How did Ottoman horseback archery compare to English longbow archery in terms of training time and skill required?

by [deleted]

[deleted]

Superplaner

Well an english longbowman would out-preform an ottoman horse archer in almost every battlefield scenario. There are countless examples of this from the crusades. Foot archers and crossbowmen were quite literally the counter to horse archers. With more powerful bows and generally greater precision they were able to keep horse archers at bay. In fact the prolific use of foot archers protected by a screen of infantry was one of the things that led to the decline of horse archery in the middle east.

However if one were to compare training times and skill required I'm not sure how that would be done. There is no objective measure for either. In both cases archery and horsemanship were practiced from an early age. The longbow requires a greater amount of strength to fire since it has a longer draw and greater draw weight than a turkish bow but on the plus side you were not expected to fire from a galloping horse.

For the comparable time period the most common Ottoman horse archer would have been the Anatolian Timarli Siphai, a class similar to the feudal knights. They were given land by the state in return for service as horsemen and raising a set number of footmen (dependent on the size of their land) but unlike European knights their lands and titles were not hereditary.

These men would fight as horse archers or as medium cavalry meaning that they carried not only bow and arrow but also shield, lance and sword. This is normally classified as a heavy horse archer (generally any horse archer capable of engaging in melee falls into this cathegory whereas light horse archers were generally more lightly armored and armed, intended to be mounted skirmishers and scouts).