PDA

View Full Version : Crossbow ryu?



Soulend
14th May 2003, 08:36
I was wondering if any koryu existed which included the use of the crossbow. Although this weapon existed prior to Sun Tzu's time, I believe was it was primarily an ashigaru weapon in Japan, lacking the grace and esteem of the yumi - so possibly no ryu included it. Then again, we have the Morishige-Ryu which teaches the use of the arquebus, so maybe....

poryu
14th May 2003, 10:38
Hi

I dont know if there is a ryu that ises the cross bow in Japan.

When I waa at the royal armouries in leeds UK they told me that historically there is no real evidence of crossbow being used in japan. as far as they were aware only a few examples existed and they have one from the Tokugawa family collection on display.

I had a photo somewhere I will see if I can find it

poryu
14th May 2003, 10:43
here it is

bears the Tokugawa family hollyhock mon on the sides

Soulend
14th May 2003, 11:15
Thank you Mr. Richardson! Perhaps I was mistaken. I was under the impression that some clans did outfit some of their ashigaru with crossbows during the Sengoku era, due to the ease of their use, a la Oda Nobunaga with the hinawaju (arquebus).

If it was not in use, I wonder why? Certainly the crossbow would have been known, as per your pictured example and as the Chinese use of this weapon has been documented all the way back to the Han dynasty. It is simple to aim and operate, and it is effective. Despite all the elitism, one would think that a culture that would stoop to using the lowly matchlock would have made use of it. Then again chariot warfare was big in China too, but never caught on in Japan.

poryu
15th May 2003, 16:00
Yobina

why is whenever there is a post you dont agree with you are always abusive.

Listen matie.

I was told - ok do you understand that - face to face by Ian Bottomley the curator of the Orientals of the Royal Armouries at Leeds - which so happens to be the home town of Steve Turnbull and also the armouries is a place he does a lot of his research - and I will stress this was FACE to FACE, everything I posted in this thread.

I really dont apprecate someone like you being offensive when I have made such comments which you can not prove incorrect.

Now if you really dont like what I have posted then email Ian Bottomley and tell him he lied to me, and quit withthe profanities and abusive attitude

Soulend
15th May 2003, 16:00
If you've ever been to Japan you'd understand why - 81% mountainous.

Yep, I have, and figured that this was the reason. Any knowledge of a smaller crossbow of a size similar to the Tokugawa example ever being used - perhaps in a later era?

Walker
15th May 2003, 17:24
Wasn’t the use of wheels for transport reserved for the Imperial Household?

poryu
15th May 2003, 17:56
Hi All

after my little out burst at Yobina I thought i had best check I was or was not right.

i have emailed Ian Bottomley and asked him his thoughts on this thread. he told me the follwoing

there are currently 4 crossbows known to still exist in Japan from its fuedal past.Two are in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya and there is one in the Metropolitan Museum NY. ex George Cameron Stone's collection, and the 4th is in the Royal amrouries UK.

he then went on to state that they were not used in historical japanese warefare, but were popular in China. Even going on to say that no crossbow mechanisms have been recovered from excavations of Japanese Tumuli (burial mounds)

he says one reason may be that there was not the suitable materials in Japan for making crossbows. the armouries and the NY one's are made of baleen (not a clue what this is), the Nagoya pair are uncknows as they are lacquered and boundin rattan. ian says judging by the dimensions of the Nagoya crossbows they could also be baleen.

As for Turnbull. He is well known as not being 100% historicaly correct, several Japanese history mail lists have discussed his work in depth and as much as I love his books and own smany of them, he does have a habit of cut and paste from one book to the next.

Hope this solves the riddle of why no crossbows used in Japanese warfare

Bjorn
16th May 2003, 00:34
Originally posted by Yobina

Bullsh!t, the Japanese did indeed use a very large crossbow called an oyumi from the ninth to eleventh centuries. It was a siege weapon capable of pinning a horse and rider to the ground. It fell completely out of favour by the time of the Gempei war (1180).
- source Stephen R. Turnbull.


