Re: [OT] CrossbowRe: [FT] (LONG) The Balance of Power -- Fighters and a Defense

"laserlight@quixnet.net" wrote:

> Chinese had a crossbow with a gravity-fed magazine and a rotary crank
to draw the bow, IIRC.
> And the point of *all* crossbows was that an untrained oaf could use
them.  We had a fencing master at university who was so fast that a
novice person literally could not see his movements; the only way I knew
when he hit me was to hear/feel it.  He said that for fencing, starting
at age six was really too late to be any good.	Being a knight was a
fulltime occupation (if you expected to survive your first fight,
anyway), nomad light cavalry literally learned to ride before they could
walk, and to make a good longbowman, start with his grandfather.
> With a crossbow, any peasant can learn to draw, load, point, shoot. 
You only have to win one battle with them--you can replace your losses
(you always have more peasants than you can mobilize) but if your
opponent has high quality troops, it'll take a generation to replace
them.

The problem comes if you lose the crossbows (they are expensive), and
after the plagues of europe, peasants were a valued commodity and there
were not enough to go around.  The other problem with conscripted
peasant crossbowmen was that they have to be convinced not to run in the
face of a heavy cavalry charge.

Longbowmen and knights were self sufficient.  The bowmen hunted and kept
up their proficiency or starved, and the knight had nothing better to do
with his time and money than practice his skills and buy the best
equipment.  Crossbowmen that would not flee in the face of a cavalry
charge were usually mercenaries, or that earth shattering invention that
spelled the doom of feudal cavalry, a professional standing army.