What was the transition to firearms like? Was it swift? Any milestones in terms of battles won with firearms? Seems like an interesting time in military history that is often overlooked.
This is a topic that I've studied a lot, but it's difficult to answer. Your question has a global scope, and depending on the country, the widespread adoption of firearms could have taken place over hundreds of years. How do you say when a country has transitioned to firearms? When they're first implemented into the army, when they make up a certain percentage of the soldiers, or when they've displaced every other individual weapon?
>>494832
Good point. Perhaps limit my query to Europe and count "transition" as when combat began to be focused around firearms, like the rise of pike and shot formations. Really I'm just asking about how, why and when firearms took over European warfare.
>>494791
>how, why and when firearms took over European warfare.
I would have loved to have been part of the companies deployed to sub-Saharan Africa with the first Maxim machine guns to deal with the local spear-chuckers.
Oh, the comedy...
>>494869
>Why?
1) Because they are easy to use. They are easy to train the peasants, who have the brain the size of a nut.
2)Because they can easily pierce metal armor and shields.
3)Because cannons and sappers with gunpowder barrels can destroy the city and castle walls.
>When?
The european transition happened from the 14th century up to the 17th.
>>494869
Not him, and hardly an expert but:
You first start seeing firearms being mentioned in the early 14th century, but at that point they're more of a novelty weapon than anything else.
It's not until the late 15th, early 16th century that you begin to see them in a big way on battlefields, but they're still somewhat supporting weapons. If you look at say, Spanish Tercios, the early ones especially were still primarily about the pikemen, with the gunners hiding behind the pikes and taking shots when they could.
Classic pike and shot doesn't really develop until about a hundred years later, as swords become less favored, and lines become longer, instead of block squares. Rocroi is usually considered one of the premier battles to show that the Tercio was finally showing its limitations.
>When
If you're considering pike and shot? 17th century.
>Why
Guns had already replaced most other personal missile weapons by the 16th century, and were becoming deadly and accurate enough that they were turning into a primary arm, not just a skirmish weapon.
>How.
Not entirely sure myself.
>>494919
But the hand-cannon existed before the 14th century and coexisted with crossbows and traditional bows. Who (or which country) was the first to think "gee, these gun things are pretty fucking good, let's use these more!"?
>>494919
>2)Because they can easily pierce metal armor and shields.
You do realize that "Plate mail" that stuff that popular imagery has King Arthur and his knights wearing, was a renaissance invention, created primarily to deal with guns, right?
And early, muzzle loading firearms were not easy to use by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, they were downright dangerous to load safely. Levee en masse was something that came to be long, long after guns were the dominant weapon on the battlefield.
>>494933
It can't have just been guns, pikes, cavalry and artillery in the beginning, though. What made people do away with swords and axes and shit? When? why mang why
>>494943
>"You do realize that "Plate mail" that stuff that popular imagery has King Arthur and his knights wearing, was a renaissance invention, created primarily to deal with guns, right?"
the fuck
this is new
elaborate, anon
>>494791
Guns were cheaper than bows. They were not better however
>>494869
>why
Guns have a longer range, better penetrate armor, and inflict more serious wounds than any other individual ranged weapon of the time. They could also be used from behind cover, or in a trench or foxhole, and bows couldn't.
>when
The first thing remotely resembling a gun appeared in Europe around 1320. Cannons became commonplace siege weapons very, very quickly and saw some minor use on the battlefield. Smaller hand-held cannons were also used. In records of this early period there was no distinguishing between handguns and larger cannons, so it can often be hard to tell which one a record is referring to. Handguns were used during the Hussite Wars, but were still outnumbered by crossbows. Handguns became more and more commonplace as time went on.
Around the 1470's we see that firearms had developed to the point where we could call them harquebuses. They had integral matchlock serpentines, stocks, and used an improved gunpowder called corned powder.
During the Italian Wars firearms fully demonstrated their superiority over the old bows and crossbows, and European armies began switching over en-masse.