To paraphrase Karl Friday (Hired Swords, pg.41-43), the oyumi was an artillery weapon. While it is assumed to have been some sort of ballista (i.e. siege crossbow) or multiple-arrow launcher, "no drawings or detailed descriptions of the Japanese version survive."

Not being more than a dilettante in history (and likely quite a bit less!), I don't know if there's been any more recent research on oyumi. Nonetheless, the details provided in Dr. Friday's book seem to make it pretty clear that whatever the oyumi was, it wasn't a "crossbow" in the sense of the hand-held weapon to which I think the original question referred.

Bjorn

Joseph Svinth
16th May 2003, 03:53
Baleen is what krill-eating whales strain dinner through. In the late 19th century, baleen was worth considerably more per pound than gold, as it was used to make corset stays. The Japanese whales were probably bowheads.

http://nmml.afsc.noaa.gov/education/cetaceans/baleen1.htm

A Chinese repeating crossbow appears at http://www.atarn.org/chinese/rept_xbow.htm . These weapons were still in use in the 19th century.

A possible explanation is that the Japanese originally lacked the sophisticated bronze-casting techniques of the Chinese, and as a result, they could not make the triggers. Later, when they had this technology, there was no demand for crossbow-trigger makers (equestrians disliked crossbows as much as they did muskets), and so nobody used them except as toys or siege weapons.

The European use of crossbows as military weapons is very late (ca. 10th century), and was owed in large part to the rise of siege warfare in the west. (You can't keep a longbow loaded, but you can have people load crossbows in the basement, and then hand them up to shooters. In this way, the sustained rate of discharge becomes substantial.)

On the Continent, the feudal lords liked crossbows because they could be kept locked up in the armories and then handed out when required. Longbowmen, on the other hand, required years of practice, and could use those skills against you during uprisings.

Anyway, if you encourage longbows and teach this mostly to the sons of the equestrian classes, then you have somewhat limited the ability of the rabble to cause problems for the equestrian classes. Put a crossbow under every merchant's jacket, then assassins flourish, and politicians of all eras hate it when the rabble starts treating them like anybody else who acts bad.

Bjorn
16th May 2003, 06:17
Originally posted by Yobina
And the drawing that I posted is what?

I'll admit to being interested. Could you tell me who drew that illustration, and when? Does it specifically identify the crossbow as an "oyumi," or is it possible that it was a rare import from the continent?

Unfortunately, I haven't read much of Dr. Turnbull's works. Would you happen to remember in which book he described the oyumi? I'm curious to see his references, and how they contrast with those used by Dr. Friday.

Bjorn

PRehse
16th May 2003, 06:30
Originally posted by Bjorn
Would you happen to remember in which book he described the oyumi?

More information on the Oyumi would be great. I had heard they could be fired rapidly but were very complicated to use.

It could have been a novel or historical fiction but I remember reading a reference about people knowing what a terrible weapon it was if only someone knew how to make it work.

Andrew - the picture is great but I was under the impression that Oyumi was bigger, faster, better.

PRehse
16th May 2003, 07:12
Thanks Andrew - that was by the way what I had read before - just forgot where.

It still leaves the impression that the siege weapon was larger than the picture but that's just an impression. Happy with what you gave.

Bjorn
16th May 2003, 18:14
Thanks, Mr. Turner. I'll look for that book. The details seem to match those presented in Hired Swords.

I have to agree with Mr. Rehse, though, and say that the description provided in the text doesn't quite seem to match the impression that the illustration gives me. I imagine that it could just easily be some artistic license -- no point in dwarfing the hero of the composition with an over-large piece of siege artillery!

Again, thanks for the info.

