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And here is [url=https://bookandsword.com/armour-in-texts/rules-of-the-venetian-guilds/#title_crossbow]a handy page with just the English translation and the Latin original[/url], no back-and-forth. If your idea of medieval craft workers is Fulliautomatix banging out horseshoes by himself, this is a good picture of how communities of workers regulated quality.
If you don’t have a good picture of medieval European crossbows in your head, [url=https://archive.org/details/Book_of_the_Crossbow_The_by_Sir_Ralph_Payne-Galloway/page/n149/mode/2up]Ralph Payne-Gallwey[/url] has some diagrams of the parts (although other parts of the book are not so trustworthy, he was one of those Victorian hobbyists who made stuff up to fill in the gaps of his research).
This struck me as interesting:
“No man or woman shall dare or presume to put new cloth with old in any work (laborerio), on pain of …”
This sounds like they had women masters (not unusual in Central Europe but I didn’t know they had them in Venice)
After a quick search I have “Weapons of the Ancient World Vol. 1” which I read back in 2010 or so, I don’t remember a second volume or see a PDF.
There are also Doug Cole’s spreadsheets for calculating the properties of various bows and crossbows using his engineering degrees to simplify the model in a Dutch PhD thesis.
I will send you a copy of volume II. It includes missile weapons (including crossbows), armor, and firearms. We recently updated the firearms data based on the Graz tests and a series of accuracy tests done in the 19th Century (I had underestimated the accuracy and effective range a bit). The armor data as I said was largely derived from Alan Williams, and as you noted upthread, it is somewhat predictable assuming relatively good metallurgy. He did tests with firearms and also mechanical tests with arrowheads, lance and spear points and so on.
With regard to crossbows specifically, there is a bit less clear understanding of the medieval type in modern academia. I have been following recent academic studies and ‘living history’ experiments very closely, and used a wide variety of sources, mostly recently Andreas Bichlers work, as he is the first to begin to approach the reported performance of real (higher end) medieval crossbows. Or the famous shot by Mr Gallwey.
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