What stopped medieval armies from spamming archers?

>archer spam is destroyed by any other spam
>what are Mongols

Firearms replaced bows because firearms were better. Not because they were weapons for "plebs". By the late 16th century only the poorest counties still had bowmen in their militias.

quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A05277.0001.001?view=toc

Wales is not a country.

But they are a separate culture, identity and ethnic group to the English

Battle of Legnica shows that heavy armor is shit against horse archers as well.

>Nevertheless, both East and Western designs were much more accurate than early firearms, particularly over longer distances. They had a much higher rate of fire. And they required fewer materials and logistics to manufacture and supply. Surely any military commander would have preferred them over firearms.

>Well, yes. Except for one big disadvantage: bows require a high degree of skill to use proficiently.

>Nieminen points out that while Chinese armies had a huge pool of skilled archers to pick from, European armies did not. The Europeans therefore trained their soldiers to use firearms, which could be done relatively quickly.

technologyreview.com/s/422365/the-puzzling-evolution-of-guns-versus-bows/

I can hardly read what you posted. Pretty bad OCR+Old English.

Your article guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

The period sources are explicit, as are the battles between bowmen and musketeers. Military writers like Montluc, Humphrey Barwick, Roger Williams, Barnabe Riche, and Robert Barret are explicit that bowmen were shit compared to musketeers.

>Wales is not a country

As usual, tactics goes a long way. Shit in war isn't clear cut and dry.

But dude, seriously, armor goes a long way protecting you from arrows.

China was switching to firearms as well. They just couldnt manage to equip everyone with such weapons in their hugeassfuck army. Not to mention Horse Archery was still the missile cavalry par excellence. Not even dragoons can top em in Central Asia. Muzzle Loaders are shit mounted weapons.

The same things that stops modern armies from being nothing but artillery.

Didn't they also kill all the Yew trees in England or something?

Archers are great against footsloggers, but they fold to cavalry and especially to heavily-armored cavalry. The famous English victories at Crecy and Agincourt notwithstanding, the dominance of heavy cavalry in continental warfare tended to depreciate archers. Only England and Wales, without a strong cavalry tradition and under the rule of a single king from very early on, could afford to give archers the status they did.

Why was Angicourt so much different from other engagements?

Terrain, and the eagerness of the French to engage before forming into proper order.

Lots of mud and dumb frogs

For foot archers - heavy cavalry.

Unless you have good conditions like in Agincourt you're gonna get stomped(and even then, archers started doing something significant after they went out of arrows and encircled the French) by them.

For horse archers - ordinary archers - as they will outrange them.

Other than that there's that logistics thing. If you want to do long range salvos like English did, you need to use huge bows, to use huge bows you need trained manpower that is standing soldiers. In medieval world standing army was limited to few thousands people(more 2-3 than 5-7) and that's only in relatively rich countries, levies though... they were everywhere. Of course supplying arrows is also an issue.

lots of drunk frogs

Why weren't Mongols countered by regular archers then?

Here's the war hero Sir Roger Williams on bows ca. 1590.

"Touching Bow men, I persuade my selfe five hundred musketers are more serviceable than fifteene hundred bow-men; from that rate to the greater numbers in all manner of services: my reasons are thus: among 5000. Bowmen, you shall not finde 1000 good Archers, I meane to shoot strong shoots; let them be in the field 3. or 4. months, hardly find of 5000. scarce 500. able to make any strong shootes. In defending or assay∣ling any trenches, lightly they must discover themselues to make faire shoots; where the others shot spoile them, by reason they discover nothing of themselves unlesse it be a litle through small holes. Few or none do any great hurt 12. or 14. score off; they are not to be compared unto the other shoots to line battels...

In our ancient wars, our enemies used Crossebows, and such shoots; few, or any at all had the use of long bowes as we had; wherefore none could compare with us for shot: but GOD forbid we should trie our bowes with their Muskets and Calivers, without the like shot to answere them."

