From the Vault: The Invention of the Crossbow, Part 2

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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Saturday. We have another vault episode for you. This is going to be part two of our series, The Invention of the Crossbow. Listen, originally published 11, 16, 20, 23. So let's go ahead and dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, my name is Robert Lam. And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the invention of the crossbow. In the previous episode, we talked about some evidence of the crossbow's invention in ancient China.

some differences between the crossbow design and regular bow design some differences in the physics of how they work and what different kinds of advantages they would have had in historical usage and today we're back to talk about crossbows some more now there is a subject.

I brought up in the previous episode, I think, or I think it at least teased it, that I wanted to come back to in detail. And that is the moral coding of crossbows specifically in like storytelling, especially in movies, in modern movies.

I was reading a very interesting paper about this that was like a history slash film studies paper called x marks the plot crossbows in medieval film by Peter Burkholder published in the journal studies in popular culture in 2015.

And it starts with what I think is a pretty good example. So there's a scene many of you out there will remember from the first Lord of the Rings movie is from Fellowship of the Ring, which came out in 2001. It's when the heroes are at Rivendell, the Fellowship is formed for those unfamiliar with the story. It's when the adventurers from various peoples around Middle-earth

pledged to band together into a fellowship to carry out a mission to destroy the story's McGuffin, a wicked and powerful magic ring, to protect the people from its demonic owner Lord Sauron. So it's sort of the ultimate good guy vibes scene. The good characters are all pledging camaraderie, pledging to help each other in the service of doing good.

Yeah, in fact, I referenced this scene in the last episode. You did, yes. About how Legolas says it's my bow, not my string. Yeah, it's not actually the string that stretches. Though we will get back to that concept.

Later on in this episode when we get back into the technicals specifications of various crossbow designs because sometimes it is the string. Oh, I can't wait. Okay, so you got the characters in the scene. You got Frodo. That's the young hobbit who commits to taking the ring to Mordor to destroy it. He's your classic courage against impossible odds character. Frodo is not a warrior. He's just like a

a young almost helpless little guy at first but he had he has courage and he wants to do the right thing so he's gonna go destroy the ring. But then the other character say they're gonna help him gandalf the wizard holding the magic staff in his hand he says photo you're not gonna do it alone i will help.

And then Aragorn, the man, the sort of king of men in Middle-earth, says, you will have my sword. I don't remember. Does Sean Bean say the same thing? Or something like that. But Aragorn, at least, says you'll have his sword. Legolas, the elf, says you'll have my bow. Gimli, the dwarf, says, and my axe. And then Mary and Pippen, the perpetually second-breakfasting hobbits, also offer the help of their intelligence. Yes. Yes.

But in this scene each of the principal heroes of the story they offer their commitment through the metaphor of the weapon they carry, and this is basically in a medieval technological regime. But the author of this paper notes that it's interesting that

It's sort of trying to, like, show the whole span of recognizable medieval weapons, but none of these characters offers up a crossbow to help. Despite the fact that Berkrell Holder calls the crossbow, quote, one of the most readily accessible personal weapons of the Middle Ages.

And I should say, I still hold this to be true. I think a crossbow is an excellent weapon for a dwarf. I think everything lines up that dwarves should be using crossbows by the dozen. It's just a perfect weapon for imagining them use some sort of a ranged weapon within an enclosed, dwarven environment. It seems to fit their build, their basic demeanor, their technological proficiency. I think everything lines up. I think Gimli should have had a crossbow.

Fair enough, though, the axe makes sense to me. It seems at home in his hands. But this paper argues that the absence of a crossbow among the ranks of the good guys in the movie is neither unique nor happenstance. The point of this paper is that throughout modern film,

There is a consistent principle that in settings with roughly medieval European technology regimes, good guys do not carry crossbows. The crossbow is the weapon of the wicked, the barbarous, the treacherous, the cruel. And secondly in this paper, the author argues that this implicit moral gloss on different types of medieval weapons

is not necessarily a modern invention. In the case of the crossbow, there are elements of this particular vilification of it going back to the medieval period itself. So in the first half of the paper, the author goes through this extensive list of movies with medieval technology regimes.

that implicitly associate the crossbow with wickedness. Note that these stories include both comparatively realistic period dramas or historical films as well as high fantasy and other stories with fully fictional settings and magic that just rely on the conventions of medieval technology.

