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Here is an (apparently real) Chinese or Korean giant, giant pintle-mounted repeating crossbow used in the wars against Japan in the late 16th Century.
Here is Goa in the 16th CenturyThis is one battle between the Spanish and Wagu pirates / Japanese Ronin
en.wikipedia.org
1582 Cagayan battlesThe 1582 Cagayan battles were a series of clashes between the forces of Colonial Philippines led by Captain Juan Pablo de Carrión and wokou (possibly led by Japanese pirates) headed by Tay Fusa. These battles, which took place in the vicinity of the Cagayan River, finally resulted in a Spanish victory.AB This event is a recorded battle between European regular soldiers and sailors against Japanese pirates. The battles pitted musketeers, pikemen, rodeleros and sailors against a large group of Jap…
The English author used a lot of sources but the most important and credible source for this data up above is this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Martin_Lappenberg
…who was the 19th Century chief archivist and chronicler for Hamburg and a Hamburg senator. He was the author of the Hamburgische Chroniken in niedersächsischer Sprache “Hamburg Chronicle in Low German”. He also published the Bremen chronicle. These are available online but in Low German. I painstakingly translated some stuff from the naval battles in 1401 which included the fact that Hamburg captured a 12 cubit long ‘feldschlange’ cannon from the Mad Dog. We estimate this to be about 19 feet which is huge.
“For four years longer, from 1398 to 1402, the pirates prospered and were the terror of the seas and the coasts, even as far as Spain. From a Spanish convent, which they sacked, they brought much gold and some precious relics of St. Vincent. The gold was all divided among the brethren, but the relics were taken by Stortebecker and Michelsen, who always wore them about their persons, believing that they were thereby protected from all wounds.
Stortebecker was famous for his vast physical strength, and many terrible tales were told of him throughout the country; while the distinguishing characteristic of Michelsen was the astonishing quickness with which he moved from place to place, giving him a reputation for ubiquity.
In 1400 a Hamburg fleet, under Senator* Albert Schreye, attacked and defeated several pirate ships off the Frisian coast, and captured Emden, thus bringing Stortebecker’s father-in-law to a realizing sense of his sins. Later in the year there was another fight, in which eighty pirates were killed and thirty were captured and taken to Hamburg, where they were properly hanged.
The indignation in pirate circles was very great. Only a year later pirates swarmed in the river Weser, where a Hamburg fleet found them and fought them, and carried off seventy-three of them who were hanged in Hamburg.
The pirates retorted by proclaiming that hereafter no quarter should be shown; but as they had shown none before it mattered little. After these reverses the two leaders seemed maddened, and their depredations were more constant and terrible than ever.
In 1402 a new expedition was fitted out against these corsairs, whose audacity was such that they had taken their fleet to the mouth of the Elbe and captured all of the ships coming from or going to Hamburg. The senate secretly prepared a small fleet under the command of Burgomeister Niclaus Schocke. The lrgest vesel in this fleet was called Die Bunte Kuh – ‘The Brindled Cow**” – and was commanded by a young man named Simon von Utrecht***. The night before the expedition sailed a pilot named Peter Krutzfeldt rowed out in the dark and tampered with the rudder of Strortebecker’s flagship, the Mad Dog, so that she could not answer her helm.
The pirate fleet was lying off Heilgoland, expecting no attack and waiting for a fleet of trading ships about to sail from Hamburg or England, full of rich booty, which they expected to have no difficulty in capturing. Instead, came this fleet of Hamburgers keen for battle. The great Brindled Cow made strait for the Mad Dog, which could not be maneuvered, because of her rudder; but Wichmann’s ship, seeing this, sailed in between and fired a broadside at the Cow. The Mad Dog also got in a broadside, but the Cow got to close quarters between the two, and fired a double broadside which did great damage. She then charged, bow on, into Wichmann’s ship, completely wrecking her and leaving her to drift.
