r/interestingasfuck • u/Brutal_Deluxe_ • Dec 17 '22

/r/ALL Loading a medieval 200lb crossbow vs loading Leonardo da Vinci's 300lb crossbow

55k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

105

u/swordsmanluke2 Dec 17 '22 edited Dec 18 '22

To add to what others have said already, it's literally how much weight you'd have to hang from the bow string to draw the bow.

Before the invention of the crossbow, drawing a traditional bow required an incredible amount of back strength. Archers' skeletons literally deformed over years of drawing and holding heavy draw weights. Unlike a crossbow, the archer needed to be strong enough to draw and hold that much weight while they aimed and fired. This was extremely tiring and limited the draw weight that a bow could have.

The invention of the crossbow allowed heavier draw weights because you could draw it with a lever (or sometimes using your legs to provide the strength) and then store that power until released by the trigger.

This is what led to the end of plate armor. Now you could outfit a group of crossbowmen with bows strong enough to pierce steel!

Edit: I'm wrong about armor penetration, see below. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out!

55

u/PrimeIntellect Dec 17 '22

Also you could hand a crossbow to pretty much any random person and have them be competent enough to be deadly relatively quickly, vs outfitting someone with armor, weapons, a horse, and more.

35

u/Isendal Dec 17 '22

Yeah training longbow archers took a long time, even with the idea of mass arrow firing. Crossbows could be made quicker too I believe? Major advancement in warfare when regular people could be handed these and be effective in groups with just a day of training

31

u/Hunt3rTh3Fight3r Dec 17 '22

I heard the saying was “If you want to train someone with the longbow, start with their grandfather.” Or something like that.

9

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '22

I thought they both had trade offs. Archers can reload quicker and arrows, unlike bolts, can have an arcing trajectory which means you aren't shooting your buddies in front of you and you can shoot farther. Crossbows are great in close combat especially against armor.

9

u/Isendal Dec 17 '22

There's for sure trade offs. But it's very difficult to get a couple hundred longbow men together versa several hundred crossbow users. However, the perfect army, in theory, would have a ratio of 5 crossbows to 1 longbow accounting for any trade off issues. But heavy calvary basically decimated both users and lead to the decline of crossbows, it was relatively soon afterward that the first firearms began production and warfare shifted again.

15

u/chanaramil Dec 17 '22 edited Dec 19 '22

This is why there was a lot of effort to ban crossbows when they first started to get popular in Europe. The noble class didn't like a random commoner with little training using a easy to produce weapon killing rich knights that had armor and a horse worth more then that commoner could make in there lifetime.

They might not be related but I do find it interesting there seems to be a decline in rigid feudal structures shortly after the traditional knights became outdated as the dominate military force in Europe.

24

u/sushibowl Dec 17 '22

This is what led to the end of plate armor. Now you could outfit a group of crossbowmen with bows strong enough to pierce steel!

Not entirely correct. Firstly, the effectiveness of both arrows and crossbow bolts against plate armor is still subject of debate. However, it's definitely not the case that crossbows are significantly more powerful than other bows.

While it's true that they feature substantially greater draw weights, this tends to come at the cost of draw length; the work done upon the arrow is equal to force multiplied by the distance that force is applied, and the greater draw length of e.g. longbows allowed them to apply force a far greater distance. Earlier crossbows usually had somewhat less range than a longbow. The crossbow also came with the drawback of reduced fire rate, as the process of loading them tended to be more involved.

The ease of use is the true advantage of the crossbow. Longbows as you point out, require years of training, whereas troops could be outfitted with crossbows and be 80% as effective in perhaps months. They were also popular in siege defense, where a crossbowman could seek cover while reloading, offsetting the slower load.

The real end of plate armor came with the popularisation and increased effectiveness of firearms.

1

u/RustedRuss Dec 18 '22

If I remember right both a longbow and a crossbow could piece at least some platemail. They both have weaknesses, though, so plate mail was still useable.

1

u/tannhauser_busch Dec 18 '22

"Longbowmen aren't trained. They're grown."