One thing he notes is that crossbows are often used to establish setting for medieval films, along with other visual cues like knights in armor, castles, catapults, etc. And this is true even in settings where it would be strictly anachronistic. For example, in stories about King Arthur, which if you're trying to sort of situate those roughly historically, that'd probably be something like 5th century Britain,

where there's really no evidence that crossbows were popular, even though they had already been invented by this point. It doesn't seem like 5th century Britain had a lot of crossbows in it, if any. But it's sort of like a shorthand. You see knights in armor, you see crossbow, you think, okay, I know where I am. It gets you to the correct mental setting very quickly.

Yeah, yeah, and I don't know if he gets into this at all, but I think one of the other things about the crossbow in films is that there is a gun-like quality to the crossbow where that makes the visual language of say armored guards or armored goons, whatever the case may be, with crossbows, like read very similarly to modern tyrannical enforcement agencies.

I think you might make that comparison. We'll see when we look at a few of the examples. Okay, let's see. What do you got? Let's look at some films. I'm not going to list all the examples Burkholder gets into in this paper because I suspect most listeners will in fact already recognize the crossbow as evil pattern themselves, but it's just worth naming a few.

One he gets into that I've never seen is the 1995 film First Night, which has Sean Connery as King Arthur. So this is an Arthurian legend film. Sean Connery is Arthur, Richard Gere as Lancelot. And in this movie, he says, the heroes such as Lancelot are repeatedly shown demonstrating their skill with the sword. And this is a recurring theme. The sword is often represented as a kind of virtuous and honest weapon.

Meanwhile in this film the villain character named Prince Malagant played by Ben Cross commands gangs of marauders who are all armed with crossbows which he says are treated almost like six shooters from a western film. And also he says in the story the heroic King Arthur is is killed by a barrage of crossbow bolts.

Yeah, I think this comparison to Cowboy Flix is pretty solid. It reminds me of the scene in The Western, The Cowboys, in which Bruce Dern's character is a scoundrel, is beat up by John Wayne's character with fisticuffs. And then afterwards, he shoots John Wayne's character in the back. Clearly, if this had been a medieval setting, he would have used a crossbow. Right, John Wayne would have the sword and the bad guy would have the crossbow, yeah.

Yeah, I think I saw first night, but I've forgotten all of it. This is no ex caliber, but I have to stress that Ben Cross was always great. Next movie. I also haven't seen this one. Another Arthurian legend film. This is the 2004 film King Arthur, which not only shows Arthur's Saxon enemies using crossbows, apparently at one point of this movie, one of the heroes picks up a crossbow from the ground only to like look at it and toss it away in disgust.

I did not see this one. This was a strange decade for films. But having Clive Olin is author, that's got to be good. To come back to Lord of the Rings, we've established that the heroes don't use Crossbows, but Burkholder mentions that the only time we actually see Crossbows used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Peter Jackson films, is by the forces of evil. He says, Crossbows are used by the Uric High during their attack on Helm's Deep.

Those are elite orcs. Another interesting thing he points out is how in some movies, the use or discarding of a crossbow can signal a change in the same character's moral or factional valence.

So maybe a character uses a crossbow when acting as a villain or when we're supposed to wonder if they're a villain. And then they stop using the crossbow when they become good or are revealed as good. An example cited here is Lord Arthur in the movie, Army of Darkness, where he apparently used, I didn't remember this detail, but he apparently uses a crossbow when you assume he is an enemy of ash, but then when he becomes an ally of ash,

The crossbow goes away and instead we see crossbows used by the deadites, the bat, the monsters of the movie. Oh yeah, I forgot this scene as well. There are so many other scenes that definitely stick in your mind, but this is a nice subtle example of what you're talking about here.

One more. This is not an example. The author here brings up, but I was just thinking about the most prominent appearance of the crossbow in HBO's Game of Thrones adaptation, which as a show is notable, especially in early seasons for moral ambiguity and what might be called grim dark realism. There's kind of a

In many ways, it resists the kind of classic hero villain tropes and the clear delineation between those two. And yet, even in Game of Thrones, this crossbow pattern holds true. Its most salient use is as a weapon of torture used by King Joffrey, one of the nastiest and most sadistic characters on the show.

