few years ago used to taint our perceptions of medieval swords and body armor.

So as a result, we haven't had that much research on crossbows compared to many other types of medieval weapons.

One thing is for sure, we need much more research done. But until I see new data, I tend to believe the primary literary sources on this. I don't believe that ineffective weapons were used in dozens of realms and polities in life and death struggles for centuries because of "fashion" or because they lacked the moral fiber or cleverness to adapt allegedly superior longbows or recurves. They actually did use both longbows and recurves all over Continental Europe (you'll find them very popular sport weapons in the various Societies of St. Sebastian in hundreds of towns), but for warfare they tended to rely on those short powerstroke crossbows, and then gradually replaced these with firearms.

We don't yet fully understand why.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

I should add, I am not saying any of this to denigrate modern tinkerers or replica makers. I admire the skill of these people and love these replicas myself - I would be delighted to have one even if it couldn't make anywhere near 70 m/s shots. I have a few (modern) crossbows and none of them are as pretty as some of these replicas are.

I also like seeing all the experiments done with these things on youtube and so on, and have enjoyed watching over the years as they are gradually improved. I just don't think we should conflate these playful, casual experiments with the serious research being done by guys like Bichler and others. Before we draw conclusions about history, I think we need to a bit more cautious and systematic in the data we include in our analysis.

[Sean Manning]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

The thing is we had a lot of 'back of the envelope calculations, many dating from the 70s, which claimed that swords could break your ribs and knock you out or give you brain hemhoragges through plate armor, that medieval armor was crude. Then we saw Bohurt. We saw "Secrets of the Shining Knight'. We got Knight and the Blast Furnace.

Then we had all these assurances that medieval swords were 'sharpened crowbars', yada yada. Now we have Peter Johnsson.

We were told quite confidently for quite a long time that Europeans didn't have martial arts. Now we have 250+ medieval fencing manuals.

I've talked about all this crossbow prod issue with engineers numerous times.

I don't think a period crossbow prod is the same thing as a modern truck spring any more than I believe a 15th Century sword is the same as a Walmart machete.

For me, with this specific subject and many others, I tend to believe the period sources (in aggregate) until something really compelling convinces me otherwise. I.e. back of the envelope ain't gonna cut it. Over time I have seen the period records turn out to be correct about what was going on in the period over and over again. With regard to the crossbow, there are just too many sources, over too long a span of time, in too many languages, for me to assume they are wrong and some modern engineer or replica maker knows better. With all due respect.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

As I posted about on here nearly a decade ago now, one intriguing tidbit about steel-prod crossbow design comes from the Crossbow Building Wiki. The link to download the spreadsheet isn't working for me now for some reason, but I still have it from a previous download. The steel-prod crossbow Gamma v4, drawing 150kg over a 25.7cm powerstroke, managed 71.16 m/s with a 29.39g bolt for 74.42 J. Assuming a linear force curve, that's an efficiency of close to 40%. With an 80.82g bolt, the crossbow shot 50.26 m/s for 102.1 J & 54.69% efficiency. It's not a medieval design but Gamma v4 does provide a basis for reasonably efficient steel-prod crossbow shooting at high velocity. The steel-prod crossbow Ralph Payne-Gallwey described would deliver 190 J with a relatively light bolt at 40% efficiency (again assuming a linear force curve). That's beyond what any yew warbow could do but probably not quite enough for his claimed 420m shot.

I hope we can all agree that historical European crossbow were effective enough weapons in their context. High-quality crossbows shot by skilled hands could & did compete with high-quality bows wielded by skilled archers. The weight of the evidence makes this clear. We don't know exactly how powerful they were, but we know European crossbows saw widespread use for centuries. (Designs varied across this period of use, of course.) I've been emphasizing the crossbow's advantage in accuracy & shooting from cover because that doesn't depend on the details of performance in terms of velocity & kinetic. Raimond de Fourquevaux's praise of crossbows underscores this. Fourquevaux gave an account of a single crossbower at Thurin who killed & wounded more of the enemy in five or six skirmishes than the best five or six arquebusiers did during the entire time of the siege in question. He wrote in the middle of the 16th century, many years after most European armies has stopped fielding large numbers of crossbowers. Despite this shift, Fourquevaux still thought the crossbow had certain advantages over the arquebus. (Fourquevaux lumped bows & crossbows together, praising both, but his specific example featured a crossbow.)

[Sean Manning]