Why didn't europeans ever adopt horse-archery?

why didn't europeans ever adopt horse-archery?
was it because of chivalry?

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They did, it's only arrows vs heavy cavalry isn't that good and was phased over be crosbowmen in horse or Javelinmen in horse.

Europe is a big place OP you should be more specific.
If you mean central or western europe its probably due to geography and how expensive it was to breed horses.
I mean look at central asia where the turks and mongols lived.
>wide grassy steppes with ample foor for horses
>fucking dry cilmate so agriculture was impossible which lead to hunting and herding being the best food providers
>wild horses everywhere waiting to be tamed

Mongolian and turkish bows could penetrate even plate armor though.

And for those than don't speak the language of Cervantes.
>Strongly protected be they helms, shields and mail over padded clothes, the muslim javelins and arrows barely did scratch the christian charge. As the chronicles of the epoch said, in those situations some knights resembled hedgehogs (with all the arrows pocking out).

You can see how the arros have punched trough the mail, the problem is than the padded armor under it stoped the worst of the arrows (the muslim with bows are Turks, they where used as mercs be the Almhoads and used reinforced with tendosn style bows, the Christian respected them for they Torna-Fuye tactics and being very good light cavalry, still there aren't long steppes in great parts of Spain and they could be hutned to death be the heavy cavalry), in battle there is a reason bows where phased out in continental europe relatively fast (Spain or Italy barely used them, beinng easier to train crossbowmen).

I have to imagine this shit is highly dramatized given how many instances there are of Crusaders getting their shit pushed in by Turks and Arabs in the Second Crusade, Fifth Crusade, and beyond.

Even in the Crusade or Muslim chronicles you find the bit about the Knights (called Franks be the Muslims as a whole) being compared to hedgehogs for all the arrows the armors collected. Normally the muslims knew than a frontal charge be the Knights was death, so the smarter ones fought inflicting logistical defeats like fouling water and skirmishes with they light cavalry, hiting and banishing if they could get away with that. Also the majority of big fights where in sieges where logistics and not cavalry where the key of victory. Of course that is over simplify the issue, there where great victories in the field be Muslims or Christian both using they forte, but is very naive to reduce the exist in battle from one or the other side to a single factor (like armor or the bow).

The difference between a normal archer and a horse archer is that horse archers would be galloping towards there enemy while shooting this gave the arrow more force behind it than when fired by a stationary archer.

>why didn't europeans ever adopt horse-archery?
You need composite bows to be successful at it. Composite bows don't work well in Europe.

its more that they could ride up to your formation and spray you with arrows and retreat

very infuriating thing to deal with im sure

I'm playing Total War and I have to say that horse-archery is a lot better than regular virgin archers when it comes to survival. Even when all of my infantry is dead, these guys stay alive because no one can catch them. They just keep running around whoever I'm up against and finish them off.

How? Their tiny bows would lack the penetrative power. Not to mention that the Mongolians never even met plate armour. By the time plate armour was around they went already back to herding Yak.

A horse is way too slow for it to make an actual difference.
Rather than that a stationary archer can draw a heavier bow or crossbow, which makes an actual difference.

There would be more momentum not force.

It might make a difference. Let's assume thar the speed of an average arrow is 100m/s, 10m/s of an average horse, and the mass of the arrow is 100 grams. Momentum difference between just the arrow+horse and arrow is 10%. I don't know if it would penetrate better, but the difference is significant. If they had heavier arrows, the increase in momentum would be even more significant when it would come to armour penetration.

shouldnt it be even more since its mass x speed2 or soemthing

Energy is mass times velocity squared. Momentum is just mass times velocity.

They didn't have the technology to make short bows of the same strength as the mongols and other steppe nomads. Also, that style of warfare wasn't as useful in Europe anyway, since it requires a lot of space to manoeuver and doesn't do so well in areas with forests and mountains.

There's also the fact that heavily armoured knights were simply better. When the Mongols invaded Hungary, the Hungarians took heavy loses among their infantry and light cavalry, but engagements between the few heavy knights and the Mongol steppe archers went far worse for the mongols. The same happened when the Mongol's launched small probing raids into Austria, which had much higher numbers of heavily armoured knights.

There's also the Crusades, where armoured knights were able to smash through Seljuk armies again and again.

Basically, the only times horse archers beat heavy knights was when the latter were stupid enough to charge straight at them and get surrounded (as happened during the Mongol invasion of Poland). Against enemies with experience in fighting horse archers and with the discipline to not charge when being pelted with arrows, nomadic horse archer tactics fared much more poorly.