>>494919
>1) Because they are easy to use. They are easy to train the peasants, who have the brain the size of a nut.
It's very common for people to say that easy training is an advantage, even the biggest advantage, but I absolutely disagree. Firearms took off in Europe at the same time military training was becoming more comprehensive, thorough, and necessary than ever. Military writers of the period never mention easy training as an advantage of firearms. The soldiers had to be well-trained because of the high risk of gunpowder explosions.
>>494943
>You do realize that "Plate mail" that stuff that popular imagery has King Arthur and his knights wearing, was a renaissance invention, created primarily to deal with guns, right?
No it wasn't. You're confused and thinking of proofed corslets.
>>494791
Its not swift for anybody.
Even for fucking Japan. Its not as if the Portuguese came down from the heavens like angels bearing the gift of gunpowder. The Japanese were already using it for bombs.
Its just that for some reason, Japan missed out on tube fired tech. They skipped the whole handcannons business
>>494943
Plate mail was primarily invented to maximize protection dingus.
>>494964
>Guns were cheaper than bows.
No they weren't.
The slowness of English military authorities to adopt ‘weapons of fyre’ is a curious matter. Quite apart from the nation’s already mentioned deep-rooted sentimental attachment to the bow, there was also a worry within government and the upper classes that, if firearms were put in the hands of the common people, they might be used to undermine public order or be exploited by papists to promote revolt. But there was also a more practical rational – cost. While bows were cheap, firearms were expensive. A good yew-wood bow and a set of arrows each ‘a clothyard long and fletched with the wing of a grey goose’, was significantly cheaper than a harquebus. According to the historian C. G. Cruickshank, in 1566 a high quality bow of imported yew cost 6 shillings and 8 pence, a bow of second quality was 3 shillings and 4 pence, while a bows of English yew cost a mere 2 shillings. During the latter part of the Queen’s reign, calivers ranged from 12 to 30 shillings and muskets from 18 shillings to £2. With the average cost of a bow being 3 shillings, and a firearm 30 shillings (not including all the associated items that went with musketry), then the cost of refitting a company with gunpowder weapons was very considerable indeed. Something that would not have escaped a notoriously parsimonious queen was also well known for her dislike of soldiers.
Read this: http://ciml.250x.com/archive/marx_engels/english/mecwsh/mecwsh-18_365.pdf
>>494980
Better yet, read this.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A05277.0001.001/1:4?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
>>494943
Lolwut
The golden age of the knight in shining armour is the 15th and early 16th century, where most projectile weapons are still arrows and crossbow bolts and were designed to protect from the same. Firearms were around but nowhere near the most common thing flying around the battlefield.
>>494964
Wha-who-huh-I...
Nigga?
Do you know how much effort goes into milling guns? Actually they couldn't even mill guns back then, everything was by hand.
It isn't like they could use pot metal unless they were fine with blowing their arms off every shot they took.
Battle of Pavia, (Feb. 24, 1525), the decisive military engagement of the war in Italy between Francis I of France and the Habsburg emperor Charles V, in which the French army of 28,000 was virtually annihilated and Francis himself, commanding the French army, was taken prisoner. Francis was sent to Madrid, where, the following year, he concluded peace and surrendered French claims to Italy.
Spanish hegemony in Italy dates from this battle. The Battle of Pavia also marks the ascendancy of the arquebus, at least in Spanish hands, over mounted shock action (that is, cavalry charges).
>>495041
Most early guns were cast bronze or strips of iron banded together like a beer barrel.
>>494938
Hand cannons weren't that good. It was the invention of the match lock and refinements to gunsmithing by that time that made them clearly superior to crossbows, and eventually everything else.
Guns were useful because any peasant can make some arrows. Only governments can supply gunpowder, and have ample means to interrupt the supply to mutinous rebels.
>>495055
He charged all his extremely heavy cavalry into a fucking park full of trees and was completely hemmed in. The opposing Spanish might as well have been armed with butter knives and the result would not have been to different.