No. English Yew didn't make good bows. The climate is too damp and the trees don't grow straight enough. The best bows were made from Swiss yew. Merchants were required to pay a tariff with imported bow staves.

Nonetheless, the best bows still cost about a tenth of what a musket did.

There were lots of battles similar to Agincourt, where the English took up a strong defensive position and shot the enemy to pieces as they advanced. That tactic stopped working after the battle of Formigny, where the French realized that they could bombard the English with artillery and force them to leave their position.

>to use huge bows you need trained manpower that is standing soldiers.

It is precisely because England was so small and poor, and so unable to field any serious number of expensive knights, that it relied so heavily on archers. Laws compelled English peasants to practise with the longbow, they might become semi-professional war archers during a long campaign but they were ultimately far cheaper to field than a "real" army.

Because Mongols never got into conquering a country that was prepared to fight.

The Mongols were not "just" horse-archers, they carried lances and swords and could double as heavy cavalry against enemy archers.

The Welsh never made up a significant proportion of archers in the HYW English Army. The concept of longbow tactics was derived from the Welsh, though

Sounds like someone is bitter over losing an ancestor 650+ years ago

Armor.

And shields

>Because Mongols never got into conquering a country that was prepared to fight.

kek

Well.

Who says they didn't?

French, Burgundians, Scots, English all had longbow archers.

You can't spam anything in real life, because you can't just pop a longbowman from a hut by spending x gold, y food, and z wood.

Rome spammed infantry.

They had more cavalry than archers which isnt a spam

>For horse archers - ordinary archers - as they will outrange them.
Ordinary archers do not out range horse archers. Their biggest advantage is their fire density.

Cavalry and archers were the same thing in their army.

Archers aren't that effect. Arrows aren't like bullets, they don't go into your body with so much force that they turn the inside into a mushy cavity. They just stick in you. They might give you a bad infection, but that kills you after the battle.

So to an extent they are more or a harassment force and skirmishing force, not the main method to kill or rout your enemies.

The Mongols are other steppe peoples were succesful because they combined it with shooting and riding away again on a horse, which was hard to beat and tired your enemies so much they ran away and then you could chase them down. A force or pure archers on foot will not be successful otherwise.

Unless you're Kushites with the worlds most powerful bows and the ability to hit mens eyes from 200 meters away, they fucked everyone up and are the reason the area remained unconquered for so many centuries.

First of all: The Battle of Legnica took place in the mid 13th century. This was before plate armour was even around. Second: a million accounts from the middle ages tell us that even mail armour was perfectly sufficient in protecting against arrow and most famous people who were seriously wounded from arrows were wounded in freak accident, e.g. when they took off their helmets. Thirdly: the Battle of Legnica was a battle between a Mongol army, the poorly equipped remnants of a Polish army, a few German and Silesian knights, and poorly trained and equipped people that were hastily drafted from the city. This battle is not representative of anything.

The European answer to Mongols were crossbows, armoured knights and fortifications.

>[King Béla IV] spent the next few decades reforming Hungary in preparation for possible future invasions. He used a variety of methods to do this. In 1247 he concluded a feudal agreement with the Knights of St. John, giving them the southeastern borderland in exchange for their help in creating more armored cavalry and fortifications. In 1248, he declared the country's middle strata could enter a baron's service, on the condition that the barons lead the men on his land properly equipped (in armor) into the king's army. Documents from the time state that "the nobles of our country can enter into military service of bishops in the same way in which they can serve other nobles". After 1250, free owners of small or middle sized estates serving directly under the king were included (along with barons) in the nobility. Finally, new settlers were given "conditional" nobility in exchange for the requirement of fighting mounted and armored at the king's request.[9] In 1259, he requested that the Pope put him into contact with Venice, as he wanted to hire at least 1,000 crossbowmen (crossbows having also proven a very effective weapon against the Mongols, despite the relatively small numbers of them actually deployed by the Hungarians in 1241).[10]

>To cement his new defense doctrine, the king offered grants and rewards to cities and nobles in exchange for the building of stone fortifications. The reforms ultimately paid off. By the end of his reign, Béla IV had overseen the building of nearly 100 new fortresses.[11] Of these 100, 66 were made of stone.[12] This was a major upgrade from 1241, when the kingdom only possessed 10 stone castles, half of which were placed along the border with the Duchy of Austria.[13]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Mongol_invasion_of_Hungary

No, they had lancers and foot archers as well.