The other main example I could think of was it is later used by a more sympathetic character, but in an act of patricide when that character is at his lowest point. So it's still, it's a pretty like negatively coded weapon in Game of Thrones. Yeah, absolutely. And both of these are cases where the Lannisters are using them. Lannisters are always at least in a little bit in the gray area, if not outright villains. Yeah.

Now, the author does try to acknowledge some counter examples, and I think it's interesting to look at movies that violate the pattern. One he mentions, oh boy, I think you're going to be excited about this, Rob, is Rutger Hauer and Lady Hawk from 1985. Lady Hawk, a movie that is never as good as I remember it being whenever I rewatch it. But I still love it. Like, you got to love Lady Hawk. It's just kind of, it's just pure romance. It's beauty.

I have the same experience. I remember it's been years since I watched it, but I remember wanting to like it before I watched it. Watching it and thinking, eh, wasn't actually that great, but then still kind of loving it for some reason.

Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so Rutger Hauer in this movie, he plays a renegade knight who uses a crossbow. He is sort of the hero of the story, but the author notes that he is portrayed as a kind of rebel or renegade character. So, you know, maybe it's more fitting that he uses the crossbow because he's more, he's more outside the bounds of the normal medieval knight type hero.

And also here the author notes that he uses the crossbow early in the movie, but then he goes on to explain the prodigies of his family's house sword and then he uses that more in the later parts of the film. So again, perhaps an example of casting aside the villainous crossbow and picking up the noble sword. Okay.

Yeah. One more example I had to mention. Another movie I haven't seen. A lot of these are like medieval movies from the 2000s that never got in front of my eyes. But apparently the good guys use crossbows in the medieval sci-fi time travel movie timeline from 2003 based on the novel by Michael Creighton. Again, I haven't seen it, but the author here notes that the movie flopped and I laughed out loud when I read that because I was like, wait, is he saying that it flopped because it depicted crossbows coming to the rescue?

unclear. There's probably no real connection here, but it is worth notable that Lady Hawk and Timeline were both directed by Richard Donner, so I don't know. Maybe he just really liked Crossbows, or had some sort of, like, there's so many factors that go into, I guess, making these kind of decisions for film, you know, could have been something where it's like, well, Crossbows are easier to block and use, I don't know.

So, it's not absolutely universal. You can think of a few counter examples, but I do think, by and large, this is very true. Throughout the language of modern films with historical and fantasy medieval settings, I would have to agree it is remarkably consistent how the crossbow, in contrast to other medieval weapons like the sword and the traditional bow, is used to convey the negative traits of the person who wields it.

Yeah, I think this is absolutely true when you look at all the examples here. And I'm certainly not going to set around and come up with a bunch of counter examples. But I think one counter example is worth mentioning because it has folkloric origins and then also resonates through media. And that's Swiss folk hero William Tell. This was a 14th century mountaineer assassin and crossbow marksman, again, of Swiss folkloric origins.

folklore and legend. The legends range from shooting an apple off of a person's head. If you're aware of nothing else concerning this character, you probably know about that little episode, just because it's been portrayed in cartoons and so forth. But other things he gets into, like he slays a chimera. So he does all sorts of stuff. But his more realistic exploits position him as an assassin of evil doers and tyrants with a crossbow, a weapon that, as we've discussed before,

democratizes ranged lethal violence, and certainly factors into, for instance, one of the Chinese examples we mentioned in the last episode, a way that people outside of an actual military group could potentially do harm or fight back against their overlords.

So I think it's, you know, it's worth considering this is a notable folkloric exception to the rule. And of course, there are also numerous depictions of this in film and television, including the late 1980s TV series Crossbow, which I remember seeing some in syndication later on, and I also distinctly remember seeing a VHS of it.

Maybe it was just like a few episodes cobbled into a movie, I'm not sure. But I remember seeing that on the video shelf as a kid. And then there are other older adaptations from the 50s. There was a 1998 TV series that looks really bad. There's a 1934 movie, The Legend of William Tell. So certainly a figure with staying power within Swiss culture, but also seems to resonate beyond it into other media.

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Two more examples do come to mind because I imagine people will write in. There's the Walking Dead, Daryl Dixon, always using that crossbow to shoot zombies. I'm not sure. I guess he's kind of positioned as an anti-hero in some respects, like he is kind of like a...

