Were handheld crossbows actually used in the medieval era during pitched battle...

the problem with the infantry sized repeating crossbow was that the ''bolt'' could be stopped by a piece of cardboard, thats why the arrows were poisoned

it was a kind of antipersonel weapon that only made sense in the kind of wars that were fought in china, it was meant to spary the enemy with poisoned arrows, the high rate of fire was meant to replace armor piercing, since you realy just have to hit someone once on any exposed bodypart and theire done, and it was mostly used by ligth infantry against light infantry, even tho it meant everione did their best to cover up in as much armor as possible, but it was often armor made of leather and bamboo

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>Were handheld crossbows actually used in the medieval era during pitched battle?
Occasionally, but more often during sieges due to their unwieldy size and loading time. The point of having soldiers carry their arms on them at all times is so they are at the ready and can fight at a moment's notice, but a crossbow can't really do that unless you carry it around already loaded, which is extremely dangerous and when you multiply that by 100 or however many crossbows you have in your army it's just ridiculously bad thinking. So they have to be unloaded when you're marching or not in a fight, but that just means once the fighting starts the crossbowmen are going to be bent over loading their crossbows, totally vulnerable. So you see, not the best weapon in the field where sudden changes require swift reactions. Speed is key in pitched battles. If you control the field and have time to entrench yourself, then crossbows can prove valuable assets. Provide the crossbowmen with cover to load and fire behind, and they will rain death on your enemies.

>were they not used for battle and just carried around on a regular basis for self-defense and hunting small game
Crossbows of the type used in Europe were impractical for personal use (self defense or hunting) because they were heavy and slow to fire. Consider that if you were attacked and had to defend yourself, you would need the crossbow to be loaded already in order to shoot in a timely manner, just like the problem described earlier for pitched battles, and moreover if you missed that one shot you wouldn't get a second one. Not practical. For hunting you certainly could use a crossbow but a normal bow would work just as well and be easier to carry and faster to fire.

also, anything could be produced easy/cheaply in china, then as it is now, because its china

they ''work like chinamen'', or rather they always had a strictly organised collective system of labor that resembled industrial production, since forever, and they are ''as numerous as chinamen'', and they have ''all the gold in china'' etc etc

kind of how india was the major global exporter of textile and die for centuries, a combination of cultural practice, resource and fuckloads of working people

It's a meme they weren't used
They would always be used in open battle since Ancient Greece in Europe, but the widespread use varies.
The increased emphasis of siege war meant crossbows were stockpiled more, and the stockpile meant people constantly thought about how best to use them.
The hayday of the crossbow is end of the Middle Ages and then until the firearm fully replaces them.
Early firearms were relatively inaccurate and used more to scare than to kill, whilst the crossbow could relatively efficiently kill knights, but for this to be truly expensive you needed to field large numbers of professional troops which was very expensive and not to mention unchilvarous, as well as possibly killing your years income
Pike and shotte tactics come from European spear and crossbow tactics mainly
For further reading I would reccomend the first two chapters of 'weapons and warfare in renaissance europe' -Bert S Haal, as it goes into good detail of prior tactics and strategy

Why exactly does industrialisation occur when European populations are massively increasing
I mean why would you invest in automising your factories when it means you'll hire less workers and your workers become skilled

Because workers need to be paid, machines don't.

>Lindyposting

>OP posts a picture of a "pistol crossbow"
>Everyone talks about regular crossbows

Well then OP shouldve said that.

But then he said "Handheld Crossbows" and that's all the fucking crossbows sans siege engines.

Because it's about making money and not employing people? Factories hired people in droves not because they were doing them a favor, but because hiring lots of labor was basically the only way to boost production before automation set in. From a business perspective, being able to dramatically increase production without needing to hire more labor and accrue more overhead costs is a godsend. The only real impediment is the initial investment that automation demands, but paying for the machines is only a short term cost with amazing long term benefits.

Is everyone in this thread fucking retarded? They were insanely popular on the continent, particularly among Italians Also, arrows were poisoned? Are you fucking 10 years old? Why don't we claim that they also lit them on fire? That is some Medieval 2 Total War tier shit thinking right thereAlso, chivalry meant literally nothing unless you were a French nobleman, otherwise it was basically a stupid and outdated concept past the 12th century, which even then it meant basically nothing unless you were French or a particularly cheeky Burgundian.They weren't used? Seriously? They were VERY popular during sieges (which were the majority of medieval battles by far) and were rather quite common during the high-late middle ages and extremely common during the late middle ages right the way through the Renaissance.

Surely the intial cost and maintenance of those machines were more than the workers, af you've still got like 30 years until workers riot
>OP post picture of Shield of Arms
>everyone starts talking about coat of arms

europeans have been obsessed with mechanic multipliers and automatisation since the plague

certain industries especialy suffered froma need of mechanic solutions, either to provide enough force to replace precarious human labor or to simply get the ammount of usefull work to the point its economicaly viable, these were mainly things like mining, textile manufacture, and various forms of processing, like say turning grain into flour or rendering hemp into fibre etc

so you got mills, all sorts of mills, powered by wind or water, even textile factories, or textile mills were placed on top of streams for the smae reason as flour mills

you cant do that with mines tho, since you cant place mines anywhere, you haveto dig where the ore is at, and mines present a massive problem in the above terms since you have to get fucktons of shit OUT, including water and all sorts of waste material, and traditionaly this was done by muscle power, either animal or slave/child labor, untill they started putting animals into massive hamster wheel things to increase usefull work, till eventualy someone figured they could use steampower to do the same work, and then someone decided to invent a actual steam engine(before that it was just a improvised piston/pump sort of thing) - and then you had a source of power that you could actualy place where you want it, even if it was the size of a building

and thats how the industrial revolution happened in europe

even so, a huge part of work done all the way till 1970 in some places was just third world stile slaving away, arduous mass physical labor didnt stop being a thing because something turns a wheel, it just became more time intensive, one of the things was, for example, that children became incresingly used alongside machines since it just made sense in the context of cost-efficiency, three 10 year olds and a machine can do as much work as 5 adults but cost far less, 5 female adults cost less that 5 male adults to pay etc..