The "muh whole army is horse archers" meme needs to die. What the fuck were they supposed to do when they ran out of arrows? Or came across an entrenched position, or an army holding a river or mountain pass?

Say mean words to the enemy and hope for emotional breakdown.

>No, they had lancers a
Thing is, in Asia, from China/Korea/Up to 1500's Japan to the Middle East, Cavalry is, well, just cavalry.

The only true division between Asian Cavalry is
>Light
>Heavy
Thats it.

But every cavalryman in Asia was a fucking archer. No exceptions. This was largely due to the existence of Central Asian nomads or the need to fight in Central Asia even by the civilized cunts. It was a necessity for a cavalryman to also be a bowman in that part of the world.

Sure the heavy guys might call an attendant to fetch a lance, but they know their way around a bow.

>Form ranks! Pikes front, archers behind!

Mongolid typical tactic
>Send heavily armed shock cavalry
>Get blasted by archers
>Those who survived, fight to death to lower enemy infantry morale
>Mongoloid act like they are devastated and retreat
>But do it in a slow manner which baited the enemy in pursuing.
>Extend enemy far enough to send light archer cavlary
>Do constantly harass the enemy
>Exhaustion and causalities finally breaks them
>Mongol send rest of army to wipe them out

Every fucking time.

>Humphrey Barwick, Roger Williams, Robert Barret
All 17 century. Firearms were used in Europe since the late 14th century. I didn't bother to check the rest but it's clearly you who is confusing things.

>Firearms were used in Europe since the late 14th century
Not him, but they were mostly artillery support pieces then. Guns didn't become rank and file weapons used in a comparable way to bows and crossbows until the early 16th century, and all of those writers were writing from experience of the past century of warfare.

Put it this way: if the reason guns were adopted early and completely in Europe was because unlike China it lacked a huge pool of skilled archers, then that would be true also for the Turks who were also very skilled and very prolific archers. Yet the Ottomans were one of the earliest adopters of the firearm, and Anatolia which had some of the oldest traditions of skilled archery at the time was flooded with guns even for civilian use.

It's more likely the Chinese and other latecomers to the gun game were too poor for mass adoption of firearms, whether for civilian life or an organized deployment and drill by the government.

The Mamlukes in Egypt also used the early hand cannon against the Mongols and won, so it's unlikely any commander of the time who knew what a gun was would have preferred a lot of skilled archers to them. Don't forget Japan, an island which was all about archery and horse archery for centuries, became one of the most gun crazy places on Earth within decades of the Dutch selling them their first arquebus.

Pic related is some next level memeing

But I thought during the Hundred Year's War every English male from a young age was required by law to practice with the bow daily. Surely they had enough training to be slapped into some gear and taught basic military disciplines. Then again England practically DID spam archers during that war.

>All 17 century.

No, 16th century. Specifically the 1580s-1590's, when the bow was being replaced in the English military.

Why would I be talking about guns from the 1300's when guns didn't replace bows until 200 years later?

Arrows are limited
Arrows rarely change the course of battle
Arrows are to be used in support of infantry

*raises shield* *fights in range of your own infantry*

Nothing personal... kid

The Chinese were anything but poor and the reason why they didn't adopt firearms in mass is complicated. Since the Mongol Yuan dynasty composite bows became the range weapon of choice, and despite having crossbows began to produce them less and less. When firearm technology was developed in China, the gun began to replace the declining crossbow but not the composite bow and was only used in the south, the reason being that their guns were of such poor quality that the barrels would warp after 3 shots and needed to be water cooled to prevent this from happening, which was much easier to do in the hot tropical southern regions than the dry arid Northern areas.