A neutral character who's obviously not going to side with the zombies, but he has his own kind of like rogue outsider energy. And then let's not forget. Hold up. Sorry, I don't mean to derail, but I've never seen that much Walking Dead do some people side with zombies.

Well, I think in later seasons that I have not seen, there are certainly individuals who become more like the zombies through their cruelty and their wretchedness, and there are some that find ways to use zombies and become more zombie-like in their use of them. So in a sense, they're those who side with zombies, but walking dead mostly about humans being horrible and zombies just being zombies. Zombies are kind of neutral. You can't hate the zombie for being a zombie.

There are plenty of reasons to hate most of the human characters in my experience. Oh yeah, I think that's a classic zombie movie thing where usually the villain is other living humans and the zombies are more like the setting. Yeah, but Daryl Dixon, a favorite character of many on the TV show. I don't think he's in the comics at all.

But the other one that came to mind, and this is what movie I have not seen, but I again just remember seeing the VHS box art all the time. Patrick Swayze is next of Ken from 1989. I think he uses a bow in it as well, but there are also scenes where he's using a crossbow. There's some sort of an action sequence in a cemetery where he's running around with that crossbow. I've never seen this one either.

Yeah, well, it has Bill Paxton in it, and it also has Neesons. Wow. Okay. Yeah. It's not supposed to be very good. It exists. Well, so to come back to the points made in Burke Holder's paper, we sort of already raised this, but it's interesting to contrast the villainous associations in film of the crossbow with the sword, which is almost always used to convey admirable traits and moral virtue.

And of course this seems like if you really think about it, it's kind of a silly way to split things up. Like they're both weapons and so they could both be used for evil. Like just as easily a sword or a traditional bow could be used for murder or something else evil. And a crossbow could be used by whatever we see the good characters using swords for in this movie. I don't know, self-defense or defense of others or something.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a sword carries a great deal of symbolic power, but at the end of the day, it is a murder weapon and a symbol of terror. No one is out there hunting a deer with a longsword. Well, I was going to say that's true, but I don't know. Maybe some people hunt deer with swords. It seems unlikely to me. It would be a highly ineffective weapon to use that way for hunting. It was clearly not designed as such, but the longsword was designed with clear intention, the longsword, the dagger, the dirt, most of these.

these implements, they are made to kill and mutilate human beings. So, wonders like where do these associations come from? How come it is in these modern stories, especially on film, that the sword is seen as good and the crossbow is seen as bad? And a question raised in this paper is, was the crossbow seen as fundamentally more evil than other weapons at the time when its use was common, especially in war in, say, medieval Europe?

And the answer is complicated, but to some extent, and in some cases, yes. There are medieval writings that indicate something uniquely bad about the crossbow. But I want to stress this was clearly not everyone's opinion, and it certainly didn't stop people, especially armies and militias, from using it.

One extremely famous example of a medieval work vilifying the crossbow in particular over other weapons, and you'll see this example cited very often, is from the Alexiad, a biography of the 11th to 12th century Byzantine emperor Alexios I Kamnenna, written by his daughter, the Byzantine princess Anna Kamnenna.

Uh, listeners of the show might remember our episode on Greek fire. We, uh, we, we cite this source as well in that episode. And I believe we had Annie Reese come on and, and, and read it in the cold open. Oh yeah. Well, thanks again to Annie for that. We didn't get her on hand today. So I'm going to have to read from it myself for this time. Um, but yes. Uh, so there is, uh, so Anna Kamnenna was writing this work while she was in exile in a monastery in the later years of her life.

And a passage of this work that has attracted a lot of attention is Anna's eyewitness account of the arrival of crusaders in Constantinople in the years 1096 and 1097. The account is very vivid and it contains some confusing claims. So I'm going to read what she says about the crossbow. And the translation that I'm using here is the one block cited in a book that I mentioned in the last episode, but I'll mention it again here.

The Medieval Crossbow by Stuart Ellis Gorman from Pin and Sword military press in 2022. The Crossbow is a weapon of the barbarians, absolutely unknown to the Greeks, and by barbarians there she's referring to Western European Crusaders, probably especially the Franks.

She goes on. In order to stretch it, one does not pull the string with the right hand while pushing the bow with the left away from the body. This instrument of war, which fires weapons to enormous distances, has to be stretched by lying almost on one's back. Each foot is pressed forcibly against the half circles of the bow, and the two hands tug at the bow, pulling with all one's strength towards the body.

