The tradeoffs for crossbows are not as clear as it might appear, and it took much longer for the crossbow to overtake the longbow in medieval Europe than most p

The tradeoffs for crossbows are not as clear as it might appear, and it took much longer for the crossbow to overtake the longbow in medieval Europe than most people imagine. Yes, crossbows have massive draw weights compared to a longbow; but this heavy weight comes with two drawbacks. First it requires a very heavy and less aerodynamically efficient bolt in order to survive the extreme acceleration; this provides plenty of close up power but means crossbow bolts lose their energy quicker over distance than a longbow. Second the reloading procedure is very slow, a crossbowman can fire about 1/6th as fast as a longbowman, which reduces volume of fire and means that the crossbowman needs some sort of cover while they look down and fiddle with their crossbow. Historically only China used the crossbow heavily, for Europe it was probably more a hunting weapon than anything else for the first ~500 years they were in the region. The main benefit of the crossbow appears to not be penetration, but ease of use. Training a longbowman takes a lifetime (medieval English Archers had skeletal differences due to the constant training), and effectively requires handing out weapons to your peasants. This is not a good idea if your peasants are in fact, serfs. With a crossbow you can hand them out and train a soldier how to use it in a week or so, and then take the crossbows back later and not worry about them being used against you in a peasant revolt. You simply can't do this with a longbow due to the constant training they need to be effective. > And Western knights did not like it. Their armor protected them from most weapons they would face with the exception of the longbow, a weapon that took years to learn and decades to master. But crossbows could slice right through the armor at greater range than even a longbow, and shooters could be trained in hours or days. This description of crossbows trivially defeating armor is not true. Perhaps a crossbow could defeat cheap iron armor at close ranges, but the primary sections of high quality steel armor will be effectively immune to all projectiles; later examples were in fact actually capable of stopping bullets. The real risk was the thinner sections around the groin, shoulders, or face mask, where the armor was typically thin enough to be defeated by either bolt or arrow. This historical account sounds a bit like a moral panic of the day, not an accurate description of the behavior of armor against crossbow bolts.