The question up there says it all, but this came to mind when I read an article about the crossbow, and how bows like it fell out of popularity quickly after guns were invented. I've always been told that early guns were very inaccurate and that it took long to reload them, so why did they so quickly replace other forms of projectile weaponry.
Note: I'm not asking about cannons, I have a much better idea of why those caught on so fast. I'm specifically asking about smaller firearms and pistols.
Thank you everyone!
I would approach this question from the rear, as it were, and ask what was it about bows and crossbows that made them easily replaceable?
We'll start with the bow. The basic, short, self bow (self meaning it's made from one piece of wood, not multiple layers glued together as in composite bows), such as would be useful for hunting, is virtually useless against an armored infantryman. We see this in the chronicles of the Crusades, when both Christian and Muslim accounts report the complete inability of their bows to pierce mail backed with padding. They are simply not launching the projectile hard enough to actually get through. The English longbow is a real outlier, in that it's less a bow, to my mind, than a sort of man-powered ballista. They had insanely high draw weights, to the point that it took years of training to build the strength to use them, and even then, you were not going to hold it to your ear while you took careful aim; you were going to draw, sight a target, and release in one movement. By using this method, the longbow could fairly reliable penetrate mail at close and medium ranges, and at long ranges, wound or kill horses and seriously annoy the armored men. But it is not, in any sense, a sharpshooter's weapon, and beyond fifty yards or so, it is going to be used for zone fire, to lay down what later military theorists would call a "beaten zone," an area in which it is unsafe for the enemy to go. With the rise of plate, longbows become less useful, as the range at which it will reliably penetrate drops precipitously.
Crossbows, which seem to make their reintroduction into European war c. 1000, are going to be much more common than bows in most nations. They don't require as much strength to load, but they are time consuming and require a degree of mechanical ingenuity to operate and maintain. This is probably why skilled Italian crossbowmen were very, very well paid; they were certainly not untrained peasant levies. But crossbows suffer the same problems as bows, and by the Late Middle Ages their draw weight is so heavy that they have to be "spanned" (drawn) using a mechanical device of some kind. They could not be fired nearly as quickly as bows, or as quickly as a decent musket.
Which brings us to the musket. A man can be taught quite quickly to use a musket, even a primitive matchlock arquebus, and basic maintenance is relatively simple: boil the barrel out after firing, grease the mechanical bits, keep the rust off the metal parts, and for more complicated issues, have it looked at by an armorer. It can fire more quickly than a crossbow, but less quickly than a bow: 2-4 shots per minute, depending on user skill. More importantly, it is at least as accurate as a bow, and while not devastating beyond perhaps 75 yards, it can provide harassing fire at three times that range.
The problem is that the gun did not quickly replace the bow. The oldest guns were invented in the early 12th century. Primitive guns like the Chinese "fire lance" or "fire spear" were descendants of earlier incendiary weapons. The ability to fire projectiles was really only a secondary feature that gradually overtook the original function of projecting a stream of fire. The earliest guns came into existence from soldiers who experimented with existing incendiary weapons by placing metal or clay pellets inside the barrels. It would take decades for guns to transform into weapons that solely fired projectiles.
Guns from the 12th and 13th centuries were also notoriously slow and inaccurate. They had a limited firing range and duration, and did not fare well against the speed of mounted steppe cavalry like those of the Mongols. It was because of these disadvantages that primitive guns were far less common on the battlefield than the crossbows of the Song Chinese or the composite bows of the Mongols. Having guns did little to deter invasions by the Mongols. It wasn't until around the mid 13th century that guns, which had previously been constructed from bamboo and paper, began transitioning into metal barrels that more closely resemble modern guns. It took over a century for the gun to change from an incendiary weapon used against siege weapons that happened to fired projectiles to a weapon with an iron barrel and high-nitrate gunpowder capable of only firing projectiles.
Even then, the gun was not able to replace the bow or the crossbow. It took another series of inventions in Europe, like corning (which prevented gunpowder from spoiling) and the matchlock, for the gun to really come into its own. The matchlock arquebus was invented in 15th century Europe, three centuries after the first appearance of the gun. The corned gunpowder of the matchlock arquebus greatly increased the velocity, range, and deadliness of the bullets fired from the gun. Incidentally, the English word "arquebus" comes ultimately comes from the German word "hakebusse" or "hook gun". German cities were one of the major centers for the manufacturing of arquebuses.
But tl;dr, it took centuries of gradual advances for the gun to progress to its current stage and guns did not immediately replace bows.
Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics by Bert Hall
Firearms: A Global History to 1700 by Kenneth Chase
A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder by J.R. Partington
and a couple more books that I can't remember off the top of my head
Crossbows were relatively niche weapons, and between them and traditional bows the amount of training and finesse required to use them far exceeded the training necessary to use a gun.
And they didn't "quickly" replace bows and crossbows. It took centuries to go from the earliest working concepts to a weapon reliable enough to be the core of an army. Going from the end of the medieval period to the Napoleonic Wars the most common troop formation a box- rectangle, square, whatever- of soldiers equipped with guns that had the outer most line(s) comprised of pikemen.
And even after guns were established as the weapon of choice, they still had bayonet mounts to mimic the usage of pike and spear weapons.
At the end of the day, while it may have been pricy to construct a decent gun compared against a traditional bow or crossbow, in the greater scheme of things, a peasant given a gun and 3 months of training (I just picked a number here) is much less expensive than the specialized training required for some of the more legendary medieval soldiers, like British longbows.
The inaccuracy of early firearms is often overstated.
When people think of early firearms they probably think of two rows of men firing on each other at close ranges with negligible results. And to be fair, 'negligible results' is a good way to describe this style of fighting, usually with only one or two soldiers dying per minute. But the guns aren't at fault here.
I'm reading a book right now which talks about a Prussian experiment on the subject in the late 1700s. An infantry battalion fired smoothbore muskets at a target 100 feet long an 6 feet tall (representing an enemy unit). The accuracy results are as follows:
So, at common ranges for the Napoleonic wars, infantry accuracy should have easily been over 50 percent, and hundreds of people should have died every minute. But that didn't happen.
The reason for that, largely, is due to training. It turns out that humans naturally have an aversion to killing other humans, even on the battlefield. Even as late as world war 2, it's estimated that less than 20% of soldiers actually tried to shoot an enemy.
I don't have any sources for this nor am I historian but I was under the impression it was partly to do with fear factor? So much smoke and noise made it terrifying for the other army. Can anyone confirm/deny this?