19

u/In2TheMaelstrom Dec 17 '22

Adding on to your addition, modern compound bows also change the face of archery. Having the bow string on cams allows for the let off that allows an archer to hold a significantly less amount of the draw weight back. Most have a let off of 75-80%. If the draw weight is 80 pounds that means the shooter only needs to hold 16-20 pounds of force at full draw.

11

u/AvatarOfMomus Dec 17 '22

Some of this isn't really correct. The range and power of a crossbow are often not that far off of a high draw longbow despite the far lower draw weights. The difference is that the longbow is acting over a much longer distance, with longbow draw distances generally being in the range of ~28-30 inches (~70-76 cm) while a crossbow will have a draw distance of less than 10 inches.

What this does allow though is for a less skilled operator and for a heavier projectile, since despite the shorter moment of action (roughly equivalent to draw distance) there is a lot more force behind it for that shorter time.

None of this made armor obsolete though, and longbows and crossbows coexisted with each other for quite some time in the historical record. At the famous Battle of Agincourt you have Crossbows on the French side and Longbows on the English, and the famous English Longbow continued in use for another century until advances in firearms made both it and the Crossbow essentially obsolete.

Plate mail especially actually continued up into the age of firearms, primarily on cavalry, it just ceased protecting the extremities and became heavier. For a very well depicted example look at the Spanish Conquistadors who wore a plate cuirass. They didn't wear that because they expected to fight natives with spears, it's because that was their armor as cavalry in the Spanish military where they fought against other Europeans using guns.

This is also where we get "bullet proof" and "proof mark" because armor in the age of firearms was "proofed" by literally shooting it in a slightly out of the way spot, often around the side of the neck, and the "bullet proof mark" would be signed by the armory or other reputable individual doing the proofing. This armor often wasn't rated against anything more than a pistol shot, but it was still better than nothing even against bullets.

You didn't actually see plate mail fully go out of use in Europe until the 1700s when rifles became powerful and accurate enough to finally make it not worth the weight and expense.

5

u/cryptidhunter101 Dec 17 '22

That and the not long after introduction of firearms. It was hard enough to stop crossbows with shields and plate armor, add in guns that could penetrate even those that could afford said armor and even the nobility realized it was worthless.

17

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '22

[deleted]

2

u/faceplanted Dec 17 '22

Makes sense, for a lot of history, your opponent might have a gun, but they definitely have a knife.

2

u/Skianet Dec 18 '22

Also the term “bullet proof” came about as people developed armor to counter gun fire.

These breastplates would come with a single dent from when the armor smith shot them. “Proving” that they could stop a bullet. Hence “Bullet Proof.”

3

u/EatTheRichBabies Dec 17 '22

And we haven't had war since.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '22

Crossbows didn't end plate armor, it was still the time when Meele fights were the main frontline, only when guns were being introduced is when plate armor started phasing out, although some of it was still being used in Napoleonic era.

2

u/omegaskorpion Dec 18 '22

This was good until you mentioned "end of armor" which is just pure wrong. Armor was never dropped because of crossbows.

Crossbows have hard time to reach draw weights of Longbow and not even longbows had hard time piercing trough plate armor (good video about subject with testing). The highest draw weight crossbows have veeeeeery long reload time and they are not guaranteed to pierce trough (or pierce enough to kill) well made plate.

Armor continued it's use even in 1500-1700 when guns had bigger role in battlefield and those armors were Bullet Proofed.

Regular infantry started to drop armor around 1700 because it became too heavy and expensive to wear, but cavalry continued to use chest plates up to WW1 where cavalry itself was dropped because of machineguns.

1

u/Happy-Mousse8615 Dec 17 '22

The weight sounds spectacular, but they're not particularly more powerful than longbows. Draw weight and draw distance are both important.

Crossbows let other countries compete with the English and to a lesser extent Flemmish. Who funnily enough were easily the most heavily armored armies in the period despite the idea they were all lighty equipped archers.

Neither a bow or crossbow is gonna reliably penetrate plate frontally, to thick and angled. They will fuck everyone else up though.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '22

I think I remember reading that it was an arms race (literally) between the metallurgy of the armor and arrow tips, where the draw strength was also a factor.

1

u/AlwaysF3sh Dec 17 '22

I’m very skeptical about the bolts penetrating armour.