Bjorn

Karl Friday
19th May 2003, 18:43
Originally posted by Yobina
This is from pages 11-12 of the above book. When I asked at the Kyoto National Museum (a few years back now) about what Mr Turnbull had written, I was told that Mr Turnbull was correct and that he had probably quoted chronicles at the Fukui Museum which state these facts.

Dr. Turnbull is only partially correct in his descriptions of oyumi in Samurai Warfare, which quote passages in *Hired Swords* that quote (and translate) passages from the chronicles the Fukui museum refers to.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are no surviving contemporaneous drawings of oyumi, so we really can¡Çt know with certainty what this weapon was like. The picture Mr. Turner posted is a modern drawing, depicting a style of armor and helmet that weren¡Çt developed for at least a century after Ono Harukaze was around. The picture of oyumi in my Hired Swords book is from the Tokugawa period--again, long after oyumi had disappeared.

I¡Çve revisited the whole issue of what oyumi probably were in my new book (Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, which is currently in production with Routledge--and will hopefully be out by late fall or early spring). But here¡Çs the gist of what we know about crossbows in Japan:

The earliest written reference to crossbows records an unspecified number of ¡Èoyumi¡É being presented to the court in 618 by envoys from the Korean kingdom of Koryo, but it was clearly in general service by the late 600s, and deployed under the ritsuryo (imperial state) military system by both the provincial regiments and the various guard units in the capital through the early tenth century. There is some evidence that it continued to be used at least occasionally as late as the twelfth century, perhaps even longer.

Again, the form of the oyumi is not actually known, as no contemporaneous drawings or detailed descriptions of the Japanese version survive, and no examples have been found in archeological sites. The same character (read nu in Mandarin) was used in China to name several types of crossbow, but the Japanese weapon does not seem to have been the same as any of these. It appears, in fact, to have been some sort of platform-mounted, crossbow-style catapult, on the order of the Greek oxybeles or lithobolos, the Roman ballista, and similar devices, perhaps capable of launching volleys of arrows or stones in a single shooting.

Redoubtable as it may have been, the weapon also appears to have been a very complex machine to operate. This seems, in fact, to have proved its undoing. Between 814 and 901, the court received requests for oyumi instructors from no less than seventeen provinces. All had the same complaint: regrettably, the weapons in their armories were going to waste, because no one knew how to use them. In his 914 memorial, Miyoshi Kiyoyuki went further, complaining of the incompetence of even the teachers.

The hand-held crossbow, a mainstay of Chinese armies from the fourth century BCE onward, was also known and used in Japan, but neither the ritsuryo armies nor the bushi appear to have developed much interest in it, preferring to rely instead on the long bow. The ritsuryo military statutes provided for only two soldiers from each fifty-man company to be trained as oyumi operators, and no later source indicates that this ratio was ever increased. Hand-held crossbows and crossbowmen are not mentioned in the statutes at all. It is, of course, possible that the term ¡Èoyumi¡É in the ritsuryo codes and other sources referred to hand-crossbows, as well as ballista-like ones; but this is improbable, for several reasons.

First, while source references to crossbows of any form are scant, two documents do clearly distinguish oyumi from ¡Èhand-crossbows¡É (shudo). The first, a report concerning a bandit raid on the Dewa provincial office in 878, discloses that among the items destroyed or stolen were ¡È29 oyumi¡É and ¡È100 shudo.¡É The second, an inventory from the K?«×zuke provincial office compiled around 1030, lists ¡È25 shudo¡É (apparently its entire stock) as missing. The specific identification of ¡Èhand-crossbows¡É in these documents strongly suggests that the term ¡Èoyumi¡É here and in earlier sources referred to something else. The reading ¡Èoyumi¡É (¡Ègreat bow¡É) itself is also evocative of a large, rather than a hand-held weapon.

Second, hand-crossbows require very little skill to operate--in fact this is their principal advantage over the long bow. And yet more than two-thirds of the extant sources that mention oyumi (indeed, virtually all such references from the ninth century) complain of the dearth of men capable of using the weapon or training others to use it.