Meantime, Stortebecker, on his Mad Dog, was raking the Cow with his guns, until Simon von Utrecht*** got in a second broadside at close quarters and then lay alongside, grappled and boarded the Mad Dog. A terrible hand-to-hand fight ensued. Simon*** and Stortebecker met and fought. The latter’s enormous strength was met by superior suppleness and skill.
When both swords were broken, and their axes dropped, they grasped each other in a death struggle. Both were very nearly exhausted, but von Utrecht was underneath and getting the worst of it, when two of his friends, who had successfully disposed of their special opponents, saw the struggle, and tied up before they realized who he was or that their own captain was underneath. St. Vincent’s relics had done their work. Stortebecker had no wounds, but he had been captured unhurt, though out of breath.
Meanwhile, the other Hamburg ships had attacked the other pirate craft, and had done good work. Some small vessels were taken and two large frigates****, commanded by Michelsen, finding the enemy too strong for them, sailed away and owing to their superior fleetness, soon escaped. Watchmann’s ship, which had been disabled by the Brindled Cow, was fired at and sunk by the other ships.***** Only a few of the crew escaped, but Wichmann himself was one of those picked up alive.A great deal of booty was taken, a great many pirates were killed, but the main thing was that the famous, invulnerable Stortebecker and some seventy of his chief men were prisoners.
The Hamburg fleet sailed back into the city, carrying the two famous leaders and many of their men. The citizens went wild with joy. They could hardly believe that the terrible Stortebecker was really in their power.
That individual himself found it hard to realize. He is said to have offered to pay vast sums to the senat as a ransom, but no government would have dared to let him go. He and Wichmann and their comrades were all beheaded. We do not know what became of Stortebecker’s cruel wife.
Michelsen and Wigboldt had escaped. The former was a nobleman of Verden , the latter a Master of Philosophy from the University of Rostock, who had taken to evil ways.
It was but a few weeks before the fleet was repaired and refitted and sent out again to search for the freeboters, and again the Brindled Cow was the centre of interest. The Hamburgers tracked the pirates to their lair, and there fought and annihilated them. The two remaining chiefs and eighty others were taken alive, chiefly because of Simon von Utrecht’s skill and courage, and they were all executed in Hamburg.
* Hamburg city council had a ‘Senat’ and the councilmen were called senators.
** aka ‘bright cow’ or ‘colorful cow’ – a reference to the tradition of painting cows in colorful patterns on certain feast days in lower Saxony and Frisia.
*** We now know that the story of the involvement of Simon von Utrecht in this action is apocryphal, he wasn’t involved with Hamburg naval activities until a couple of years later. He did perform a lot of services for Hamburg later on in life including in actions against Denmark in 1428 and against another group of pirates, the Likedeelers, in 1432 and 1433 . Actions attributed to him in the 1401 engagement were actually the work of Hamburg senators Nicklaus Schocke and Herman Lange.
**** This is an anachronism, frigates as such didn’t exist yet. The ships were probably cogs or schigge.
***** This is significant, because if true it would be one of the earliest documented examples of ships sunk by naval gunfire.
A few links:
Magister Wigboldt, the philosopher-pirate.
Verden, the town where many of the pirates came from.
The Bunte Kuh, the famous warship used by Hamburg in their campaign against the pirates.
To give an example of the potential payout for a Schützenfest,
First prize was 40 gulden in Ausgburg in1440, 101 gulden in Augsburg in 1470, 110 gulden in Zurich in 1504. This is in addition to usually two oxen and a silver cup. In a couple of early Schützenfest in Magdeburg (thirteenth century, the first was in 1279) first prize was a maiden.
There were also many other prizes. Whoever shot the worst got a sow. Whoever told the best lie got 1 gulden. There were prizes for prostitue races, a long jump, a foot race, the fechtschule, and a horse race. Nor were these prizes negligeable. The winner of the horse race at a Schützenfest in Ausburg in 1446 won 45 gulden.