So in China you see the gun and the bow used in conjunction according to their environments.

They almost ran out of feathers.
During the 100 years war there wasn't a goose in England with feathers.

Composite bows had superior rate of fire and more range compared to firearms. Individual skill didn't matter too much for Chinese archers due to mass fire tactics using heavy shot, fired at an arc and relying on gravity for armor piercing capabilities, meaning that armor wasn't a huge concern either.

Fixed fortifications. Getting fucking trounced by heavy cavalry.

Legnica wasn't all heavy cavalry. And the fact that the mongols sustained heavy casualties in both Mohi (which they almost lost) and Legnica shows that tactics in tandem with technology is what really wins. Also, the Crusades beg otherwise, where mail was perfectly adequate at stopping arrows.

>and get similiar -- though substandard -- results.

completely wrong. The crossbowmen of french armies in the hundred years war were pathetic. They got annihilated in every engagement

>What stopped medieval armies from spamming archers?

They were superseded by gunpowder units. Pretty fucking simple

The english longbowman in civ 5 is fucking unreal. I easily choose them over chu ko nu

Except the Mediterranean and Middle East had their own composite bows, and that didn't stop them from adopting firearms en masse as early as possible.

In Europe, manpower was the problem facing armies. In Asia, manpower was not the problem and therefore adopting firearms would be using a more expensive weapon when the advantage of such a weapon (cheap training) cannot be used effectively as soldiers were much more replaceable in Asia.

But literally everyone in Asia except China humped the gun from an early age. The Safavids, the Mughals, the Japanese, etc.

In states where armies are decentralized, like in Japan, raising enough effective fighting men was the biggest restriction so firearms made sense. In states where the army is centralized like in China, firearms didn't make much sense because of the manpower is not the restriction, but the expenses the state treasury can take. Since firearms were much more expensive than bows, they didn't make much sense.

A similar example would be the Byzantine empire before the Theme system. Since the army was centralized under the emperor before then, the treasury was the limit to the size of the army and when the treasury started to run low due to a variety of reasons, the army size was small compared to Western European armies and Arab armies with the same population because the state couldn't maintain the army size due to treasury limits. This was also why the armies were decentralized during the Medieval times; the treasury cannot keep up with the manpower.

that's how mongols and turks invaded - lots and lots of horse archers. arrow from composite bow can penetrate most medieval steel armor plates.

>arrow from composite bow can penetrate most medieval steel armor plates.
proofs

The Ottomans weren't any different and had a centralized state army with lots and lots of guns. None of this would have also stopped civilians and private soldiers and mercenaries from acquiring firearms like they did everywhere else.

>Slav builds bunkers
Same story every time.

Didn't that work for them a few times?

>mongol marpat

My guess is that the Ottoman army had to face enemies with heavy armor where bows had trouble penetrating and the terrain in the Balkans where they would have been most likely to wage war did not allow for large maneuvers, forcing armies to clash at specific locations where the armor penetration was beneficial and the lack of mobility of early firearms formations was not of large consequence. The other part was still likely due to the lack of effective fighting men considering their diverse multi-ethnic empire which mostly resented the Turkish government in Anatolia, greatly limiting the effective manpower pool.

myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=15454&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=380

>Outnumbers the defenders by a huge margin
>Has war elephants
>Has trolls
>Has an immortal witch king on his side
>LOSES TO CAVALRY AND GHOSTS
Is Gothmog the worst commander ever?

Longbows aren't as effective against armor as you think. They're shit against cavalry without the support of heavy infantry/.

No, they weren't. Welshmen were valued for their skill with spears at the time.

Except no, you cum guzzling fucktard.

