Do we have primary sources on the effectiveness of the bow vs firearm in this time period?

[kvnrthr]

The justification I've seen here for the musket/carbine's -100 POA against cavalry as opposed to the Bow's 0 POA (-50 for armor 100, if I recall correctly) relates to rate of fire and the difficulty of using such weapons mounted.

But do we actually have any primary sources corroborating this assumption? In the game, the Turkish army list's bows outshoot most opponents with carbines. I've tried digging through any source on the Great Turkish War but I couldn't find any detailed tactical accounts to confirm this model.

If the assumptions are correct, one would expect to see some cavalry writers in this time period bemoaning the lack of good horse archers and cursing their carbines, and warn against the dangers of arrows from Turkish horsemen. Or some infantry writer bemoaning their firearms being poor use against cavalry and wishing the bow was back. But I can't seem to find any books on this specific tactical problem, most books of this time period focus on the development of pike and shot formations vs other pike and shot formations, or cavalry with pistols vs shock cavalry, but I see little mention of the problem of shot vs bow in the 17th century.

[Athos1660]

Did you have a look at Raimondo Montecuccoli's Memorie della guerra ?
Books 2 and 3 are about his experience against the Turks.
Version in French : https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Ko0I ... C/mode/2up

[companion]

I think the FOG:R rule contains some elements that originates either from old myths (i.e. "Tilly's Early Tercios" in TYW army list) or underresearched/outdated information. The Bow range and POA values seem to be one of latter.


There is this quote from "Gustav Adolf the Great Playbook" pdf file boardgame supplement apparently available from gmtgames homepage:

The Polish prince, Jerzy Zbaraski, wrote in 1629 that kozacy were inadequate cavalry against Swedish ones, because kozacy used bows and didn’t use armor. This indicates (and is confirmed through a variety of Polish accounts) that bows were outclassed by firearms, even against traditional bow armed Tartar or Turkish cavalry.

I have to say that I don't know in what context this statement was made because I couldn't find the English translation of the prince's letter as, unsurprisingly, European sources available in English is rather scarce.

In the far East, the Chosun dynasty of Korean peninsula starts the drive to replace bows with matchlock harquebuses during the Japan invasion ("Imjin War" 1592-1598) and continues after the war to arm the cavalries also with carbines. Nevertheless, bows were retained in relatively small numbers as supporting weapons for matchlocks.
Before the war, there was considerable inertia against adoption of matchlocks due to the importance of archery in the culture based on Confucian teachings, lack of industrial capability, and perceived superiority of bow against matchlocks such as shooting speed.
After several catastrophic battles, primary sources are quick to acknowledge matchlocks as overall superior than bows. Reasons given are, among other things, superior range, lethality, and armor piercing capability. There is at least one instance where Chosun archers were outranged by Japanese matchlocks and failed to retaliate properly. Primary sources say that the arrows fell short.
Chosun navy field manual published in late war states that matchlocks should start firing at 100 paces (about 120m) and bows at 90 paces (about 108m).
Chosun military regulation from 1795 has matchlocks start firing at 100 paces and bows at 50 paces.

Generally, Chosun dynasty promoted practice of archery to nobles and commoners alike due to the importance of archery in the Confucian teachings, which was the primary ruling ideology. The composite recurve bows used were also comparable to those used by Tartars, Turks, etc. Like the Turks, Chosun also knew how to shoot the fast short arrows and employed them en masse against mounted raiding parties from the North. Despite all these, matchlocks were deemed to be overall superior.


In my personal mod that I am working on time to time, I set the range of foot archer to 2 (same as arquebus) and split the horse archer range to short range (1 tile) and long range (2 tiles). Coupled with enabled non-light cavalry evasion, this gives horse archers a dilemma vis-a-vis carbines where horse archers can deal higher damage than carbines at the cost of increased chance of getting caught in a pursuit.

[StuccoFresco]

That seems clear evidence enough.