Fireside this week! First off, it seems like last week’s post on the Hollywood myth of archery volley fire really got out there, so if you are a new reader just joining us, welcome! If you are in to discussions of historical tactics with an eye towards correcting common myths in games and film, you might consider also reading the three(ish)-part series on “Total Generalship” (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc), which discussed how pre-modern generals could – and couldn’t – actually command an army in battle, or our series on pre-railroad logistics (I, II, III), discussing how ancient and medieval armies managed marching and eating on campaign.
For this week’s musing, I wanted to expand a little bit on an element of last week’s archery post that I gestured at but didn’t really get into, which is the question of cultures with bow traditions, but with meaningfully weaker bows. You will recall that a lot of the math on arrow penetration, range and lethality we were working with came from this older post of mine, which took as its starting point the shooting characteristics of the English longbow and the Steppe composite bow, historically the strongest war bows used. In practice, my sense is that in much of Eurasia, by the Middle Ages at least, most cultures with strong archery traditions were using war bows in that range.
But what about the exceptions?
Here there are two that spring to mind. The first is that it’s not clear that ancient composite recurve bows had the same very high draw weights: Sean Manning has collected the – admittedly sometimes sparse – evidence in a pair of his posts, which are also going to be in this week’s reading recommendations below. The suggestion we might glean from the evidence – and it is only a suggestion, given how thin it is – is that war bows seem to have developed heavier draws over time, with late Bronze and very early iron age bows being reconstructed with draw-weights in the 40-65lbs range, while by the fifth century or so the draw weights push more confidently into the 60-70lbs range. Second, I have seen it generally supposed,1 that the war bows in use in the Americas were also not as powerful as English longbows or Steppe composite bows, although I can’t put a number to how much less powerful.
We might wonder first why that might be and then what that might mean for our understanding of archery tactics. For the why we are necessarily speculating, but I think the most immediately plausible answer is the tactical and especially armor environment. As Manning notes himself, ancient military treatises that talk about archery often stress rate of ‘fire’ as being as important as raw power and of course the speed of shooting over an extended period is going to be fairly closely connected to the strength required to pull the bow. In short, there are tradeoffs for powerful war bows: ‘heavy’ war bows (in terms of draw-weight) require ‘heavy’ (literally) arrows that can withstand the force of acceleration and more strength and endurance to shoot. So if fighting is happening in an environment where you do not need that power, there would be advantages to ‘lighter’ (in draw-weight) bows.
And here it is worth noting that in early Iron Age (c. 1200-500 BC in the Eastern Mediterranean is the range I mean with ‘early’), armor of any description seems like it might have been a fair bit rarer than it would be in subsequent centuries. The evidence for the armor of regular warriors in the Bronze Age – only chieftains and kings would have worn something like the Dendra Panoply – is extremely limited but also suggests, to me at least, that most soldiers had at most a textile defense, if anything. Egyptian infantry in the Bronze Age, for instance, are – so far as I have seen – almost always depicted as wearing knee-length loincloths, but no helmets and bare chests (and carrying shields). The picture in the pre-contact Americas is a bit more complex – the Americas were really big – but armor was limited to organic materials (as there was no tool metal use prior to contact), which is to say the best available armor might have been in the same basic performance class as a gambeson or buff leather.
And that makes a big difference: you will recall, working very roughly from Alan Williams testing in The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003),2 lethal penetration of an unarmored human requires relatively little energy, on the order of 10-30J (generally to the lower end of that range). Adding a thick textile defense might raise the impact energy required up to something on the order of 40-60J (very roughly). An mail with padding or a solid breastplate in iron or bronze might push that figure up considerably and so on. You can see my rough estimates in the chart below:
So in a high or late medieval environment, where a lot of combatants on the battlefield – not just in Europe, but in the Middle East, South Asia or East Asia – are going to be wearing some mix of textile, hardened leather and metal armor, it makes a lot of sense that bows push their impact energies up as high as they can by maximizing draw-weight. In essence, they are ‘keeping pace’ with accelerating armor technology.
By contrast, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the Romans deploying a nearly-all-metal-armored heavy infantry battle line in the second century BC was an innovation. Ancient armies were almost never so heavily or uniformly armored. Even as late as the Hellenistic period, we see reportedly unarmored soldiers (with shields, of course) – lighter Greek thureophoroi, Gallic, Celtiberian and Iberian warriors, etc. – used as ‘line infantry’ holding the line of battle (rather than fighting as skirmishers). In that context, it’s not hard to see why a relatively moderate draw-weight, allowing fore more rapid or prolonged shooting, would be advantageous, especially given that functionally no amount of draw-weight would allow an archer to defeat the real key protection these combatants had against arrows: their shields.
But does that combat environment, with lower draw-weight bows combined with much lighter armor, change our expectations for archer lethality? I don’t think it really does, actually. From a pure model-perspective, we’re still dealing with infantry that generally use pretty big shields, so body coverage is still very high, meaning even most ‘on target’ arrows won’t inflict wounds. But also, we know that Greek hoplite phalanxes, Macedonian sarisa-phalanxes, Roman legions, Gallic battle lines and so on confidently marched into contact against arrow-heavy forces all the time: the exception were horse archers who could, of course, withdraw faster than a shield-bearing heavy infantry formation could advance.
Meanwhile, in much of Native North America, what we see through the limited pre-contact and early post-contact evidence is a fairly normal ‘first system‘ interaction, where ‘battles’ consist of often prolonged exchanges of missiles (arrows, javelins, sling shot) that produce very low casualties. These sorts of low-lethality battles, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization show up in a lot of cultures. Some of those cultures develop armor specifically for those contexts, but many do not and casualties remain low because the exchanges happen at long distance, often from behind shields, in loose order. The long range makes arrow ‘dodging,’ feasible, while the shields and loose order mean that a very high percentage of missiles are simply not going to hit anyone. Instead, the extremely high casualty rates of first system warfare come from raids and ambushes, where weapons (both contact and missile weapons) are being used at very close range against enemies who have little hope of defending themselves. Of course that is also a military context where a ‘heavy’ draw bow doesn’t offer much advantage: it isn’t going to be appreciably more lethal against an opponent hiding behind a shield or a tree (nor more lethal against an opponent being ambushed at close range), but it will be much more exhausting to use and shoot slower.
In short, then, I find the basic supposition – supported, as far as I know, by the evidence – that draw-weights on bows were lighter in Eurasian antiquity and in the New World quite plausible. It fits with the broader threat environment those bows were operating in that whatever small advantage of lethality might be offered was outweighed by the loss of shooting speed in a low-armor environment. At the same time, that interaction doesn’t seem to have really changed the arrow lethality situation, because shields and dispersion were still very effective ways to limit the lethality of archery.
I should note since there remains some online contretemps over it, that Emily Armstrong, the new lead singer, was spectacular live. Chester Bennington will never be replaced, but Armstrong absolutely has the chops to fill the role going forward.
On to Recommendations:
Of course since I’ve mentioned it above, let’s start with Sean Meanning’s two-part series on bow draw-weights, discussing the archaeological and reconstruction evidence first from the Medieval period (in the first part) and then from the ancient world (in the second part). Sean’s blog, Book and Sword also just generally has a lot of very good ancient warfare material in the back catalog, so give that a look if that is your jam. Sean is an academic expert on ancient warfare (particularly for the Achaemenids, a field that is grossly understudied) with a PhD from the Universität Innsbruck; he will not steer you wrong.
Meanwhile, if you like watching historians comment on the historical context and mistakes of battle scenes in movies, Insider has put together a massive, three hour long supercut of their videos interviewing historians over just that, featuring appearances from friends-of-the-blog Michael Taylor and Roel Konijnendijk, as well as Michael Fulton, Evan Wilson and William Short.