THe mongols barely won that battle against a divise and p[oorly lead foe, and were reliant on fucking seige weaponry and close combat.

Arrows did jack shit to the poles.

Fuck, every account of dorylaeum makes it clear that the men in chain were ale to stand up to point blank arrow shots for fucking HOURS.

Anna kommenous writes the same of franks being shot at with composite bows-they did not care. At all.

>linking another forum with probably the worst proof you could find
Assert yourself and try harder

Correction: I"m thinking of mohi.

Leginca is a simple case of the poles using poor tactics.

Fucking nothing about it has anything to do with the effectiveness of arrows against armor.

*shrugs* read or not read, up to you.

>the best bows still cost about a tenth of what a musket did
the best bows need the best bowmen

>*shrugs*
>>>/reddit/

and why the hell would you base your assertions off a forum debate that was entirely indecisive and had only one, very poor piece of evidence posted on the matter?

You're still partially right, the poles at legnica used levy peasants.

Additionally, Mohi didn't even have the full support of the nobility since they were pissed at Bela for letting the Cumans in

Yeah. If the Poles and Hungarians actually had decent leadership, the first invasion likely would have failed entirely.

As is, they still took heavy casualties in every fight, yet retards circlejerk to MUH HORSE ARCHERS because of these battles.

I"ll never get it.

No the first invasion would have succeeded regardless. Europe hadn't encountered a force that organized, well lead and well trained since the Romans. If you read contemporary chronicles of the first invasion, Europeans were in complete awe at the speed and military maneuvers performed by the Mongols.

*hungarian

Although most turanic culture is ultimately derived from the same place as that of the Mongols.

They were considered weak and cowardly.

No, because he lives in a fantasy universe where cavalry charges into pike lines work wonders.

What made Japs abandon horse archery?

Increasing violence in the 1300's. The initial Japanese method of war which was a massive skirmish duel followed by single combat honour-duels/closing in gave way to Japanese armies opening up battles straight into melee.

In the books the battles are a lot closer and the good guys use actual non-suicidal tactics.

the complete slap in the face that was the mongol invasion where they were only just saved by the typhoon must have been a pretty big indication they were doing something wrong right? Or had they already started to transition away from Bow archer honor duels by then?

Nah. It was already moving away from the bullshit honor duels during the Gempei Wars.

Samurai were really getting more and more violent when the Imperial Central Government weakened and the military men grew in de facto power. Wars had more at stake rather than silly matters of personal honor.

it's fascinating how it almost seems that the ideal samurai bushido ideals and all that was how they originally were way back when the warfare was highly ritualized. Was that where they drew a lot of inspiration from during peacetime when writing about the perfect samurai code? Rather than take inspiration from a less distant past where they had actually fought for winning with guns and other tools to win at at any cost.

Maybe in your retarded RPG games.

Back then, prior to the mongol invasions, there were still a lot of treasons, assassinations, chronical backstabbing and such.
Let's take another example, battles in Ancient Greece was also highly ritualized and organized, do you think they didn't try anything they could to win though ? Sometimes, ritualizing a battle is a way to assure a dramatic and durable victory.

The bushido is an ideal, trying to put it on distant ancestors would be totally anachronic, even though some traits could be found back then.

>In states where the army is centralized like in China, firearms didn't make much sense because of the manpower is not the restriction, but the expenses the state treasury can take.

1. Firearms were adopted in Europe at a time when armies were becoming increasingly centralized.

2. The Ming used firearms heavily. Even the Qing, who weren't big fans of musketry, trained Chinese bannerman to use muskets and bows at a 1:1 ratio, and trained them on the same shooting ranges.

This is the Scythian debate reworded, it only works on the tabletop

Since ppl continually dropped the use of armor in the 1600s and onwards, could it not have been useful to in a surprise way bring back bowmen? I always imagined some north african warlord or something who goes full persia and just hurls a rain of arrows down upon the non armored, non shield wearing muskeeteers and getting away with it.