In a sense, once armour is discarded, a good rider can fire several shots for each carbine shot, with no problems reloading, so bows would eventually get an unexpected bump in effectiveness. I know within Pike and Shot certain eastern european lists actually move from guns and crossbows to bows since that is what happened, while one expects the opposite. I won't see too much in the weapons evolving, since they sometimes go in weird direction. My theory you give a rider culture (nubians, hungarians, mongols) ANY weapon, and they will do fine, while you can dress up a sedentary culture in the finest armor and weapons and they will still do poorly.
However, the Cossacks, once they started building and holding garrisons in forts, rapidly (2 generations) lost any semblance of cavalry.
Others say EXACTLY the opposite, praising their fine riders while bemoaning their unreliable foot. Now different historians say different things about the relative quality of their infantry versus their cavalry, with some praising their fine foot while deriding their dodgy cav in the face of winged hussars. The opposite is true for sedentary cultures.Ĭase in point the Sich Cossacks. Feed horses? We eat the horses! While guns and lances would be relatively expensive compared to the bread and butter bows and swords. Within a rider culture, everyone has easy access to horses. I would postulate that the choice of weapons was determined by cost and availability, and weapons played a very small part in cavalry effectiveness, compared to the ridership culture. I do think the main determinant of the quality of cavalry at any time is the ridership of the riders (did they come from a horse culture, were there subsidies to take up riding, or were they from a sedentary, agricultural, defensive minded society)? Once a culture goes sedentary, it is hard to get back horsemanship skills, since there is a skills gap with no one to teach it. This is a interesting topic, however, I don't know nearly enough. A lance can outreach a bayonet-equipped musket but not a pike.
Hussars win a battle so everyone adopts hussars.Ĥ) Was this driven by other technological developments? Ie, pistols lost some of their effectiveness vis-a-vis swords when everyone discarded their armor. What went on here? I don't think the changes were driven by cost-effectiveness, because the price of any weapon was dwarfed by the cost of equipping and feeding and replacing all those horses.ġ) Was there a scissors-paper-stone dynamic, in which sword-beat-pistol-beat-lance-beat-sword?Ģ) Did some armies use weapons requiring a higher degree of skill because they had a more solid tradition of horsemanship? Ie, a good lancer beats a good swordsman, but a bad lancer gets beat by a bad swordsman?ģ) Was this just trend-chasing? The Dutch beat the Spanish so everyone imitates the Dutch. Pike and Shot illustrates steps 1, 2, and 3 but not really step 4 and 5, because that's when its historical focus ends. Everyone rushes to adopt the lance, which remain in vogue throughout the 19th century, until no one uses cavalry in a shock role any more. Better for cavalry to charge with the sword alone.ĥ) Napoleon starts using Polish lancers. So everyone learns the caracole.ģ) Gustavus Adolphus develops a more aggressive charge, in which cavalry fire their pistols before closing in with the swordĤ) In the 18th century, armies decide that the pistol prelude is really a distraction. To whit:ġ) At the beginning of the period, most Western European states make use of lancersĢ) The Dutch win some battles with pistol-armed cuirasseurs. So long as infantry could protect themselves against cavalry, the trend was toward more and more firepower - more shot, fewer pikes, shallower formations, etc.īut cavalry tactics seem to go around in circles, particularly the best weapon to use against other cavalry. The development of infantry weapons and tactics in Pike & Shot and the rest of the blackpowder era seems pretty straightforward.