At the midpoint of the string is a groove shaped like a cylinder cut in half and fitted to the string itself. It is about the length of a fair-sized arrow extending from the string to the center of the bow. Along this groove, arrows of all kinds are fired. They are short but extremely thick with a heavy iron tip. In the firing, the string exerts tremendous violence and force so that the missiles wherever they strike do not rebound. In fact, they transfix a shield.

but through a heavy iron breastplate and resume their flight on the far side. So irresistible and violent is the discharge. An arrow of this type has been known to make its way right through a bronze statue. And when fired at the wall of the very great town, its point either protruded from the inner side or buried itself in the wall and disappeared altogether, such as the crossbow, a truly diabolical machine.

Now, Ellis Gorman makes a few observations about this passage. First of all, even though it is clearly exaggerating in some cases about the power of a handheld crossbow bolt saying that it will go through a city wall or straight through a bronze statue and come out the other side.

It does give a clear description of how the crossbow works, and I thought it was interesting where she describes people having to lie on their backs on the ground in order to span it or to pull back the mechanism to lock with the trigger, like you were talking about in the last episode, possibly with the ancient Chinese example, I think. Yeah, about there being different ways of loading some of these different crossbows, and one of them was laying down and having to use your feet to pull it back into position.

Ellis Gorman says it's confusing why she says the crossbow was unknown in Byzantium because other evidence indicates it was probably known at least somewhat if not widely used in imperial Rome and the Byzantine Empire was descended from the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

But it's possible that the technology had fallen out of favor in Byzantium and had been forgotten by many. But the point of the passage, more than to create a continuous history of military technology, was to praise her father and to condemn the barbarity of the Western European Crusaders. So her comments about the crossbow seemed kind of aimed at that purpose.

Yeah, she has a clear agenda here because otherwise if you take her literally it's like she's saying crossbow absolutely diabolical. Our secret fire weapon totally above board. Yeah, so it's possible it's just like here it is described as particularly a worse weapon than others because it is the weapon used by people she saw as wicked and barbaric.

So coming back to Burkholder's paper, he discusses at some length this passage by Anna Kamnenna. But he also points out medieval sculpture depicting crossbows in the hands of demonic figures. So for example, at the church of Saint Cernan in Toulouse, France, there is a 12th century pillar that has sculptures of demons squatting on top of it, clutching crossbows and bolts. And there are others as well, but he tempers these observations by pointing out that

Medieval European personifications of like death and disease and sin, these sort of demonic embodiments are often wielding other weapons as well, like swords and traditional bows. So you shouldn't read too much into the cases where they are holding crossbows.

Joe, I had to look up one of these demons with a crossbow, of course. I can't not look this up. And it's pretty fabulous because it's like a gargoyle-esque figure, you know, on a corner, part of a pillar motif. And the demon appears to be sort of squatting, but also sort of loading the crossbow, like he's pushing down with his feet and pulling up on the string with his hands or claws. But also, there's something kind of perverse about it, like the demon's kind of humping the crossbow as well.

Yeah, that checks out. Now, if you read sources about historical views on crossbows, it is very often pointed out that the Catholic Church produced a sort of ban on the use of crossbows in war at the Second Lateran Council in 1193, condemning, quote, the hateful and death-bringing art of crossbowmen.

However, Berkholder adds a lot of context to this that shows how just this fact in isolation could be misleading. So some context is, first of all, the church's ban on the crossbow only originally applied to use against fellow Christians. And then later in the same century, the church amended that ban to say, okay, you can even use the crossbow against fellow Christians as long as it is, quote, a just war.

I assume the people using it would always claim it was a just war.

Yeah, they should probably put a warning on the side of the crossbow just in case, only for use in just war. Also, according to some scholars, this ban was essentially completely ignored, like Christian armies just continued to use crossbows to fight each other all the time. Also, the church's proclamation didn't just attempt to ban crossbows, it attempted to ban regular bows as well, and this was also generally ignored.

And then also, uh, Burkholder sites, some other scholars named, uh, Contamine and Strickland who point out that one, uh, among multiple possible utilities of these bands, one of them, uh, it was that it was possibly just being used by military leaders to quote, keep deadly missile weapons out of the hands of non-elites. Well, this absolutely checks out with a lot of what we've been discussing. Yeah. It's okay. If we have the crossbows, we just don't want, uh, the people we're pressing to have the crossbows.