>ywn man the crossbows mounted to your walls and watch 10 Frenchmen be impaled on your hard shaft

Actually there was a relative shortage of labor in Europe before industrialization, unlike in China
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap#Contrast_with_Britain

Long before the industrial revolution itself, the Black Death had already forced an equivalent:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Impact_on_peasants
And
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Labour-saving_innovation
The effects of the Black Death depopulation were still felt well into the 16th century.

Byt the 18th century, the biggest pressure in Britain was having to compete with its own colonies:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacture_during_the_Industrial_Revolution
>Indian cotton textiles (particularly those from Bengal) continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with India, Britain invested in labour-saving technical progress, while implementing protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports. At the same time, the EIC's rule in India contributed to its deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods.

It wouldn't take 30 years to make the money back and that would be factored into the decision making when buying the machine. It's a long term investment to make the company more money in the future.

carrying around like 8 1 shot flintlock pistols

now those were days

Oh didn't know that thanks
My point was surely lots of unskilled labour is cheaper than a few labourers with machines, as I wrongly believed that labourers were in large excess so would be fine with getting paid half a loaf of bread

>arrows weren't poisoned
You know china has always had like 1.5 continents wealth, rescources and knowdlege right
I talked about chivalry in the context of killing knights, and thus is useful, especially considering ransom money
Did you mean to respond to me twice? I clearly said they were often used in sieges, and this often use mutated into field use because why save these weapons for sieges when you can use them elsewhere

>pull the trigger accidentally when brushing your neck scarf
>shoot dick off
>girls laugh at how long it is but now can't use it on them

it is cheaper on the first, but in the longrun the mechanised production beats basic manufacture trough things like rationalisation and ''everithing counts in large ammounts'' and such

the main reason cultures dont just randomly become mechanised and industrialised as soon as they can figure out how to make wheels turn around a axis is that to make a usefull industrial machine that has some significant output is massive investment of labor, energy and material, and also requires a large acumulation of intelectual capital, sophistication and volume of cafts and trades, skilled craftsmen, engeneers that sort of thing, as well as the right combination of good reasons

so indians were realy ingenious in making up all sorts of machines that aided or sped up all sorts of manufacture work, but they were almost exclusively made of wood and powered by muscle, usualy the worker himself turning it with a leg or a free arm

it just takes a lot of shit to come together to make industrial grade machinery, the basic cognitive functions and skills involved were present since before humans used pottery wheels, but 17th century western culture only appeared in 17th century west

My bad, meant to respond to both of your points in the same post, but didn't mean to click you twice. Basically no evidence of poisoned arrows being used outside of the very few accounts on the wiki page for them. Imagine the vast amount of times it wasn't used vs. when it was, aka virtually never, especially during the middle ages in Europe. Not really talking about China either, as when people quote their use of things like gunpowder, they quote things like Chinese fire arrows (look it up, not what it sounds like). I really don't buy that China was ever as advanced as some people say it was. Were they "first" to a few things? Yes. Did they perfect them? No, never. Did they have a lot of resources? Yes. Did it help? No, not really. Crossbows were MUCH more common in field battles in Europe than people in this thread tend to think. Crossbowmen were much cheaper to hire than long bowmen, as both the training and the weapon itself was actually cheaper despite what you might think (longbows that were useful during the late middle ages were actually rather expensive to produce due to how strong they had to be).

Latches the small Scottish crossbow used by border reivers could count

Longbow were a rare thing just because how hard the native skill was, it fucked up your back, and other cultures besides English and Welsh simply used the normal bow and then the crossbow
The book I mentioned does also talk about longbows, and also how the Chinese 'fireworks' were actually bamboo with trapped air pockets for 9th century, so the Chinese really only had gunpowder for one century before the west did

I think it's supposed to be a siege tower. Could also be a ram, but I'm not so sure.
Regardless, our artist has no fucking clue what perspective even means. He probably lost an eye in the siege he's attempting to reproduce.

Artists had perspective in the medieval ages dansgame
Yeaa I wasn't sure what the proper terminology for very small crossbows are. Hence the picture. Probably should've said one-handed handheld crossbows.

Because those things sacrificed the ability to aim well...or at all.

Crossbows were massively important, 'specially in the Baltic Crusades.

Read some primary sources

Longbows were rare? No, they really weren't that rare at all. England wasn't the only country that used them. Basically ever medieval army used them, it was just the English that used them as the main battle component of their armies. "normal bow", do you mean hunting bows? Those wouldn't be used in war, a 50 lbs draw weight would do nothing to anyone wearing even a gambeson alone more than 50 yards away. Warbows for war.

meant to say 5, not 50 yards

It's the battle of troy. Medieval people didn't know what kind of equipment ancient people had so they drew them with their own clothing and weapons.

True point, noted.