Third, archeologists have, to date, unearthed only one trigger mechanism for a hand-crossbow, despite more than a century of efforts. That more have not been discovered, and that none had been discovered at all until the late 1990s, is strong testimony to the rarity of the weapon in Japan.

It would seem, therefore, that early medieval warriors lacked interest in using hand-crossbows, and that this indifference toward hand-held crossbows predated the bushi, having been shared by the ritsuryo military apparatus as well. This apathy is easy to fathom, when one considers the technological benefits and limitations of the weapon.

A crossbow is, fundamentally, a bow attached to a stock, so that it can be kept drawn and ready for shooting without continuing effort from the archer. This arrangement, coupled with a mechanical release, enables the use of a bow too strong for an archer to otherwise draw and hold. Crossbows also have an advantage in accuracy over regular bows, because a crossbowman can sight directly along the top of his arrows, using the fletchings like the sights of a modern firearm, and because the rigid stock holds the bowstring absolutely stable relative to the bow stave during aiming and release, eliminating the errors introduced by otherwise inevitable oscillation between the archer¡Çs hands. Crossbows enjoy the further advantage of being able to use shorter bolts, or quarrels, than are needed in the case of an ordinary bow, because the projectile rests on the stock and does not need to span the entire gap between the string and the bow stave. This not only makes crossbow bolts cheaper and easier to manufacture than regular arrows, it means that, in the words of a twelfth-century Chinese text, ¡Èif the crossbow bolts are picked up by the barbarians, they have no way of making use of them¡É¡½at least insofar as the enemy is not also equipped with crossbows!

But crossbows also have serious limitations. Most designs are difficult or impossible to cock and reload while walking, running or riding on horseback. This makes them better-suited to defense, siegecraft and naval warfare than to offensive tactics on land. Crossbows are, moreover, much slower to reload and shoot than ordinary bows, resulting in a reduced volume of missiles that can be directed at a charging--or fleeing--enemy host, while it is within effective range. Nor does the greater power of crossbows always translate into range longer than that obtainable by ordinary bows, because while a regular bow can be angled upward, and shot to its maximum range with reasonable accuracy, a crossbow cannot be elevated very far without the stock obscuring the archer¡Çs aim. In practice, this renders the crossbow largely a line-of-sight weapon.

Advantageous use of crossbowmen therefore requires that they be carefully deployed and drilled. Maintaining the necessary degree of order would have been difficult for ritsuryo era Japanese armies, which were composed of militia units filled by conscripts who served only thirty or forty days a year on active duty. It would have been impossible for the privatized warriors of the Heian and Kamakura periods.

In addition, there Japanese would have encountered serious technological problems producing crossbows. The main difficulty would have been one of available materials: the same limited choices of construction materials that determined the development of the distinctive Japanese longbow would have complicated the design and manufacture of hand-crossbows as well.

The bow staves of Chinese crossbows were composites of wood, bone, sinew and glue, constructed in much the same manner as the ordinary Chinese bow. But the Japanese lacked supplies of animal products, and fashioned their bows from wood and bamboo instead, which required that the weapons be long. Manufacturing crossbows with composite bow staves of wood-and-bamboo comparable in length to those of regular bows would have resulted in a weapon too unwieldy to be practical: not merely extraordinarily wide--and not readily usable by troops standing in close ranks--but also extraordinarily long, as it would have been necessary to lengthen the stock, to permit a sufficient draw. Crossbows made with short wood, or wood-and-bamboo bow staves would have been considerably weaker, and more prone to breaking or delaminating, than the regular bows already in use.

The remaining alternative open to the Japanese would, of course, have been to import crossbows manufactured on the continent. Although there is no direct evidence to support such a conjecture, this may in fact have been what the Japanese did. Written and archeological sources can confirm the existence of only 125 hand-crossbows, in Dewa and Kozuke provinces. The only specimen uncovered to date, the trigger mechanism found in Miyagi, is made of bronze, and the Japanese are not believed to have ever produced bronze armaments on their own--all other bronze weapons discovered in Japan are thought to have been imports.