And for more on what is happening in the study of the ancient world, also check out the May 1 issue of Pasts Imperfect, with a focus on Seth Bernard’s recent work estimating the economic role of enslaved laborers in Pompeii,3 as well as noting a fascinating comparative study of inequality between the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty by Guido Alfani, Michele Boll and Walter Scheidel. This latest Pasts Imperfect also includes a gift/author link (which I’m not sure I can reproduce) to the ‘big splash’ ancient history article of the month, “Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors.”4 That’s not precisely a new hypothesis (as PI notes, Josephine Quinn argued for it back in 2017), but it is exciting to see it appear so clearly in the genetic evidence. We’ll be coming back to Carthage a bit later this year on the blog, but this sort of evidence certainly forces us to rethink the nature of Carthaginian imperialism in the western Mediterranean.
Finally, I suppose I ought to note that I wrote again for Foreign Policy, this time on the role that pro-trade policies – despite elite disdain of merchants – played in Roman success. Alas, this one is presumably behind the paywall, but for those with access, it may interest.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I want to lead with something out of last week’s essay on archer and suggest Michael Livingston, Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (2023). Livingston’s core focus here is a revised account of the Battle of Agincourt, in particular shifting the location of the battle, in order to better fit what the sources are actually telling us as opposed to some of the mythology that has sprung up around the famous battle. But that ‘intervention’ is in turn embedded in a book that serves as an excellent introduction to the battle even for readers entirely unfamiliar with it. Indeed, the reader who opens the book expecting swiftly to be seeing the hail of arrows at Agincourt will need to be patient, but their patience is rewarded: Livingston begins with a brief history of the Hundred Year’s War to 1415 which sets the battle in its context and then a careful narrative of the Agincourt campaign in 1415 itself, which sets the stage for the battle.
The stage set, Livingston moves to his main historical intervention (what we call it when a historian is trying to change our understanding of something) which is focused on the location of the battle (and then a bunch of follow-on implications of that). What is really handy for the regular reader though is Livingston begins by giving a capable, serious account of the preexisting consensus, what her refers to as the Vulgata-version of Agincourt, before moving to his explanation for why an alternate site for the battle provides a superior understanding of the sources. Likewise, in his discussions of the battle, he makes clear where he deviates from the Vulgata and I think this is useful for giving the reader a sense of how we make history and why it can shift and change as we come to understand our sources just a bit better.
All of that done, the book can finally close with a vivid account of the battle itself, as Livingston works through what I’ve termed here a ‘physics of the battlefield’ approach, trying to harmonize the often difficult sources with what we can understand about the physical place and the way weapons, armor and of course humans would function in that space. This Livingston mixes with vivid descriptions of the horror and savagery of a battle that was, in the end, decided not by arrows but in the mass press of close combat between armored men struggling in muddy fields.
Livingston’s approach here is rigorous, but the book reads very easily: there’s plenty of moments of engaging color and evocative description, while the core historical arguments are delivered clearly in easy-to-follow plain language, making this book both a fascinating stage in the scholarship of the battle and a good introduction for a reader looking to come to grips for the first time with one of the most famous battles in European history.
- e.g. Lee, “The Military Revolution in Native North America” in Empires and Indigines (2011), 57, fn. 31 in turn citing Malone, The Skulking Way of War (2000), 17-18.
- With the caveat that some of those figures are not perfect.
- Very large, surprisingly so to me, but then Pompeii seems to have been a fairly commercial town
- Though I feel the need to caution that genetic analysis can tell us where people’s genes are from, but they can’t tell us things like cultural identity or political belonging.
There was a documentary about Agincourt that claimed it was primarily a crowd-crush disaster – the mud and arrows causing many of the French to fall over on top of each other.
I saw that archery post being shared by Financial Times’ Alphaville section in their weekly roundup of neat articles
I’ve seen links to this blog pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, including random gaming discords. It’s good too see quality, educational material still thriving when so much of what’s on the internet is AI slop or rage baiting drivel.
I now have the book on imperial Roman archery by Holger Riesch and maybe I can finally read it this summer. I just have to find my copy since I rearranged my office.
Michael Livingston’s books (and Anne Curry’s sourcebook) are definitely worth reading if you are interested in late medieval warfare in France.
For a similar change: the revolution that enabled the Zulu to dominate warfare was principally social, with very little technology required. Shaka accepted that the stand-off exchange of javelins would not be decisive, and simply had his guys run in and stab, and have separate groups that could run and stab from the flanks, and had more guys to run in and stab later.
I’m not poking fun – it’s a deceptively simple tactic that requires serious discipline and organization to pull off successfully.
The relevant point here is that the hail of missiles just could not stop this. Even sizable forces got worn down and then defeated decisively. That sounds a great deal like the kind of ancient warfare described here, with ample but light missile fire resulting in shock infantry as the deciding arm. (IIRC, the Zulu lacked cavalry altogether.)
(IIRC, the Zulu lacked cavalry altogether.)
Why didn’t Shaka decide to adopt cavalry and horses? I know in much of Africa the climate and ecology aren’t super favorable to horses, but horse-based cultures have developed nonetheless, even in , and South Africa in particular seems like it would be far enough south that horses could thrive fairly well. He could in theory have gotten horses either via the Dutch to the west or the Omani Arabs in Mozambique to the east, right?
I Am Not An Expert. tl;dr – He couldn’t use them because he didn’t have them.
First point: Shaka died fairly young and definitely didn’t have a chance to consider this. It seems horses don’t naturally thrive in *most* of southern African and only penetrated the economy slowly. It was rare to see them used in warfare, because the herds were mostly imported and their natural increase limited by disease. I don’t have strong academic sources, but:
https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-history-of-horses-in-the-southern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_horse_sickness
It seems horses don’t naturally thrive in *most* of southern African and only penetrated the economy slowly.
I would think that’s even more so the case in Sahelian Africa though, and you did have horse-based cultures there, like the Fulani (who used cavalry effectively to carve out empires in the 18th & 19th c). The horses didn’t thrive in that environment (although I guess eventually they did breed lines that were resistant to trypanosomiasis), but they were clearly valuable enough for warfare that people kept on importing them via the trans-Saharan trade routes.
The Sahel is north of the tsetse fly belt of maximum livestock disease. Horses were slow to spread southward through that tropical zone.
As far as horses being brought by ocean to cooler South Africa, Shaka Zulu was not that hooked into world trade or influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetse_fly
I think they key difference here is that the Sahel has always been proximate to the North African cultures, connected by the trans-Saharan trade routes, and the North African cultures have always had horses.
The tsetse fly belt means that once you get as far south as – say – Gabon, there aren’t any horses. So even if you’re living somewhere near the Cape where the climate is hospitable to horses, there aren’t any adjacent cultures to get the horses from or to learn how to use them (how to make saddles and stirrups and reins, how to ride, how to make collars and use them in agriculture, how to train a warhorse and use one in battle), so even if the horses themselves were introduced, without the cultural transmission, the locals wouldn’t know how to use them other than as food.
The European settlers – the Boers and the British – did bring horses with them, of course, and also brought the full cultural array of equipment and skills, but Zulus would have to acquire both the animals and the skills, and then it would take generations to acculturate that. Shaka didn’t have that sort of time. Could you build a steppe archery culture on the savanna? Perhaps. But not in the time that Shaka had. Think how long it is from the Spanish introduction of horses to the Americas until the first of the Great Plains Indians became fully-nomadic horse cultures (about 200 years, and it took another hundred years for that to be fully established).
