Something has long bothered me about the adoption of gunpowder weapons. I have a hard time believing they were used at all, much less accepted so quickly in the advancing Renaissance.
Everyone has seen historical programs or reenactments demonstrating the muzzle-loaders of the (American) Civil War and the Napoleonic era. The first time anyone sees them, usually some time in grade school, the reaction is invariably surprise at how slow the rate of fire was, and how close the soldiers had to stand to the enemy to get a decent effect out of their weapons. And the old European weapons, c. 1300-1500, were much, much worse in every way: clumsier, heavier, slower, less accurate, and shorter ranged.
The earliest handarms were metal tubes, without stocks, firing likely-sized rocks picked up on the field. Lest he burn his hand with the fuse, the firer had to look at the touchhole rather than his target. Successive improvements, like the matchlock and manufactured ammunition, helped enormously, but even as late as the 18th century, firearms were only comparably lethal to the English longbow and Mongol composite bow, as measured in range, rate of fire, penetration, and mobility. Further, bows were silent, and neither advertised the firer's position nor obscured his vision with a cloud of gunpowder smoke. Benjamin Franklin seriously urged the adoption of the longbow in the fledgling US army.
That leaves around five hundred years in which European armies had armed its infantry with second-class weapons while the technology caught up with its potential. Why?
Gunpowder had only one advantage over high-powered bows. Archers had to train more or less continually for several years to use the bows effectively. Just building up the strength to handle a bow was a formidable task. Archaeologists have turned up corpses of longbowmen with scoliosis, their spines twisted by their own asymmetrical musculature. Preparing a company of archers was therefore expensive: not only did the king have to pay their salaries for several years, but the yeomen also weren't available to work the fields or otherwise join the rapidly-expanding economies of western Europe.
The expense of archers was important to kingdoms which hovered perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. France, Austria, and Spain habitually launched a new round of border wars the moment they recovered solvency from the previous round. Wars were ended by bankruptcy more often than actual military defeat. ?Victory goes to him who has the last escudo.? Even countries seeking to keep out of expensive wars rarely had the choice, since almost everyone bordered at least one aggressive neighbor.
So for that one reason ? the extra trouble and expensive of really good archers ? armies limped along with underequipped armies for five hundred years. As much as I appreciate T. N. Dupuy's military histories (upon which this essay relies!), it does sabotage his claims of the ascendancy of infantry in status as well as killing power throughout the period.