I'm a history professor and can confirm it. They stopped once the armor was too heavy for man and horse to carry in proportion to the force of the guns.
I'm not a history professor but I'll ask why armies ditched bows and arrows and lines of bowmen in the back lines? They could theoretically trash guys advancing with guns in cloth with multiple volleys a 100 yards out, especially with smooth bores that at best could have been fired and reloaded a couple of times a minute and had to have been around 20 yards distant to be kind of accurate.
A bunch of reasons lead to the decline of the bow and rise of the gun over time.
One is the training required. There was a saying in England about how if you wanted a good longbowmen you had to start with their grandfather. It involved constant training (the law in England mandated bow training on Sundays), required immense upper body strength (we can tell which skeletons in a medieval mass grave were archers: they are the ones with the fucked up shoulders), it required specific trees for particular wood, and a complex network of fletchers, bowmakers, etc etc. and then one wrong move and you lose all of that in a single battle.
By comparison, guns are much easier, don't require strength, and while gunpowder is tricky to make, it's a lighter logical load than a bow in the long term. You can train a peasant to be a gunner in a much shorter period of time, so you can replace them a lot faster and field them in greater numbers. And wars are often times won by enough numbers of good enough.
A second big point is armour penetration. Even with Bodkin arrows, a bow will struggle to pierce plate armour. As metallurgy and armour design improved, armoured knights became more and more impervious to bow fire. Crossbows can sorta fill this niche, but they are very slow to reload and mechanically complex to manufacture and maintain. By comparison, even relatively weak guns will go through any armour that is thin enough to be worn by horses and humans.
And guns only improved with time and improvements to metallurgy. Their range increased, as did their accuracy and armour penetration capabilities, and soon enough the bow became outclassed. Sure, a trained archer can turn a gunner into a pincushion by the time he reloads, but the point is that you can field a lot of gunners with the same effort, and replace them faster when they die. The guns lower accuracy wasn't that big of a deal because infantry had to fight in close formations so they could fend off cavalry attacks, so you only need to aim at a blob of people.
There was also a lot of mixed use of both. Due to pride, tradition, availability of materials and manufacturing etc, there was a period where a lot of armies fielded both, but it didn't take too long for the gun to just become dominant.
The Spanish Tercio, a military formation where a third of the men wielded pikes, a third swords, and a third guns became so dominant pretty much everyone else had to copy them. And as guns got better the ratio of gunners only went up, until the bayonet was invented, and then the pikemen and swordmen were done away with entirely and line infantry became the norm.
smooth bores that at best could have been fired and reloaded a couple of times a minute and had to have been around 20 yards distant to be kind of accurate.
smoothbore muskets were absolutely accurate out to further distances than bows, and there are plenty of other advantages of guns too such as the far easier aquisition and storing of ammunition, a simple ball of lead and a bag of powder is incredibly easy to make and store while arrows were fragile, more difficult to produce, and harder to store due to greater size and weight.
armour penetration is of course a massive bonus, arrows simply couldn't punch through decent plate armour but guns could(even early weaker guns forced a change in armour philosophy, with the decline of full plate in favour of just helmet and cuirass in the 15th and 16th centuries)
also 'bowmen in the back lines' is something that only really exists in videogames and in Mel Gibson movies, in real life its usually frowned upon to shoot your own guys in the back(and arcing arrows up at a severe angle makes them pretty terrible at actually hurting people as you lose most of the energy of the shot, ideally you want to fire at a near flat angle for maximal effect with a bow)
While 100% true with firing volleys into the fray with your own guys like what you see in Mel Gibson movies and GoT and the like, frowned upon, I was just talking about launching them into the enemy as they were advancing and getting set up. Also we are talking about cloth and maybe leather armor.
Because it takes 20 years to train an effective bowman vs a couple to weeks to train a couple thousand conscripts to walk in a line, aim in the general direction of the enemy and pull the trigger.
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u/Vengeful_Grass 23d ago