For more on this, you¡Çll have to buy (or borrow) the book when it comes out (shameless plug . . . .).

Earl Hartman
20th May 2003, 20:35
What Dr. Friday mentions in relation to the Japanese crossbow applies to the European weapon as well.

The crossbow was easier to shoot than a longbow, since it did not require constant practice to become skillful in its use. However, it must be borne in mind that the longbow was strictly an English weapon; the hand-held bows used on the Continent were shorter, and, thus, not as powerful. The yew wood from which the English longbow was made is a natural laminate, giving the longbow some of the characteristics of laminated bows which add power to the bow by using materials with different stress characteristics for the different parts of the bow.

AFAIK, English yeomen were required by law to practice archery on a regular basis and were, I believe, subject to being fined if they practiced at butts closer than >200 yards. The bow was the national weapon of the English, and their prowess at archery was a source of great national pride. On the continet, on the other hand, especially in France, (as Joe Svinth pointed out) the rulers were reluctant to have an armed peasantry (for obvious reasons) and thus discouraged their common subjects from gaining proficiency in the use of the bow and arrow.

A good longbowman was expected to be able to get off about 12 shots per minute, that is, one shot every five seconds. Early crossbows had to be loaded either using a stirrup attached to the end of the stock or by a claw hanging from the archer's belt. With the stirrup, the archer would place his foot in the stirrup, bend over, grasp the string with both hands, and then straighten his upper body and pull on the string to place it in the trigger mechanism. Once that was done, he would load the quarrel, aim and shoot. With the belt and claw arrangement, the archer would bend over, hook the claws onto the string and then straighten up, the claws dragging the string up to the trigger mechanism. With such an arrangement, the effective rate of fire was considerably less than that of the longbow.

In addition, the early crossbows did not have a greater range than the longbow or any real advantage in power. The crossbow only came to outrange the longbow later, when bows made of whalebone and steel were developed. These bows were so strong that the string had to be drawn into place using a winch, which made the rate of fire even slower.

At the Batlle of Crecy in 1342, the French hired a contingent of Genoese mercenaries armed with crossbows. The English army, IIRC, was composed primarily of longowmen supported by mounted knights. At the beginning of the battle, the Genoese were sent out first to engage the English. As soon as they came within range of the longbows, the English proceeded to shoot them off the field. Unable to withstand the withering fire, the Genoese lines broke and they began to retreat. Seeing this, the Frecnch commander is reputed to have said to his knights "Slay me these rascals, they do but hinder us." The French cavalry proceeded to ride down the Genoese, who, when they saw what was happening, turned their crossbows on the charging knights with predictable results.

Needless to say, the French lost that battle.

Mekugi
29th May 2003, 05:59
Thanks Dr. Friday, that was sure tasty.

-R

JakobR
31st May 2003, 09:27
I would like to thank Dr. Friday too. The reading was a sheer joy.

I would like to add to Mr. Hartman's post that at the battle of Crecy the English longbowmen were fresh and the Genoese mercenaries were exhausted. Had it been the other way around the longbow might not have been as successful.

Earl Hartman
1st June 2003, 05:58
Perhaps. A lot of different factors go into defeat or victory in a battle. I brought up Crecy simply to illustrate that, AFAIK, at that particular period in time, the crossbow did not yet, as it later did, have any significant advantage over the longbow in terms of range or power. It was superior to Continental bows, which were much inferior to the English longbow, but still was inferior to the longbow because of its slower rate of fire. Only later did the increased range that came from more powerful bows compensate for that.

Of course, the main problem the Genoese had at Crecy is that they were employed by the French.

Mekugi
2nd June 2003, 05:15
Originally posted by Earl Hartman
Of course, the main problem the Genoese had at Crecy is that they were employed by the French.
Amen to that....