I think they key difference here is that the Sahel has always been proximate to the North African cultures, connected by the trans-Saharan trade routes, and the North African cultures have always had horses.
That’s a really good point, about cultural knowledge mattering as much as the presence of the horses themselves. It’s probably especially the case after Islam arrived in the Sahel and tied the region (at least, its elites) culturally to the Middle East where of course horses were a big thing.
The tse-tse fly is a big culprit here: It tends to kill horses and (some types of) cattle. This basically meant that rainforest zone of central africa blocked horses off from the southern bits until europeans introduced them.
You need more than access to horses, you need consistent access. You need the whole infrastructure. Can you breed, raise, feed, equip, maintain, and train your own horses? if not, that’s a vulnerability and a weakness that enemies can exploit.
That whole shebang is very expensive. Even if Shaka Zulu could afford all that, are the gains worth all that cost? Especially since that’s opportunity cost vs using that wealth to develop your land or get more infantry (to conquer more land).
Even if cavalry is amazing (and it’s not that amazing – useful, sure, but not a must have war winner), it’s competing against other things that you can spend resources on, and probably a lot of those are more worth it.
There’s a lot of big picture to consider here.
Even if cavalry is amazing (and it’s not that amazing – useful, sure, but not a must have war winner)
That’s very context dependent, and arguably it was a completely must have war winner for most large Eurasian empires.
A better way to phrase it is that cavalry isn’t by itself a war winner, only depending on broad context which is largely fixed for a particular group of people.
There was no relevant military horse-related tradition (or even horses period) Shaka could have pulled on. Remember the Bantu peoples came from and largely expanded too areas entirely unsuited for horse warfare. He was basically improving on the preexisting military system of the region and did that very successfully.
It may be helpful to think of an example that *did* go down the horse+guns road. Moshoeshoe of Lesotho started adopting that in the last 1820s after being raided by the Griqua (mixed race migrants from the Cape Colony). From that point the transition took something like 15 years. This required building a close relationship with the British against the Boers. Missionary connections were invaluable, but came with major cultural, political, and religious influence from them. Guns and horses of course are also expensive in purely financial terms!
Shaka was operating somewhat further east and earlier, so migrants from the Cape Colony were not part of the military mix. He didn’t share a border with the Portuguese until after his expansion was well underway. It would have been basically impossible if he even wanted to.
As opposed to what he did, which was demanding in the sense it required some new insights and a lot of training, but the resources were at hand. Moshoeshoe fielded 6k cavalry in his 1850s war against the British. The Zulu could put up to 25k in the field and that was scaled up *quick*. Shaka ruled for just *12* years! Realistically a transition was something a *successor* could have tried to do after the Blood River fiasco.
Changing strategies is very challenging. The Boer/Griqua style of warfare proved much more effective. But imitating is hard. You need resources not available in your borders. Tactics too which in a lot of ways is harder. Really you probably need outside advisors which comes with its own risks and the transition from foreign to competent local officers usually never happened. As Bret has noted before, ‘westernization’ as often as not weakens rather than strengthens. The Zulu caused the British a lot more problems than the Matabele despite the latter having a large number of rifle-armed fighters.
Remember the Bantu peoples came from and largely expanded too areas entirely unsuited for horse warfare.
interestingly enough, the original Bantu homeland (highlands on the Nigeria-Cameroon border) did eventually get a tradition of horse warfare, but that doesn’t appear to have happened till the early 19th c, long after the Bantu peoples had left.
Interesting! I guess some of those areas are high enough the teste flies are less of a concern. To be honest I am sort of surprised horses didn’t take off in East Africa then eventually spread south as significant chunks of, eg, Tanzania are high enough teste flies are less of concern. I guess the issue is the parts most connected to the outside world are the least horse suitable.
Incidentally the Boers seemed generally decidedly more militarily effective than British forces. The Boer force that won a nearly bloodless victory at Blood River was rather more seriously outnumbered than the British force annihilated at Isandlwana. Similarly the British invasions of Losotho were a fiasco while the Boers were more successful. As for the direct clash in the Boer Wars they were ultimately overwhelmed by absurd force. Though that experience and lessons learned did play a part in why the British regulars did so well in WWI
Americans like to mythologize our militia system, but the Boers and Canadiens came far closer to matching that mythology than we did. Probably because the level of military threat they faced was far higher than anywhere except the most extremely forward colonists. Also more favorable economic structures. Both of those were able to actually mobilize basically every adult male. Which is not too say American militias were useless, played a big part in the British only having control where they had large forces during the Revolution.
Oyo, in modern southwest Nigeria / southern Benin, looks like it’s one of the only examples of cavalry being used in the lowland wet-tropical region of Africa (as opposed to to the highland tropics in Cameroon and Ethiopia, the dryland Sahel, or the Mediterranean zone of western S. Africa). The article does stress that horses couldn’t self sustain in that climate zone and the society was depend on a continual import stream of horses from the north.
Interestingly, it looks also like horses were used as prestige goods (for ritual sacrifices, ceremonies etc.) in wet-tropical zones where they couldn’t really be used for labor or for warfare.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/181095?seq=3
There was no relevant military horse-related tradition (or even horses period) Shaka could have pulled on.
This is a really good point- of course in the Sahel, in coastal West Africa and in Ethiopia people would have known *about* horse warfare and its advantages (through Islamic history) even before they actually started using horse warfare themselves.
As I understand it, part of South Africa has a Mediterranean climate, but the Zulu live a little further north and grow tropical crops.
That’s more or less right, although i think it’s more east/west than north/south. The Zulu live in the east which is summer-rain, subtropical ecoregions, the Mediterranean climate is in the west.
Sort of a similar “offense in depth” strategy as the triplex acies?
Bret’s repeated, if begruding, use of “fire” to describe arrows (see e.g., this week “…ancient military treatises that talk about archery often stress rate of ‘fire’ as being as important as raw power;” last week, “…but infantry under lighter ‘fire’ might actively move their shield to block specific incoming arrows”) vindicates my view that “fire” is a valid non-literal way to describe this.
Perhaps, but note the purposeful use of quotation marks, identifying the term as “This is not my term” or “This is not how the term is usually applied” (taken from Chicago Manual of Style, in the section for so-called “scare quotes”).
Yes but it’s telling that he feels the need to use ‘fire’ in scare quotes rather than using another word…
Well, exactly. That was what I had intended to indicate, but perhaps was too cryptic.
You intended to indicate that there isn’t a better term?
Reply to AJS,, no but then your response must also have been too cryptic!
How so?
On a blog of pedantry.
My issue is not only is it not right. It’s not hard to use the appropriate words. Shoot or loose etc.
“Rate of shoot” or “rate of loose” does not make sense; “fire” is the better term in this context
There is a distinction between how we, in retrospect, academically describe the subject in terms of quantifying applications of force, and what makes sense as a command to start shooting or reference to an individual shooting.
We apply a lot of terms of modern military science to evaluations of past military actions, but that wouldn’t vindicate depicting Alexander the Great referencing the OODA loop.
Yes, but this is not a hard-&-fast distinction, & we frequently see anchronistic terms accepted for both purposes (eg using “empire” & “emperor” to refer to pre-Roman &/or non-Western states)
Yes, but this is not a hard-&-fast distinction, & we frequently see anchronistic terms accepted for both purposes (eg using “empire” & “emperor” to refer to pre-Roman &/or non-Western states)
A type of state was probably referred to with an equivalent term for a type of state, whereas the process of shooting a muscle powered weapon would have a local equivalent that would be distinct from “fire”.