In fact, this is a pattern that goes all the way back to Roman vs. Parthian conflicts. Crassus got his army massacred because he was stupid enough to walk out onto an open plain and allow the Parthian horse archers to surround him. But even just a few years later during the Parthian invasion of Judea and Syria, Roman heavy infantry were able to defeat Parthian horse archers simply by picking a good defensive position (halfway up a hill) and holding their ground. The Romans were able to invade and capture key parts of Parthian territory in the following centuries (including the capital, Ctesiphon), while the Parthians lacked the ability to do the same due to their reliance on horse archers.

yeah i mean we can talk about when the crusaders got rekt ,but ive seen those battles where they were 90% of the time twice outnumbered fucked by logistics and ran into traps. On an even playing field i think crusader armies never really lost ,(maybe against mamlucks which used heavy cav and infantry way more than the seljuks i think)

The point is that it is insignificant in comparison with the difference using a larger bow makes. And not even those were good at penetrating armour.

Mongolian composite bows could shoot twice the range a english longbow could though.
Turkish bows which the seljuks would be using were probably similar.

The numbers of the muslim side are most of the time unkown desu.

Bullshit.

>Mongolian bow is much shorter than a English long bow and different materials are used in order to take advantage of the properties of each material. Where as atraditional longbow is made from a single natural piece of wood.Also as a mongolian bow belongs to recurve bow, it stores energy in curves at the end of the limbs of the bow.If the two bows have the same draw length and draw weight, the Mongolian (or any Asiatic recurve) should store more energy (and thus shoot further/hit harder assuming identical arrows) as it has a higher initial draw weight due to the recurve and the higher force required to string it to bracing height.

archerysupplier.com/mongolian-bow-vs-english-long-bow/

If you can trust anyone its commercial sector.

>atraditional longbow is made from a single natural piece of wood
That is based on the false assumption that wood is a homogeneous material, which it isn't.

See youtube.com/watch?v=0kHndvPYHGw.

Their bows were lower in poundage and their arrows were lighter compared to English longbows which also couldn't get through.

>10m/s of an average horse
Can you even shoot with that much speed? Where do you get that number from? Military manual?

I Googled average horse speed and then just rounded it to 10m/s because we have 10 fingers.

Mongolian bows are made from YAk sinew with which an invidual sinew can with stand 2 to 3 times as much tonnage per sinew compared to any other bow of that time including longbows. Which were made from inferior tree parts like oak and willow.

P. S. Apparently that number can double if the horse is pushed to its limits

There have been finds of recurved longbows, for example on the Mary Rose. Even then, the benefits of recurves have much more to do with compactness than actual power.

The range itself is not so much down to the bows, but the arrows. The sort of long range flight arrows mentioned here have one problem:
They were fucking useless in European warfare. Sure, they had a use against mostly unprotected tribesmen of North Africa and the Middle East, but in Europe this was mostly pointless as even the most poorly equipped troops generally had a helmet and a large shield and/or padded aketon.
The amount of energy in a lightweight flight arrow coming down is essentially negligible. Arrows produce a shitload of drag, meaning that they have a rather pathetic terminal velocity which won't do shit against even the lightest forms of armour, even against the hide of a horse their effectiveness was questionable.
This is why in Europe archery was generally done at relatively close ranges in a direct fire role with heavy arrows.

>oak and willow
lol

shitpost

>They didn't have the technology to make short bows of the same strength as the mongols and other steppe nomads
Except that extremely powerful (as in higher draw weight than anyone could possibly handle on a regular bow) composite prods were very commonly used for crossbows. In southern Europe regular composite bows were also used.

One reason why they didn't use them quite as much as they could have is because moisture could seriously damage them, which really sucks if you're on campaign in any part of Europe but the south.

There is a western tradition of mounted archery, it's just that it doesn't involve much shooting from horseback, "Mounted archer" in a western context is an archer who travels the battlefield on horseback but dismounts to shoot. In a lot of ways this is actually more effective than shooting from horseback, as you can use a bow with a much higher draw weight. They did shoot from horseback *sometimes* if the Bayeux Tapestry is anything to go by but it seems to have happened only very rarely.

>If the two bows have the same draw length and draw weight
that's a big if

this, major differences between lighter and heavier arrows

I remember reading that some Slavs adopted horse archery from Avars or Sarmatians. Procopius wrote about it, I think.

Horse archery remained a tradition amongst eastern european nobles through to the 17th century in some parts.

Forgot to mention the broken ribs and bruises

I wil take it over puncturing wounds, death and infection, thank you.

Europeans had alot of horse-archery. The romans had it in tonnes and horsemen armed with crossbows were common throughout the middle age in europe.

>why did a continent full of forests, mountain ranges and swamps not use a fighting style that relies on vast open spaces?

Didn't some of the Eastern Europeans have it? didn't poles have mounted crossbowmen?

Pretty sure the guys with crossbows who rode horses were more inclined to fight on foot, bro.

They just had horses so they could keep up with the regular cavalry while they were out looting and pillaging the French countryside.