Such a tactical failure is not in any way the mark of ascendancy of a weapon in particular.
>>495041
>>494979
Training was cheaper. Longbows took a half century of training to master
>Gunpowder is traditionally listed as being a great military revolution. It was not. One can look at the introduction of gunpowder into European warfare 1250-1500, and be hard pressed to find where it really made a difference in terms of who won or who lost. Even its first decisive encounters did not change the pattern of the wars which it was a part of. Instead, firearms allowed the side that had military advantage to have more, while doing little for those that did not. Machiavelli observed from his vantage point that artillery did not change the effectiveness of cavalry charges, nor the importance of morale and training.
>Instead, gunpowder was part of a revolution in military affairs, and became increasingly important because it magnified and made possible that larger revolution. The real shift was the shift from the massed warfare of the middle ages, to the unit tactics that would dominate battlefields until the mid 19th century. The individual unit, commanded and deployed as almost indivisible group, was the key, and the reassertion of the Greek and Roman tactical concepts – of phalanx, flexible line and coordinated attack, even though Hannibal of Carthage was one of the great architects of the system – was what was changing warfare.
>This can be seen from battles where firearms played little part – where sword and pike infantry clashed with little musketry or artillery brought to bear. The musket, when it finally evolved, replaced both sword and pike, but the structure existed before muskets were military capital – that is before they were in every hand on the battlefield.
>The first revolution then, was in progress, and gunpowder merely affirmed it. That revolution can be called the tactical revolution.
>>495111
>butter knives vs heavy cavalry
u srs m8
>>495123
>Not understanding a figure of speech
Or swords and axes but you get the point.
>>495118
>The tactical revolution altered the shape of warfare in that during the medieval period – virtually across the Eurasian continent – armies were raised out of economic units of fuedal nobility. Capital, politics and technology all intersect here – the capital of subsistence and the politics of decentralized protection and command led to the noble being the unit of military production. The noble raises the core of the military, and nobles are then assembled into an army. Armies are fluid, and battlefield thinking consists of pouring men at the enemy.
>The emergence of the unit out of the band, is a slow process, but once established, there is no turning back. Part of the Turkish military superiority over Europeans consisted precisely of their organization of armies into units, as the battle of Nicopolis demonstrates.
>The unit military allows tactical thinking, because it reduces the number of entities that a commander must think of, it makes them more consistent, and, in turn, it has a logistical kick – if armies consist of units that are mostly alike, then the equipping of units can be standardized. The feudal levy becomes the regiment, not by being delocalized, but by being standardized.
>>495118
>start training as a wee lad of 10
>be 60 years old by the time i can use a bow
>>495118
This is somewhat relevant perhaps.
>>495131
The Scientific Revolution
>But almost as soon as this form of organization began to dominate the battlefield, it started creating a pressure on the political unit itself. The state had to equip soldiers with more and more expensive equipment, and had to equip larger and larger armies. The real next revolution in military affairs came with the introduction of ideas that would allow small powers to dominate larger powers through maximizing the new soldier.
>The beginning of this can be seen in the war between England and Spain that culminated with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and in Spain’s own conquests in the new world. Small forces of Spaniards were able to topple two large, militaristic, and powerful states, while having much greater difficulty against less organized populations. The realization at work here was to strike at the head of the other state – decapitation and taking the capital became key ideas of warfare. One would no longer see kings merely ransomed off, and conversely, kings were kept at farther remove from harm’s way.
>However, it is Cromwell’s “New Model Army” which is generally regarded as both the culmination of the development of the unit, and the arrow that pointed forward. Not only in terms of training, discipline and organization, but in terms of how military science is, just that, a science. Gunpowder had existed for 300 years in European warfare, before the introduction of the Age of Reason’s signature star shaped forts and manuals on ballistics.