An equivalent term in the sense of functional meaning but not in terms of literal meaning (literal meanings were often quite different; eg “king of kings,” “lord of the universe,” “son of heaven”). I’d argue “fire” captures the functional meaning here
“Rate of shot” or “shooting rate” or “shots per minute” make perfect sense, in fact are in common use.
It should also be stressed that draw weight is not the be-all-and-end-all for bows. In discussions of archery there tends to be a slight obsession with it, and the over simplification that the ‘power’ or ‘strength’ of a bow is largely determined by it. But in many ways it’s a flawed metric: a steel arbalest might have 10x the draw weight of a yew longbow, but it certainly doesn’t have 10x the strike.
A better one might be draw weight x draw distance (which is loosely the energy stored in the bow while it is at full tension and compression. If you measure draw weight in newtons (kilograms x Earth’s g) and draw distance in meters, you get joules – the units of energy. Or foot-pounds for the imperials. Call it “draw energy” if you want a catchy name.
Now this isn’t a perfect calculation at all, because it assumes that you need the same force to pull the bow at the start as at the end. To be precise, we’d need to plot a graph of how much force is needed to hold the bow at different draw distances, and measure the area underneath it (the curve has different shapes for different bows, with composite recurve bows being somewhat flatter than straight self-bows, and modern compound bows giving a crazy shape). And even this wouldn’t be a perfect measure; what fraction of the energy stored in the bow is transferred to the arrow varies between bows, or even with different arrows for the same bow. And, even then, there’s more to the lethality of an arrow than its energy.
While all these complexities are important, they are also very hard to take into account. Surely part of the attraction of draw weight is that it’s simple to understand, simple to measure, and simple to compare. Few people wants to measure a table of data and compute an integral just to get off the ground. For discussions such as these, having a metric that hits the sweet spot between ease-of-use and precision is key.
I’d argue that draw weight x draw distance has the same advantages of simplicity as draw weight, while being a great deal more physically relevant. If we’re going to be comparing the ‘power’ or ‘strength’ of bows across different cultures and time periods, we probably ought to start with a more apt quantisation of it.
Is there really that much variance in draw distance between bows? I would think that, since you want a bow you can draw as far as possible, that it would mostly be determined by the length of the archer’s arms.
Bit of variation in technique (and therefore arrow length) definitely, modern target archers with longbows draw to under the chin but the English warbow of the 14th century (and e.g. trad archery in Japan and Korea) would be drawn to the ear.
European crossbows had very short powerstrokes (often around 10-20 cm). Most handbows can be drawn to a powerstroke of 70 cm or more. Art, anecdotes in classical writers, and (allegedly) finds suggest that many archers in ancient Europe used rather short arrows by our standards and they had not invented arrow guides yet so the draw would have been short
To complicate things, draw weights of handbows are often measured at a nominal 28″ draw, not how long any one shooter with any specific arrow draws them
Recurve bows have the string almost next to the arrow rest, so the draw tension is pretty much the full length of the arrow. Self bows have a ‘dead’ space between the stave and the string. There’s other factors too – like where the max acceleration happens (a crossbow slaps the bolt into flight, where a long recurve or a compound accelerates more evenly and a longbow is first more acceleration then less as the bow approaches rest.
Draw weigh x draw distance is useful when comparing bows to crossbows, but when comparing bows to each other, the distance basically cancels out because draw distance is determined by the arm length of the archer.
I think so. From my understanding, compound recurve bows tend to have a longer draw distance than straight self bows. IIRC, it’s a combination of geometry and the materials having more capacity to flex before breaking. To the point where some needed special adaptions because the draw length ended up being longer than a reasonable arrow length! And, within the same “shape” class, taller bows also have a longer draw length than shorter bows. All else being equal, a heavier draw bow might necessarily have a shorter draw length before it breaks, because a thicker bow has more strain along its surface than a thinner bow.
If all military bows did indeed tend to the same draw length limited by human anatomy the difference between draw weight and draw weight x draw distance would indeed be moot. But I’m not sure that’s the case. A quick google suggests that 36″ is within the norm for Manchu bows, while for English longbows it seems to cluster around the 28″. Bows designed for use on horseback might be even shorter? And the variance within each “class” shouldn’t be ignored either.
I’m happy to learn, and be corrected, if someone has the data or has already analysed this.
Certainly if you’re trying to compare the power of bows of different materials or designs you’d need something more sophisticated than draw weight. But I strongly suspect that if you were simply comparing two bows of the same design and materials (say two different yew English longbows) that their relative draw weights would be very good representation of their relative power.
That seems fair. Of course, contexts like this post where comparisons are being made between very different areas, cultures, and epochs, is precisely the one where something more than draw weight is required!
You’re talking around limb cast, how fast the limbs go forward on a shot. The reason older bows have such high draw weights is because they had really weak cast (low rate of energy expression on release). You can shoot 3 different 28in draw 70lbs bows and get crazy different results.
An old style yew selfbow, D profile, and you might not break 160 fps on a modest weight arrow. Take that same arrow and shoot it from a more modern longbow with better limbs and you’ll easily shoot 190-200 fps (even though both draw 70 lbs at 28 inches). Take the same arrow from a modern short limb deflex reflex longbow or recurve (say a 48 inch bow) (see end note) and you might get 215-220 fps.
Every one of these bows draws 70 lbs at 28 in, but you’ve got a 80 fps range (with the same arrow).
It’s all trade offs. Limb length vs draw weight vs backing vs shape vs durability vs cost vs material (most great bow woods are new world, when you’re restricted to old world woods you’re restricted in design quite a bit).
The classic D profile yew longbows are incredibly inefficient, you need massive draw weights to get the same energy (or fps) out of them compared against older recurves/composite bows. But! They’re much cheaper to make, and b/c they’re really gentle on the limbs they last a while.
This is a key problem in talking about historical bows, with what woods/materials they had available and keeping in mind the need to produce huge numbers of bows, you’re actually pretty restricted in what you can make. Longbows (cheaper to produce, but requiring huge draw weights for equivalent energy) or recurves/composite/turkish style bows (much, much more difficult and time consuming to produce) putting out much faster (but, given how archery works) somewhat lighter arrows.
Today it’s easy enough to make super fast longbows that last a long time, this was not possible before and even modern selfbows are remarkably better simply b/c we have access to way better bow woods (and processing techniques) that make the bows perform better than they would have.
end note: All other things being equal shorter bows are faster than longer bows. This is potentially counter intuitive, and does not mean they are better to shoot b/c the draw curve on them is often brutal.
Armour/protection, is a trade off between mobility and protection.
There are other elements too but I’ll stick with those for now. These reflect the context/use and the available materials.
Missile tech, both in the bow and projectile, as well as the string. Is a reflection of purpose and preparation, target and avaialble materials.
A change on one side will lead to a change in the other.
“Armour/protection, is a trade off between mobility and protection.”
To an extent, but this is usually DRASTICALLY over-estimated in the popular image. I doubt a knight in shining armor could do the uneven parallel bars, but he certainly could compete in hurdles races and do some gymnastics. Makes sense when you think about it–being able to dodge blows is as important as being able to deflect them (which is about 80% of what armor does).
And that’s assuming plate armor. Maille basically doesn’t hinder the wearer at all–the gambeson would be more restrictive, and while it does restrict motion to some extent it’s less than merely being in a formation does. And while maille can protect against arrows, it’s not perfect protection, as maille links CAN break (hurts a lot when it happens too, even through a gambeson, though my links are huge compared to historic ones so it’s not a perfect comparison).
And you have to remember that people today wear armor on occasion. People in armies in the past would have been wearing it constantly, so their bodies would adjust to it. It’ll be strapped appropriately and fitted to the wearer (even poor soldiers would modify their kit to be comfortable, for obvious reasons), which would by necessity allow for greater mobility.