I was reading about this as well in Vincent van der Veen's Crossbows and Christians from a 2012 edition of Medieval Warfare. There's a quote from this very church ruling from 1139. I wanted to read it here, doing my best attempt at a Michael Palin accent from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers which is hateful to God to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on. Who being naughty in my sight.

Yeah, not bad Michael Palin, Rob, but still we apparently this ruling was not much heated. It was mostly ignored. But anyway, there's there's a brief passage where Burkholder cites another scholar named Venkreville to describe some of the possible mental justifications people had for especially demonizing the use of crossbows. Again, you know, it's not hard to

See why any any deadly weapon would have negative connotations attached to it But like why the crossbow more than like a regular bow or more than a sword When comparing missile weapons which would include regular bows to swords one thing

that gets mentioned in this paper is that it in some ways, quote, threatened an idealized form of close quarter combat. So maybe not that there's actually anything beautiful or noble about people like swinging swords at each other, bashing each other with handheld weapons, but

That was an activity that had been idealized in literature and storytelling, and thus had more poetic drama to it, totally apart from the reality of that physically happening. It makes sense that this kind of view would very much be a top-down viewpoint, whereas something like William Tell, that would be something that arises from the people as opposed to from the powers that be.

Though, I was saying that without, again, not being an expert on William Tell, you can also imagine the case where the people would have their folk hero and then the powers that B might be like, well, yeah, but he was using a crossbow. What does that tell you about this guy?

Another possible mental motivation for this focus on the crossbow as the weapon of a villain is the idea that it somehow gives users a supposed unfair advantage. Again, we talked about this in the last episode. It's not like you didn't have to train to use a crossbow. It did take skill and it did take training.

But it probably didn't take the level of like muscular physical fitness required and probably maybe not the same amount of practice required for a traditional bow that you would, you know, draw and hold with just the strength of your arms or maybe a sword as well.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating to think about this, though, because, of course, the crossbow is eventually replaced by advances in gunpowder technology and, of course, the coming of the age of the gun. And reading the gun by any of these moral standards, like the gun is inherently a coward's weapon and a weakling's weapon, but, of course, it comes to rule the day.

That's true, but some sources do say that a lot of the ways the crossbow is viewed and treated in culture do end up sort of mapping on to early uses of gunpowder weapons. I wanted to mention one more thing that might be motivating sort of demonization of the crossbow when compared to the longbow.

uh in in films which is a sort of inherited bias in favor of the english in the depiction of english versus french conflicts where in reality both sides actually did use crossbows at various times but the use of crossbows by the continental armies by the french is more uh i think that it did actually happen more and it certainly is emphasized more in historical accounts that the french had crossbows

So like, for example, the author of this paper mentions movies about Joan of Arc, which depict Joan's French armies carrying crossbows against the longbow armed English, and that how showing things like this feels like it's sort of violating the normal language of cinema, if like the audience is supposed to be on Joan's side, and they're the ones that have crossbows.

You know, real quick, coming back to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There, of course, is a scene where they encounter the French. And if memory serves, the Frenchmen do not have crossbows, but they do wield an unfair, ranged weapon against our English knights, and that, of course, is insults. So perhaps there's some connective tissue there, I'm not sure. It leads to one of my favorite details in that whole movie that is quite easy to miss, actually, is not even a spoken line. It's the fact that

john clays playing a lance a lot went after they get insulted by the french he draws his sword and starts hitting the castle with sword i think it's one of one of the best gags in the movie but to sum it up is there a bias in contemporary historical sources uh... about the use of crossbows that treats them in this same way that views them as villainous

It's not universal, but there are some sources like that. And it may be that those sources have been influential and have sort of come through and become inherited as part of the language of medieval films. Yeah, this is going to be very interesting to think about.

Just in general, as we all continue to watch films that have at least a medieval flavoring to them, or to read books that have medieval flavoring to them. I was just reading from a fantasy novel last night, and there's a scene where people were being shot out with crossbows. And of course, it's like rogues and assassins who are using the crossbow. And certainly on future episodes of Weird House Cinema.

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Now, to come back to the crossbow itself, first of all, I just want to pick up a few odds and ends that I didn't get to discussing just sort of the history and innovation of the crossbow, particularly, first of all, more in the West. According to Fagin and Rowley Conley, the Romans have, for them, an early explicit textual reference to the crossbows. And they would have been in use by the Roman army by the 4th century CE.