>>495118
Training musketeers could not have been cheaper than training bowmen, because bowmen were not "trained". especially in the sense of receiving supervised drill. The crown merely banned gambling, bowling, and any other fun game that wasn't archery, and actually raised money by fining offenders.
And besides that, most of the skeletons of archers from the Mary Rose were teenagers or early 20's.
I don't see the relevance of all the crap you're greentexting.
>>495118
About nine years of part time training is now half a century.
>>495159
Nine years is already stretching it mate.
120-140 pounds of drawweight is 3-5 years depending on prior condition and training.
>>495154
The same applies to the Towton bodies. Unsurprisingly for a mass grave from a battle, they're mainly 18-25 year olds with a handful of older guys mixed in.
>>495162
I'm going off starting at around 7 and going off to battle at 16.
Here's a quote from Lindsay Boynton, who was the top historian on the Elizabethan military until he died:
One of the reasons that firearms superseded bows, it is suggested, is that they could be mastered in a shorter time. Such an argument runs wholly counter to the growing professionalisation of military affairs. Training, in particular, was becoming ever more comprehensive and the specious argument that firearms required less, not more, training, bears all the marks of a propagandist’s sophistry. No contrast could be more pointed between the old assumption that levies were briefly trained en route for battle, and that implicit in the whole conception of the trained bands, that a certain minimum of discipline and instruction were essential.
>>495173
Giving bows to little kids had more to do with the supposed moral qualities of archery than the necessity of training somebody to shoot from that age for military purposes. It was the medieval equivalent of "Teach your kids to shoot arrows, not shoot heroin".
>>494933
First Breitenfeld clearly showed the limitation of the tercio imo and that was in 1631. Also relating to topic is that in first Breitenfeld mobile artillery was used in a new way with deadly effect on the blocky tercios.
>>495194
If you want to be a master archer with a medieval longbow(as in actually able to hit specific things) then you probably have to train for a long time.
But just standing with 5.000 other dudes pointing your arrow at the general direction of the enemy requires you to be strong enough to draw the bow and not much else really.
>>495078
I wonder how brittle cast bronze is to iron, they did make cast bronze swords right?
>>494967
>Military writers of the period never mention easy training as an advantage of firearms.
>You don't have to build strength to carry and wave around something extremely heavy
>You don't need to train and memorise several combat styles for your weapons
Training might have not been easier, but it was certainly faster.
>>495471
>You don't have to build strength to carry and wave around something extremely heavy
Muskets of the 1500's were extremely heavy, to the point that some military men preferred the smaller, weaker harquebuses.
>You don't need to train and memorise several combat styles for your weapons
This is video game logic.
>Training might have not been easier, but it was certainly faster.
There were a lot of veterans in the late 1500's writing about how the longbow should be phased out of military service, and none of them ever said that it's because musketeers were easier to train.
Thomas Digges, Muster-master General, 1590: “Reason teacheth me, how barbarous that common opinion is, that an English man will be trained in a few weekes to be a perfect Souldiar. For if a Mason, a Painter, or other Mechanicall Artificer be scarcely able in seven yeares to learne the perfections of his Science, shall we thinke the Art of a Souldiar so base and abject, that it is to be attained in a few weekes or moneths?”
Humfrey Barwick, 1594: "armed pikes and halberds, launces and speares, are better to be made perfect in sixe daies, than the fiery weapons are in 60. daies.
Robert Barret, 1598. "But you must note this by the way, that the fierie shot, either on horsebacke, or foote, being not in hands of the skilfull, may do vnto themselues more hurt then good: wherefore the same is often to be practised, that men may grow perfect and skilfull therein."
>>494938
the first conflict to really see extensive use of hand held firearms beyond a novelty were the hussite wars, which was an on and off series of religious wars in Bohemia from 1419 to 1434
>>494961
he was wrong about that, plate armor was a long sought after answer to the knight's lance which could punch right through chainmail. It became a reality due to advances in metallurgy which allowed smiths to work with larger blocks of steel than they ever had before.