All in all, I’d expect total mobility loss due to armor to be somewhere around “Slept a little funny, but not too bad” values. Certainly not “Need a crane to lift me onto my horse” levels, or “Actively interfering with my movements” levels–any armor that did bother people like that would have been quickly modified (or the wearer would be killed).
I think you’re missing the point, which is that heavier armour would be *comparatively* restrictive- it doesn’t need to affect things much. Particularly when battle is already *extremely* tiring. (Put it another way. Battle was more like those uneven parallel bars than “some gumnastics”)
I’d argue that endurance/fatigue is not quite the same thing as mobility. Or, at least, that mobility should be divided between endurance and flexibility/restrictiveness (the latter of which is what is stressed with the gymnastics comparison IMO). The fact that armour makes might make it hard to put your arm in one particularly unusual position is not the same thing as armour making it more tiring to move your arm between routine positions.
Fundamentally, everything worth talking about is a compromise. Things that aren’t a compromise, eg, the pros and cons of holding your breath for an entire battle, aren’t a compromise. For armour the benefit is obviously protection, and the drawbacks are, broadly in order of significance: (1) cost / availability, (2) endurance, (3) loss of senses / communication, and (4) agility. I’m sure that there are others there, and debates could be had about whether (2) or (3) is most important.
But people usually got the best armour that they could afford which was being produced by their society. If they went for less it was to breath / see / speak better and fight (or march or dig trenches) for longer. The inability to do a double back flip in full harness was rarely a battlefield clincher
I think perhaps you’re focusing on a narrow aspect of the word “Mobility” – specifically an individual person taking an individual action, one time. Perhaps the word “Agility” would be a more precise term for this.
Yes, while wearing armour I can dodge, and run, and fight, no problem. But each of those actions, and each minute I exert myself wearing it, consumes an additional X% of my stamina, and slows my pace by X time, compared to if I were performing the same action while unarmoured, or not carrying a shield. This is part of the reason why skirmishers and light cavalry spent so much time trying to bait their heavier counterparts into chasing them. Not just to interfere with lines and strategies, but also to sap stamina.
You’re absolutely right, myths about how immobile and weighty armour was are still fairly commonplace and should be pushed back on. But that doesn’t make Jonathan wrong either – your mobility, both individually and as a body of men – is negatively impacted over the long term, the heavier your armour is. This is why scouts, messengers, long patrols et al, often wore less armour than heavy line infantry. Your ability to travel distance over time (another equally valid aspect of the word “mobility” in a military context – especially away from battlefields and full armies) is impacted by your armour, or indeed anything else you’re carrying.
A heavily-armoured knight might well have at least three horses, one for himself to ride, one to carry the armour, and the third, the warhorse, to travel as light as possible so it wasn’t tired when entering battle.
Riding in your armour on your warhorse is a great way to make sure that neither you nor the horse are fit for battle when one comes.
Too many D&D campaigns where an armoured warrior wears their armour all the time.
Not to mention movies, where armies march for miles in step and wearing full armor. (I just re-watched The Two Towers, and Saruman’s orcs would have been exhausted by the time they even got to Helm’s Deep.)
“But that doesn’t make Jonathan wrong either”
Agreed. It’s a question of emphasis, not right or wrong. I just think, based on experiences wearing armor and watching people wear armor, that we currently over-estimate the problems caused by armor.
Take, for example, your argument that wearing armor consumes X% of your stamina. This is, of course, obviously true–the metabolic factors demand it. But it’s also true that becoming acclimated to a condition reduces that X%. For example, OSHA has rules for getting workers acclimated to hot and cold environments; folks who are acclimated can work longer hours and do heavier labor than those who aren’t. Armor’s no different. There are limits, sure, but someone who’s used to wearing armor will move more fluidly and have lower stamina losses from it than someone who isn’t. This can show up in the anthropological record–bowmen can be identified by the way their skeletons respond to the stresses of pulling a bow, for example. This is due to the body’s response to physical stresses, and demonstrates that this person’s body is better able to handle those stresses (because of measurable physical differences) than the standard-issue fighter. I don’t know that we see that for armor, but we may not; a lot of these are addressed via soft tissue, which rarely preserves.
People today, even those of us who wear armor, don’t wear it nearly as often as people in the past. Remember, the armor-wearers of the past were warrior-elites who’s main job was combat; they trained for and in this stuff since childhood in many cultures. It was even part of court dress (see the costume armor in the Austrian Imperial Museum). And not many people specialize in making armor anymore, either; I’d estimate that a modern armor-maker would be on par with a well-trained apprentice in the past (though I’m obviously biased, I’ll admit). This impacts armor fitting and construction in ways that would cause increased hinderance. So we won’t be as acclimated to it as people in the past and our armor isn’t as good. That means that any experiment run today is going to necessarily over-estimate the amount of encumbrance armor causes. We should consider modern experiments to be providing upper limits to potential issues caused by armor, not the norm.
As for mobility, to an extent again you must necessarily be correct. But again, I think you over-estimate the extent. When I was fighting in a shield wall the biggest hinderance was the other shieldmen–we trained in and out of armor, and frankly the armor didn’t do much to hinder us compared to the other people’s elbows and knees and spears and swords. Makes sense when you think about it: The bits and bobs that did get in the way on our armor got removed pretty quickly! And again, despite being one of the better-drilled units in our group, we were rookies compared to any real heavy infantry unit of the past. We also were willing to put up with some crap because we knew we weren’t actually going to die.
Between acclimation, more experienced workers, more training in armor, etc., I think that the truth is that armor was less of a hinderance than most think. Something of a hinderance, sure, but again, we should be looking at even experienced modern armor-wearers as the upper limit of how much armor hindered you; the reality is going to be lower for most people wearing armor in the past. (How much of the army that constituted is, of course, another issue….)
To add (draw) weight to your thesis only sub-Saharan people I’m aware of that traditionally used heavy (~100 pound) bows are the Liangulu who shot primarily elephants with them, rather than people. There’s a super interesting-sounding book about them still at in the 1960’s called The Elephant People that I unfortunately can’t find a copy of for [less than a hundred quid](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&kn=holman%20the%20elephant%20people&sts=t)
my stupid self went cool, now Shields please? and that Feels silly of me. Thanks for the post.
Dunno, Agincourt and like the The Battle of Carrhae are the top Arrows supposedly decided it Battles that are off the top of my head,
and presumably the Mongols various victories, but my understanding of extremely simplified is good at the feigned retreat + really fucking Fast mobilization the Bastards.
been too long since looked Mongols up.
Agincourt was primarily an infantry fight, at least the decisive stages. Arrows disordered the French formations, but the melee was hard fought enough that senior English commanders were killed (Henry V’s brother, the Duke of York), and Henry himself had a few close calls. While I haven’t seen a detailed reconstruction of Carrhae, it seems that once again the decisive action was fought at close quarters. For the best case scenario of a battle won by arrows, I think Crecy is about as good as you’re going to get. Still, melee actions are going to be the decisive element almost every time until you get to, idk, the later 17th century?
This blog has articles on the Mongols (and the Dothraki).
Strategically, if their cavalry allowed them to break into the general region you were in, they could deploy a mirror-match of your infantry (by “borrowing” your neighbor’s) and cutting-edge siege (from China). Then, if the battlefield produced a victory, they had the cavalry superiority to convert that into strategically relevant loss of equipment and manpower.
