[@Willy Vereb]


Thanks for commenting Willy, I appreciate people trying to fix wrong ideas. A lot of what you said is snackurate, and I feel like my broad overview without mentioned dates may have been a cause for confusion. However, I do have some problems with your counterpoints. I am on vacation currently, and thus do not have access to either reliable internet or most of the literature I would like to rebut your claims, but I will do my best.

“Guns spread because they were cheap”: This was certainly one of the reasons why they found prominence, but certainly not the main one. To paraphrase from the best book I have to hand in rural Wisconsin, “War Throughout the Ages” [a book that, while excellent, definitely shows its age], the very early handgonne was expensive and rare. The gunsmith was a prestigious, in-demand and difficult profession, and the earliest gunsmiths were given great deference.  This is in addition to the gunpowder being both much more expensive than it became, and requiring skill on the battlefield, since gunsmiths would need to be retained since the powder was mixed on site rather than before, since no one listened to Roger Bacon when he said it should be wetted. Guns became much, much cheaper, mostly as powder became cheaper, standardized calibers were introduced by the French and later the world, and better metalworking made the guns faster to produce, but in the very earliest of days the firearm was not taken because it was cheap. It was, however, as you said, and as I pointed out above, very quick to train, at least once the matchlock became the standard and tactics had not evolved to incorporate the firearm’s advantages. 

The personal firearm, and indeed gunpowder weapons as a whole were pioneered by Jan Zizka, the smartest military mind no-one has ever hear of. To quote directly from Lynn Montross, “Armor had become so stout that at ordinary battlefield ranges it resisted both arrows and crossbow bolts. Only the handgun remained effective, and Zizka eventually armed a third of his infantry with this weapon”. This was in the first half of the 15th century, and was well before standardized caliber, better powders or indeed the musket had been introduced. When these improvements became available, the firearm showed its dominance even more decisively.

Your points about crossbows are accurate. Crossbowmen are much easier to train than gunners. However, just like at the beginning of the civil war, accounting for projectile drop is difficult. My only point was that foot soldiers equipped with firearms were comparatively easier to train that crossbowmen, not that the crossbow is somehow super had to master.

“Gunmen were a mass of infantry who were made out of peasants under a relatively short time”: not necessarily. Again, here we are faced with an issue because neither of us mentioned dates, so I am wondering when you are talking about exactly. Any time past 1500 or so would be, in my opinion, incorrect. At this time, massed gunners of the French had smashed condottieri employed by Venice and Milan, and the battle of Cerignola had proved the utter, ruthless effectiveness against the Spaniards. Professional armies were outfitting soldiers that, while only at the beginning of the Early Modern period, were already becoming far more professional than the mass levies of a hundred years prior.

“Muskets at average were fired from 30-50 meters”


Certainly against heavy armors from the oldest firearms, this is true. I assume you are talking about the very beginning of firearm development, because this was snackurate then. Of course, as time went on, this range increased to ~100 yards in the Napoleonic wars, perhaps more, and firearms became more and more able to counter armor, with the standardized firearms of Adolphus or the Hugenots being far superior to the earliest weapons.

“Actually for a truly killing blow musketeers had to let armored soldiers as close as 15 meters.”

I assume you mean ‘gunner’ rather than ‘musketeer’, or ‘arquebussier’, sine muskets never faced fully armored knights in the field as far as I am aware. Also, the musket which phased out the arquebus in the 17th century were more than capable of punching through anti-musket plate armor from further than 15 meters, thanks to better powders, better shot and a longer barrel made possible by the lighter construction.

Again, this changed as firearms developed. Early in the firearm’s history this is true, certainly. But, as firearms developed, and armors developed with them to ensure this tiny killing range, the armor conked out first. The efforts to make the mounted knight a citadel failed to outlast the efforts to make the gun better, and as such armors were dropped. 

“So yeah, this has nothing to do with people suddenly going stupid and opting for an inferior weapon. Neither the truth is "Gunz too OP, plz nerf".”

You’re right, of course. But, as I said, I never mentioned a date for a good reason. Firearms were not thrown out the window in the middle of the 15th century because they had value, and they were not immediately adopted by everyone because they had serious drawbacks. But, as you said: by that point, crossbows, wooden siege weapons and bows had reached their zenith, while firearms had massive potential to grow. Firearms were slowly adopted more and more as both they developed and the ways people used them developed. Men like Adolphus, Zizka, Henry IV and Cromwell adapted to the firearm and used the firearm as it changed. I am not saying that the medieval firearm was the best thing ever. I will make my previous points much more clear in this regard. However, as firearms became better they became the best method for fighting, and as such people in the past, who were not fools, used them more and more, until the fields of Jena and Borodino had tens of thousands of muskets on them and not a crossbow in sight.



In brief refutation to your other points. 

“chainmails were too cumbersome and expensive”

Absolute nonsense. Chain was never the primary method proposed to stop gunfire, and unless you are talking about some bizarre variant I have never heard of, Chainmail was never ‘too cumbersome’. In fact, it is highly comfortable. I wear my set around the house, and it does not restrict my movement whatsoever. As for being expensive, it certainly was, but it was not prohibitively expensive to the increasingly affluent Europe which saw the rise of the gun. It was less cost efficient than the breastplate and brigandine, certainly, but that does not mean it was expensive. Chainmail is also less restrictive than breastplates, by the way.

“Plate armors pretty much existed at the same time as guns and we already pointed out that people weren't stupid during that time, either.

I mention this above, but you’re right. They did exist at the same time. What I am trying to say is that while plate struggled to outpace the firearm it eventually hit its limit. Also, just as weapons like the katana remained in use for social reasons, it is important to note that the European mindset of armored, noble, cavalry dominance certainly extended the life of the plate harness far past what would be seen as cost effective.  Great upheavals like these always meet with conservative pressures.

a medieval knight's equipment weighed about half as much as a modern soldier's and it mostly involved the plate armor with its weight distributed evenly on the body

My prospective section “armor is better than you thinl” will talk about this, and you are mostly right. Full plate harnesses weighed somewhere around 30 pounds in the late medieval period pre-firearms, which is not a lot, and it was excellently distributed by the suit. “Half as much as a modern soldier’s” is wrong, however. Modern US army plate carriers weigh about 16 pounds. Plate armor weighs about half as much as all the gear they’re carrying, which can sometimes reach over a hundred pounds, but knights would be expected to carry similar loads when out of combat. 

Remember: no one willingly goes into combat weighed down. Modern soldiers do not fight with 100 pounds of kit on their back, and knights would have been burdened with more than  just their armor when not in combat.