This is all from Johannes Jansse’s Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters in 1896. Prof Tlusty corroborates much of this same data in her Martial Ethic, and also notes that so many women participated that a lot of the prizes were specifically for women – fabric, shoes, women’s jewelry and so on.
So compared to all that a mark or two for a firearm isn’t a crazy investment.
One of the fundamental design decisions of GURPS 4e is that game rules need to be based around adventuring situations, because those are what actually matter for the story and because its too much cognitive load to require the GM to remember to apply a lot of different modifiers in the middle of an action scene. GURPS Tactical Shooting has a really good section by gun geeks (Hans-Christian Vortisch and S.A. Fisher) adapting those rules to less stressful situations, based on the current US consensus on performance of combat shooters. That design decision makes sense to me.
Indeed, i try to follow much of the same data Steve Jackson does, but I think Codex handles it a little more elegantly – The basic (DnD) shooting rules stay the same, but as the ‘stress load’ increases, fewer of the shooters dice are available for aiming.
In Codex, players have 3 or 4 dice to use each turn. Each die can be used to do something, this case – move, shoot, reload hide behind cover, draw a hand weapon, etc. If nobody is shooting at you, or if you are behind say, 75% cover so you don’t have to worry much about defense, you can use all of your dice for your shot, and you just keep the highest roll.
This way, it’s kind of nice because you don’t have to worry about a lot of arithmetic, don’t need to write anything down etc. You have your options literally in the palm of your hand.
Alternately if you have a faster firing weapon than a muzzle loading firearm, like say a bow, you could shoot four times instead, but there would be a higher risk of a misfire. If you shoot with 2 (20 sided) dice your chances of a misfire are always much lower, if you shoot with 3 or 4 dice they are almost nil.
Training also effects this, as for example reload times are reduced with trained abilities (Feats in DnD, ‘Martial Feats’ in Codex). Circumstances also matter a lot – aiming and having something to support your weapon on (gunwhale of a boat, rampart of a castle, branch of a tree, or aiming stake) also help a lot by conferring a ‘Free Dice’. This means if you committed say 2 of your dice from your pool for a shot, but you had the luxury of something to lean your weapon on, you get a ‘Free Dice’ so you can roll 3 dice instead and take the highest roll. Chances for a critical hit go way up, chances for a misfire go way down.
This tracks very well with historical usage- hence the ubiquity of aiming hooks on medieval firearms and the widespread use of aiming stakes in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
In 16th century England, there was massive resistance by the citizens to modernizing Queen Mary’s militia law from 1558 because of the expense of buying new equipment and firearms. The weapons men carried to show their status and gender and hunt or keep order were not the same weapons they carried to defend against a landing or march into Scotland … this explicitly came up late in the 16th century, there were protests about disarming politically suspect groups and the compromise was that they could keep their bows and bills but not pikes and firearms because the former were enough to keep order and defend themselves. I have read a series of complaints against the expense of English militia laws going back into the 13th or early 14th century.
Indeed but by that time you are taking a more or less disarmed, or marginally armed population who no longer have much experience in war and forcing them to essentially become active soldiers again. In say, the vicinity of Zurich, or Berne, or Strasbourg or Nuremberg or Lübeck or Prague, both urban citizens and rural denizens would be much more accustomed to being called up for war.
And they would also be participating in these warlike games like the Schütsenfest which confer all kinds of other (social, political, financial) benefits. So more incentive to make the investment. In every city under German town law, including the mediated territorial towns, purchasing a primary weapon, which by 1500 usually meant a firearm, as well as armor and some kind of sidearm, was a mandatory requirement of citizenship.
The cost of a sword between 1420 – 1520, at very roughly speaking between one quarter to one half a mark, was expensive but well within the budget of a mid-level artisan or a wealthy peasant (anyone owning more than two hides of land, again very generally speaking). A military grade crossbow was about twice that, and the spanning device might cost half again as much, but again not out of reach by any means. Firearms were expensive in the early 15th century but got much cheaper by the end, with a simple “Kolf” arquebus also costing about a mark in Krakow in 1505.