Operationally, a cavalry-only force of theirs could both move several times as fast as local, infantry-based armies (see “how fast do armies move” article), and could do so without lighting fires to cook their meals, thus invisible. This mostly meant they could avoid battles and only faced infantry when they liked their chances.
Tactically, real retreat, envelopment, defeat in detail, force rotation would all have been important. As would have been superior scouting. What we call feigned retreat (um, did the Mongols even consider it related to retreat at all? Modern military science talks of “trading space for time” as obvious, routine, and not defeat-related) was only one element, and possibly the easiest to counter.
Carrhae? My impression is that the case is less “the Parthians won because they had a camel caravan’s worth arrows” and more “the Romans lost because their general was a moron”. He followed the textbook on how to suffer a logistics defeat, how to run into an ambush, how to get defeated in detail, how to do the opposite of displaying leadership in the face of hardship, and how to do the opposite of handling the loss of morale resulting from aforesaid actions. The fact that the Parthians didn’t show a rapidly deadly threat is demonstrated by the Romans having the time to mutiny and attempt to carry out an organized retreat (which failed to stay organized, not due to enemy presence, but because they tried to do it at night) rather than the more traditional case, where morale collapse leads to a rout.
“That’s not precisely a new hypothesis (as PI notes, Josephine Quinn argued for it back in 2017),”
Do academics have a different sense of time than I do? To me, an idea that has “only” been around since 2017 sounds pretty new.
“We’ll be coming back to Carthage a bit later this year on the blog,”
I can’t wait!
I think “new” in this context means “original” rather than “recent”.
I actually went and bought two Michael Livingstone books on the basis of him being brought up last week. They arrived a couple of days ago, and I’m looking forward to getting into them. That period of Anglo-French history has been on my mind for a while lately anyway.
Some Native American people used slat or lamellar armor, of wood or bone. Dunno if more effective than cloth or boiled leather. All going out of style very quickly once firearms were on the battlefield; I have the impression that pre-Columbian warfare could be more “second system” than the stereotypes.
I have seen some tests on a recreation of that type of armor over on YT. So the usual caveats to the rigor used by some dude on YT apply. But at least he worked of from historical descriptions, and used US east coast hard woods as material.
In his test the armor was defenitly “effective”. It was able to stop stone, and metal tipped arrows, a hardwood war club, and a metal tipped spear. Even a modern axe split the wood, but only penetrated maybe an inch after that. To be honest almost all strikes split the wood, so parts of the armor would need replacement after every battle. I’d say it was a bit more effective then a gambeson would be, but a lot more expensive and harder to maintain.
From the scarce evidence we have, armor like this would have been worn by a handful of high status indivduals. It is still armor very suited to “first system” as it allows a chief, to stand in front of his followers, while being pretty safe, and look dashing.
“I have seen some tests on a recreation of that type of armor over on YT.”
Do you remember who? I recall seeing Malcolm PL making Iroquois armor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmkQS8_MODE but I don’t recall him doing tests, but maybe he did more videos. He did suggest that the really high backplate helped protect you from your own allies behind you; also suggested that spears weren’t used much because everyone was an archer until melee.
“a bit more effective then a gambeson would be, but a lot more expensive”
Though North America was rich in wood and poor in actual cloth. Also I’ve wondered how expensive gambesons really were in Europe: we modern people think of cloth as cheap, but in pre-spinning wheel societies where many people might own only a few shirts, cloth armor made with the equivalent fabric of 15 or 30 shirts seems like it’d be pretty expensive too…
There’s degrees of “Expensive” going on. Yes, a Gambeson isn’t cheap, but it’s cheap for *armour*. Everyone makes shirts, but only a few people make metal armour.
Several sets of guild regulations stipulate that the inner padding of fabric armour would be rags or old linen or things to that effect – it seems to have been a common way to reuse material.
It was Malcom PL, he has another series about the tests on his channel. Rewatching the videos makes me think the armor is less effective then I remembered. But then no fabric armor would stand up to a metal tipped spear.
> Though North America was rich in wood and poor in actual cloth
Oh sure, for pre-columbian north america wood obviously was the solution of choice (evidence -> they did it). But even in south and middle america were tropical hardwoods were accesible people prefered fabric armor.
> Also I’ve wondered how expensive gambesons really were in Europe: we modern people think of cloth as cheap, but in pre-spinning wheel societies where many people might own only a few shirts, cloth armor made with the equivalent fabric of 15 or 30 shirts seems like it’d be pretty expensive too…
Yes, you are right they were probably pretty expensive, even though, as other already pointed out, the stuffing was often made from rags, or animal hairs unfit for use in fabric. I often heared horse hair referenced, but can give no real source.
But what I meant wasn’t the price to make the armor. When the wood of one of Malcom PLs armor is split, you need to open the whole part, cut and fit another wood piece, and then weave the whole thing back together. When a gambeson is cut, you can sew it back together, but a patch on both sides, and the thing is as good as new.
One needs at least a day and some wookworking tools, and a piece of good dried hardwood, and a few yards of new string. The other needs a needle maybe two foot of yarn, two patches, and about 3 hours worth of sewing.
I wager this is the reason why, at least when fabric becomes common enough, most people stop bothering with other forms of organic armor, that offer little more protection for a lot more maintance work.
Argh! I was almost shouting it at the screen, but you forgot something: ARROW POISONS!!!!!
I seem to recall that the word toxic is etymologically related to the Greek word for bow?
Poisoned arrows still in use in the 21st century, in actual archery militias: https://www.teddyseguin.com/dotclear/index.php?2008/03/02/43-republic-of-central-africa-bows-facing-kalachnikov
[For the tl;dr crowd: the people toting AKs don’t have many bullets because they’re poor, the people shooting arrows have poisoned arrows and make their own equipment, and they’re fighting in dense woodland, so the lethality is about equal. The archer’s form a local militia to defend against raids by people armed with guns]
I also have a rather better memory that a lot of people, around the world, poisoned their arrows, with everything from rattlesnake venom to wolfsbane. Indeed, in some groups (Kalahari Bushmen come to memory) accidental and deliberate intoxication from arrow wounds is a leading cause of death (e.g. they shot each other in arguments, or screwed up handling their weapons and poisoned themselves).
Finally, I’d point anyone who’s interested in the subject at the Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, all four volumes. There’s a huge amount of bow and arrow physics in there, and yes, one entry does talk about Africans poisoning their arrows. In the west African culture discussed, each family had their own favorite recipe, and they used a specialized knife to draw the bow, so that in case something like the leopard they were shooting at charged them, they had the knife already in hand to fight back. Good stuff.
Arrow poisons are a thing, but they’re not very useful for battles because humans are too big to quickly kill with nearly all the natural toxins/poisons. It wasn’t until the early 20th C with industrial scale production of “poison” gases that it became practical.
Resistance to poison is mostly about body volume. The spiders and snakes that hunt with venom all target small prey, nothing really bigger than a mouse. Big snakes switched to killing by constricting, physical force. (For completeness the Komodo dragon does have a venomous bite. The prey doesn’t die for several hours, and in nearly all parts of the world Komodo dragon-like reptiles went extinct because other predators were more efficient.)
Lots of insects, spiders, frogs, snakes, are toxic/venomous as a deterrent. They don’t kill their prey with poison, they deter other creatures from killing them “yes you could kill me but you will die too.”
So poison is useful for hunting, where you can spare the time to shoot an animal and wait for it to die, or murdering an individual. It can be used in the kind of small scale battles where everyone is shooting at a distance and never really closing, because attrition is the goal and some of the enemy wounded will die from poison.