Poland definitely used mounted crossbowmen extensively, it's like the first thing you can build in a castle.

dismounting is impossible

So is reloading a crossbow on horseback if it's strong enough to throw a bolt worth a damn.

What manga is this

Weren't the Cataphracts into horse archery?

Some of them were.
The romans also had non-cataphracti but still heavily armoured horse archers.

Forgot pic.

What a special boy

Europeans did not have the apropriate horses for that and there was no tradition requiring them to learn horse archery. English Yeomen archers became a thing because of the tradition of hunting with a bow. Nomadic Horse archers in the eurasian steppe were a thing because of their nomadic horse-dependent lifestyle, lack of heavy armor, and the neccesity of highly mobile hit and run tactics when faced with an enemy that outnumbers you.

Europeans did draw mercenaries though from the steppe. Its not like they didn't know the techniques of horse archery, its that they coudn't get down to learn them. The Athenians used Scythian mercenaries, the Romans had Sarmatian cavalry, the Byzantines used Penchenegs and Turcopoles, HRE had Kipchaks,. The Arabs also did not have a tradition in horse archery untill the Turkic tribes came from the east.

do comicses like this exist in English? Ive only seen French (and Spanish) ones so far.

Las Navas de Tolosa, one of the most decisive fights in the Spanish reconquista.
I don't see why not, tough in general Euro comics tend to be some tiers higher than the usual Comics pumped out be the big USA editorials (mostly like with Manga, the creators have a lot more hands on aproach and can dedicate time for quality), there are plenty of good creators in England or USA (Artesia, Hellboy in fantasy, and thinking about it my prefered western comics are Franco-belgians...), I'm sure some one has to have done something related. I think there was one based on Crecy, I think the Guion was from Warren Ellis and the illustrator was Spanish tough, with a bit iffy history but a fun read.

Also would you Fuckers be interested if I translated some? My english is very bad and I comit lots of mistakes, but better than nothing I guess. Also I wouldn't be very fast, lots of text in that comic.

Well, i haven't read any actual comics except for first 8 Walking dead and stuff liek Tintin and Asterix and Obelix when i was a child..

>Scythians are not European people
The brainlets of Veeky Forums

It's not 2006 anymore, user.

my ancestor :)

t. Medieval 2 pro

Yep. Common method of fucking with dense infantry formations that were too dangerous to attack from the front: Form up and pelt them with arrows first.

White =/= European

what is goat's foot lever

[spoiler]So is the bow[/spoiler]

white = European
Scythians lived on European territory and their ancestry also was mostly European.

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god damn the amount of heresy in this post

>There's also the Crusades, where armoured knights were able to smash through Seljuk armies again and again.
The Crusaders ended up relying on horse archers.

Western Europeans did use mounted bowmen and crossbowmen but they tended to be small in number compared to the overall size of the army. Maybe a few hundred in an army of ten or twenty thousand. Horseback archery was much more common in Eastern Europe.

holy fuck go back to rebbit

holy fuck go back to elementary school

As I said I barely can write in english user.

It’s a different kind of horse archery, they fired in volleys before the charge and stayed in formation whereas eastern horse archers tended to ride around and keep moving while shooting and maintaining distance. The west used heavily armored missile cavalry in formations, the east used lightly armored horsearchers that relied on speed.

That girl is qt. Man I miss Angus McBride.

he makes a good point tho

>white = european

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenisei_Kyrgyz

Many franco-belgian comics have an English edition, but in few numbers and the stores are sparse.

Crassus was tricked.

There is one that i know of

Just the padding of armour was enough to stop Turkish arrows because they were designed for light Arabic infantry

A combination of factors.

English isn't everyone's primary language, user. Don't be such a dick.

Brits used horse archers, Henry V used them to block the French prior to the battle of Agincourt.

They did, in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Byzantine Empire and Russia.

Yeah, but as the guy said, it had little to do with the vulnerability of armored knights to horse archery but rather due to the indirect tactics the muslims started using in response to early defeats.

It does have to do a lot with the vulnerability of armored knights: particularly they were less mobile than light cavalry and the Muslim entities were fielding shitloads of those considering the fact that most of them were Turkshits or fought in the same manner the Seljuks made predominant in the region.

Having no light cavalry in a middle eastern battlefield was a death sentence.

Horse-archery was developed the south east part of what is now days Ukraine. Some time around 700 BC. Horse archery was a rather popular form of combat in western Europe in the 4th thru 7th centuries. In eastern Europe it lasted a lot longer then that. Europeans did adopt horse archery. You should be asked why they moved away from horse archery.

>Mongolian and turkish bows could penetrate even plate armor though.

Turkish accounts from the war of the holy league said that their bows rarely penetrated plate armor. They moved their archers from being second line units to being third line units because of that.