The biggest expense of all this military stuff was in fact armor, but that requirement was probably not as important for common soldiers by the later 16th Century in England (just guessing on that part though.
No need to rush anything – I actually just ran across these while looking for something else. But we are planning an update to Weapons Vol. II before Christmas if possible. I also expect to have 1 or 2 more of the Schutzenfest invitations translated (or at least, the parts about the distance to the target and number of shots for crossbow and gun) so that will give us some more data to play with. Might be a couple of days on that.
If I can find the schutzenfest ‘songs’ and match them to the rules that would really be helpful because it will tell us how many people qualified at specific events, how many hit the bullseye enough times and so on, so we’ll have a more accurate baseline of how ambitious these regulations were. They also tell you things like how many accidents there were and so on.
Stand by for more!
And destitute serfs, as an estate, had very little political clout; whereas the Swiss turned around and marched home the minute they weren’t paid (Pas de’argent, pas de Suisse) and the burghers often refused to march more than a couple of nights journey from town or for more than a few days. If they were pressured too much they might revolt.
So for the prince, instead of a small ‘bespoke’ army with a small number of highly skilled but expensive fighters, it was very tempting to go instead for a much larger army of lesser paid, and (at least initially) less skilled peasants or serfs, but who were far more biddable and didn’t need to be paid nearly as much. And all you really needed them to do was either stand there with a pike or shoot a musket volley when told too.
The Ottomans and Mamluks of course took this a step further by using slave-soldiers.
Well, target shooting gives us kind of a baseline. And we can assume it usually goes down from there (which is something you can quantify in a game, all the factors which make it harder). But shooters who could do much better than the average were a known quantity and played an important role in a wide range of well documented battles.
There is also different kinds of circumstances for shooting. If you are involved in a fairly low-intensity siege, of the type which were very common in medieval and early-modern times, especially if you are one of the defenders, shooting at encroaching enemies through some aperture in a thick stone wall, at your leisure, and going back at the end of the day to sleep in your own bed, your actual battlefield shooting may not be that far off from your target shooting, especially if you did a lot of the latter.
One of the biggest differences between armies in the medieval period vs. those in the later early-modern, is that the former – at least in the case of burghers- did indeed invest in their own powder and weapons, as it was a requirement for their citizenship. And not only that but they spent a great deal of time engaging in these various martial sports. The same was true for the other estates as well. Anyone (any male) with some degree of freedom who wasn’t a Clerk was probably spending some time in their life preparing for an dealing with weapons, and probably involved in some martial sport or warlike game. And, depending on their estate and rank – armor, horses, supplies, and all kinds of other gear.
By the later 16th Century an increasing number of soldiers are being recruited from very poor areas (Black Forest in Swabia, Estremadura in Iberia) and trained in a somewhat systematic fashion in the manner of Landsknechts, as established by Max I with the help of Swiss officers and feldweibel. These people did not necessarily bring anything to the table except a willingness to fight for the kings schilling, but they didn’t need nearly as many of those (schillings) to fight, and thus far more of them could be recruited into the army.
As I was saying in the last post, it’s interesting to contrast this data with the Schutzenfest data
http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=342360#342360
Very early days in terms of evaluating or even translating the data but based on the first one, it seems that we can expect good shooters to be able to hit a 10″ target from about 120 meters fairly often.
How do we translate that into a human sized target? It’s hard to say. But I’d say if you can hit the 10″ target say 30% of the time at that distance then you could probably hit the human target 80% of the time.
Ongoing discussion about all this here
http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=35927&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=22
Olivier Dupuis gave me some more from Strasbourg:
1400 a law in the ‘Knechtordnung’ banning apprentices, day laborers and servants (knechten) from carrying swords, messers or axes above a specific size unless they were in the employ of the city.
1407 a day laborer was exiled for being caught for the third time carrying a langes messer
1418 – regulation stipulating that no-one was to carry a sword or langes messer with a blade wider than the length of a finger.