If though the enemy are close combatants, and even some pre-industrial societies fought like this eg Polynesians, then shooting someone with a poisoned arrow as they are charging towards you with club and shield won’t kill them in time to save you. Your poisoned arrow won’t be any more damaging than an unpoisoned arrow. It may even make them even more angry and determined to kill you.
And in pre-industrial societies there are logistics problems. There’s a really lethal sea mollusk toxin mentioned in the Neuromancer books, which actually exists. But apparently you have to collect a couple of thousand of the critters to get enough toxin to kill one person. There’s a tree frog in the Amazon somewhere with incredibly lethal toxin, but again how do you collect enough tree frogs to supply even a small company of archers?
Adding to this is that most biological toxins deteriorate (is that the right word?) very quickly. Snakes, spiders, etc have to constantly generate new venom. If you rub poison on an arrowhead, you’d better use that arrow within a few hours. Fun though it is to imagine the wagon train of live frog tanks accompanying the invading army, it’s probably not practical.
Entirely agree, poisons as battlefield killers are basically not a thing, with the caveats you mention.
However, the psychological effect of poisons might be significant? If the attackers knew that a minor wound from an arrow would kill them a week later, even if they won the battle in the meantime, would they be willing to charge through an arrow storm? Of course the same thing could be asked of the archer: are they willing to die cut down on the battlefield just to poison someone else and kill them a week later?
Patton’s aphorism about who should die for whose country comes to mind here, this doesn’t seem to be a popular strategy for either side.
How are they going to distinguish the death from seemingly minor wounds that were poisoned from all the deaths of seemingly minor wounds that bled out or got infected? How are they evaluating the presence of poison there?
Reputation, I would assume. If a culture is known for using poisoned arrows, neighbouring cultures would know that.
That does put it in the realms of ‘cultural adaptation’ though, meaning that any morale effect would only be present if the culture uses poisoned arrows at a scale that they’re known for it, rather than any individual efforts.
That seems like a very roundabout way to go about it compared to just using weapons and tactics to effectively kill and maim people. Like, to have a reputation worth caring about you already need to be at least decent at war.
It’s all a bit moot without evidence, but ‘have a scary reputation’ is a really rather useful thing to have in war, and I’m sure using poisoned arrows would go someway to doing that (provided you already have the tradition culturally). For instance, I’d bet that the AK47-armed aggressors in the original comment here would be a fair bit bolder if they were fighting bow-armed folks without poison.
I don’t think ‘be good at war’ and ‘use poison arrows’ are mutually exclusive statements.
On the question of distinguishing poison: mortality rates for minor wounds pre modern medicine were high, but not that. Much lower than for a strong poison for sure. I don’t know the exact numbers, but if 50% of walking wounded die after a battle, when it’s normally 5%, the difference should be very visible. Not to mention that the symptoms are likely to be different.
Martial use of poison arrows is extremely well attested across much of the globe, not too much ambiguity there
I would be very interested in a reference to a chronicler who wrote about their **own troops** using poison arrows, or a logistics trail of some kind for poison arrows being used by an army.
Accusations that the despicable / uncivilised enemy use poison arrows don’t seem very convincing to me, nor people dying from “scratches” = must be poison! in cultures that don’t have germ theory or effective antibiotics.
I would be very interested in a reference to a chronicler who wrote about their **own troops** using poison arrows, or a logistics trail of some kind for poison arrows being used by an army.
Accusations that the despicable / uncivilised enemy use poison arrows don’t seem very convincing to me, nor people dying from “scratches” = must be poison! in societies that don’t have germ theory or effective antibiotics.
There is first system warfare in which people from village A raid into the territory if village B, and might stick a poisoned arrow in someone. If he doesn’t die for a while, the raiders can live with that, in the same way an air force can accept that it will take hours for Dresden or Tokyo to burn down.
But for an army campaigning months from home, trying to fend off a heavy infantry attack, the idea seems unworkable.
Prior to germ theory there was not a distinction between death from infection and death from venom. Commanders knew that they were not commanding troops that were putting poison on their weapons, so they mostly did not think the ‘poisoned’ wounds that some of their troops died from were deliberate, no more than they believed the same kinds of wounds killing their enemies were deliberate.
When firearms were introduced it was immediately noted that gun wounds were dramatically more likely to become ‘poisoned’ (infected) than arrow wounds. The immediate conclusion was that lead shot was naturally poisonous, not that people were envenoming their shot (also that any surgical intervention no matter how brutal was justified if it removed a bullet, because leaving the lead in the would would always be fatal). Popular understandings of ‘lead poisoning’ continue to evolve today, but lead is not a naturally infectious material.
Endymionologist, why were gunshot wounds more likely to become infected? How big was the difference?
ad9, almost all pre-gunfire methods of killing people get through clothing and armor by cutting and parting it, or work by breaking bones without getting through the armor at all. Even lead shot that is cast with a pointed end doesn’t part clothing on the way to the body, it has so much energy that it simply punches a circle of cloth out and carries it into the wound. Woven cloth, especially if it’s full of sweat and grime and mud, is an extremely bad thing to have lost inside a wound, and that is what killed a lot of people with early bullet holes.
I don’t have numbers on the difference but it was enough that everybody at the time seemed to notice, even though they got all the mechanics of it wrong.
Well, there’s at least one example cited of it being used in warfare (though definitely closer to ‘first system’ warfare).
I wouldn’t say poisons are without merit in a battlefield situation. Battles frequently took a significant proportion of a day, so someone wounded earlier in the day may well be really struggling towards the end. Wars also usually take place over long campaigns, leaving plenty of time for attrition due to poison to prove useful. Plus any morale effect for being known to use poisoned arrows.
Is that enough to outweigh the cost of preparing poisoned arrows? Probably not, or else we’d see more evidence of it being widespread, but it’s not pointless in a large-scale battle.
Also, a point on deterioration. Cultures that use poisoned arrows today usually have processes for preparing poisons that prolong their effectiveness. It’s a lot more rare to just have a frog in a pouch, and more common to create a paste of some sort with a number of materials that’s packed onto the arrow and then wrap the end to stop it drying out (if the poison becomes inert though drying). Of course, this adds to the effort to prepare them.
Also also, there are a number of poisons that are very fast acting indeed. Hemlock is widespread across Europe, the near east, and in a band across Asia all the way to China. A small amount is debilitating (sweating, vomiting, muscle weakness, seizures), and not a lot more is fatal (usually CNS depression and associated complications). These happen quickly (often immediately) when ingested, let alone when injected into the bloodstream.
Bluebells are also fairly poisonous (though less so than hemlock). When their bulbs are crushed with water you get a white gluey paste which would be easily attached to arrows. It’s the same action as Hemlock (alkaloid CNS depression, among other nasties), just less concentrated. Having poisoned myself with eucalyptus before, I can safely say that even mild alkaloid poisoning is the last thing I’d want during a battle (and that only took about 20 minutes to take effect).
It’s all a bit moot without evidence, but if you can deliver them there are widespread and easily accessed poisons that would fit a battlefield context just fine.
How are these parameters for a poisoned wound different from any other kind of wound?
You’re going to need a lot of poison to have a worse attrition effect on an army than what the accumulation of bad diet and rough living does to their susceptibility to intestinal disease.
Again, this should be taken more as a thought experiment without the required evidence, but those things would be in addition, surely. Poisoned arrows are not in competition with dysentery. Folks are dying of dysentery *and* from poison. There will be overlap of course, folks who would have died of dysentery anyway, but instead succumbed to poison, but I’d expect there to be folks weakened by one that would be finished off by the other too.
As for ‘a lot of poison’, I’m not sure that would be the case. Hemlock is a tricky one as it varies in which alkaloids it produces most of over the course of its life-cycle, and the LD50 (the dose at which 50% of a sample population die) isn’t known in humans.
Best I’ve been able to find is an LD50 for the pure alkaloids in mice, and the LD50 for ingestion of the whole plant in cows, horses and sheep. The worst alkaloid is gamma-coniceine, of which 2.6mg/kg delivered intravenously kills 50% of mice in 30 seconds. The other two are 19 and 27.5 mg/kg intravenously, with the same 30 second action. Oral ingestion needs around 5x the dose (and take 8-12 minutes to take effect).
LD50 for the whole plant in cows is 3.3 mg/kg, horses 15.5, and sheep is 44 (never thought I’d see a metric where sheep were hardier than any other living being…). I don’t believe humans are particularly resistant to alkaloids, so let’s say that these give us our upper and lower bounds for oral ingestion (with intravenous being 5x lower).
Let’s say our enemy averages 70kg, meaning we need to stick between 0.05g and 0.6g of hemlock into someone with an arrow to be fatal 50% of the time…taking effect in something around the 30 second mark. Perhaps a little longer as this trends higher with bigger body size and just jamming some plant into a wound isn’t as efficient as injecting the neat compound, but not more than a couple of minutes.
That would not be very difficult to do at all. It could certainly turn 50% of those penetrating non-lethal shots into lethal ones (which could be significant number, considering Bret’s comments about the number of non-debilitating shots), and in all likelihood a fair proportion of the glancing ones as well. More if you can get just a tiny bit more poison in there (LD50 ramps up quickly past the stated dose).
In the hedgerow just down from my house there’s a good 30-40 plants, and they grow 2m in height or so. They’re very common, and with that level of lethality it wouldn’t be difficult to collect enough to poison all the arrows an army uses. Wrapping a leaf around the shaft just behind the head would more than do it, and each plant could have 20 or so. Keeping it from drying out might be trickier, of course.
Of course, we run into the issue that it appears people *didn’t* use hemlock this way. But I’d argue that the lethality of it likely isn’t the main issue (nor is the availability, it’s a really common plant). Perhaps the lethality *is* the issue, with the benefits of increased ability to kill or debilitate your enemy offset by the number of clumsy archers poisoning themselves as they fumble around with their arrows. Who knows?
> Wrapping a leaf around the shaft just behind the head would more than do it
I think that in practice, making an effective poison arrow is rather more difficult than that, even if a single leaf of hemlock contains enough poison that it could kill.
@Tea Kew Oh absolutely. The practices I’ve seen done involve making a sticky paste with the poisonous plant, gumming that onto the shaft behind the head, then wrapping it with some form of flat cordage to prevent it from damage/drying out. That’s how the Hadza do it. I’m sure there are other methods.
My point (not terribly clearly made in that instance) was more that it’s not difficult to procure enough poison to use for whatever archer-compliment your 10,000 man army has. A leaf per arrow would do it, whatever process is needed, and it’s a super-common plant.
Whatever reason it was that people didn’t seem to do it, it wasn’t for lack of availability (or lack of lethality, or lack of fast effect).
The use-case for poisoned weapons does indeed seems to be first systems warfare; In those desultory missile exhanges being able to poison someone seems like it would make a decent difference.
There are also mentioend that the chinese repeating crossbow was used with poisoned bolts, IIRC (largely because the fired relatively weak shots) though mostly as a civilian defence weapon.
While I have not read Livingstone’s book on Agincourt, I just finished his book on Crecy this week and I can recommend it. Once again, he argues (convincingly, IMO) for a different battle site than the traditional location.
“(as there was no tool metal use prior to contact)”
There was no heat-based tool *forging* in the Americas prior to the exchange, but when trade networks bringing tool stone to places with access to native copper deposits were disrupted or insufficient, copper nuggets would be beaten cold and sharpened. A non-alloy metal knife is never as good a tool as a flint knife, but there are also examples from the Arctic of knives made by collecting small globules of meteoric iron and hammering them cold into flat discs to be sharpened and mounted.
>Though I feel the need to caution that genetic analysis can tell us where people’s genes are from, but they can’t tell us things like cultural identity or political belonging.
This feels pretty generous. There are significant methodological caveats to these sorts of historical DNA claims. Sample sizes tend to be small (e.g. 210 in the Carthaginian study) and their pre-death provenance decidedly uncertain. The evidence to establish genetic profiles for reference populations to compare samples against is similarly shaky. The extent to which DNA can be definitively linked to specific lineages (rather than merely being a more frequent occurrence in one population than another) seems limited.
And, of course, at the end of the day it tells you nothing of how they thought of themselves.
I read the supplements to the paper (because paywall) and 210 is not a small sample size. You need to sum up the number of bases called to come up with an information criterion. In addition, most of the samples come from well attested locations with goodly amounts of modern (AMS) dating. So yeah, it’s a pretty big thing and of high fidelity and quality. Another instance we can point to of pots not people. In many ways more interesting than another folk movement!
There’s also that bows and arrows take time and trouble to make. If warfare is not your primary concern, but hunting is, your only bow will be for hunting and have a medium draw weight. Environment also figures – composite bows dislike wet, D-section bows (such as longbows) are prone to break in sub-zero temperatures. Bow technology also improves over time – the apex of composite bow technology was the Manchu/late Mongol variant, longer with dense bone ‘ears’. It would impart much more energy to an arrow than, say, a Parthian bow.
One European missionary to the Great Khan noted that Mongols generally had two bows – presumably one for war and one for hunting.
Ah yes now I really wanted your dissection of facts and fiction of Carthage. How true and important are the child sacrifices? How stable they actually are without external pressure? (read: Rome) How much primary sources do we have of them and if there aren’t many, is it because of Rome or is it because they just don’t write as much like the Macedonian successors and Persians?
I really reading that actual tophets have been found with remains of a lot of small children, and found a reputable link to a research summary: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
So, we really don’t have much knowledge about the way Phoenicians thought, because we don’t have many surviving religious treatises from them. However, it seems that the Roman (and unrelated, independent Jewish) claims of Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificing their children were not unfounded.
My understanding of the current consensus is that most experts believe that Tophet’s and child sacrifices were a thing that the Carthaginians did. The eminent Dexter Hoyos seems the main exception.
But that’s the limited extend of agreement AFAIK. How common it was, whether it was done by the elite (or if they used slave children), and a myriad of other questions remain very open. Both the archaeological and textual evidence are sparse, and don’t perfectly line up. It’s also really hard to tell the difference between a ritually killed baby given a ceremonial burial, and a still-born / naturally dead child being given the same ceremonial burial.
Booful cats!!!
I clicked the link for the FP article “How Ancient Rome Blew Up Its Own Business Empire”. It is not behind a paywall.
Watched the supercut and now I want a vid of Roel and company rating people’s bases in Valheim, Grounded and similar games. I’ve been the applying the lessons learned to my own fortifications.
I thought that the Inca’s had at least some bronze/copper armour, like breastplate for their nobles.
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Also, on the economic differences between the Roman and Chinese Han empires; whilst that is interesting, I noticed it was not mentioned what that other historians specialised in Ancient Rome, China, or economics had thought of their estimates. For all I know, maybe, there was something controversial about their data or methods which calls their results into question. (IIRC, economic historians have argued for years about how much higher wages in pre-industrial England were relative to France, and I would be surprised if the available data on Ancient Rome and China came close in quality and quantity to Early Modern Europe.)
I’ve been a bit of a fan of Linkin Park for ages, and I definitely like their new stuff. I don’t really have a strong opinion about Emily Armstrong’s actual voice in the abstract, but I would very definitely say she understands the hard-to-pin-down technique of singing a Linkin Park song.