The vaguettias actually refers to these in the book concerning military matters.

But the authors here point out that in the bow-drawing mechanisms varied, we've discussed some of these already, laying down, putting your feet into straps, kind of like boot holes on the end of the crossbow. There was also the Greek belly bow, or the gastrophetes. This is described in the 1st century CE and was loaded by bracing the crossbow against the ground and forcing the butt of the thing into your belly.

I don't know if that makes complete sense. I included an illustration here for you, Joe. Well, I'm seeing the figure in the illustration you're providing where it's like he's almost like leaning down on the crossbow with his belly on it, with the bottom against the ground. So he's like pressing. And I guess I don't understand how the pressing would cause it to be spanned or to be what you might call like loaded or cocked. I guess maybe

One way of interpreting this, though I don't know, is if there are two actual shafts that can slide across each other, so by pressing on one, he is sliding it down the length of the other, and that draws back the string. I guess that's possible.

Yeah, basically, it looks like he's giving himself an incorrect Heimlich maneuver with the crossbow, with the business end pointed at the ground. On the end of the crossbow, the business end of the crossbow, there's this shaft, and as that is pushed down, as that's forced down, it's going to push the, you see, it would slide and push the, it would draw the bow, and then it would lock.

That makes sense now. Yeah, okay. Because a lot of the later medieval European mechanisms I'm thinking of for spanning it would involve more of a pulling mechanism, where say a common one is again the belt hook, which we talked about last time, say the combination of a belt hook with a stirrup at the end of the crossbow. So you would hook something that's attached to the string to a loop or a hook on your belt.

And then you would push down with your foot in a stir up on the shaft of the crossbow at the stir ups at the end of the crossbow. So that pulls the bow towards your foot and it pulls the string back with the strength of your legs and your body away from it. Yeah.

Now the authors mentioned that there were also Greco-Roman mentions of crossbows going back to the third and even fifth centuries BCE. The third century BCE example seems pretty valid. This is described in Cestibius, but the fifth century BCE mentioned seems to be a catapult or a siege weapon rather than a handheld weapon. Again, getting back to that

that something we mentioned in the last episode that apparently looking back at some of these ancient texts, you get into this gray area when you're trying to determine, are we talking about a crossbow here or are we talking about some form of catapult? Yeah, and that ambiguity doesn't stop there, by the way. I've read that historical study of crossbows is in multiple ways complicated by ambiguity and confusion about the names used for weapons and texts and trying to understand exactly what they're talking about. Yeah.

Now, one more sort of cocking or drawing mechanism of note. You also have the goat foot lever that appeared on a number of crossbows. And this was basically a lever device that was used to draw the bow. I looked at looking at images of it. I guess the goat foot comes because it kind of looks like a cloven hoof. There's like sort of two hooks or grooves in it.

Yeah, and so in addition, so like the belt hook one, you would be trying to to span the crossbow just by using the strength of your body. But a lot of these mechanisms have a machine with some kind of mechanical advantage, like a lever or later you would have, you know, you could get a really powerful crossbow if you use objects like a windlass or a kraniquin that would give you the ability to essentially crank the string back.

And that's the kind of crossbow that a dwarf should be using. I mean, that just seems perfect. Certainly a gnome in Dungeons & Dragons needs a crossbow that has cranks on it. Cranks levers the whole nine yards. Lots of moving parts, yeah. It makes it more like a modern machine.

Now, with military technology, and certainly with the crossbow, it often comes down to trade-offs, right? So in the last episode, we definitely discussed the reloading limitations of the crossbow. And this was a problem that innovators through themselves that pretty early on. The crossbow packs power, and it offers reasonable accessibility. But is there a way to speed it up?

Again, to be able to fire perhaps more crossbow bolts before too many arrows are fired at you by archers and so forth are there ways to do that while retaining the advantages of the crossbow to some measurable degree. And so this is where we get into the topic of the Chinese repeating crossbow.

I was looking at a couple of sources on this one of them is mechanism analysis of ancient Chinese crossbows by Dong et al published in the journal mechanical sciences in 2020. I was also looking at structural analysis of ancient Chinese crossbows from 2012 in the journal of science and innovation by Sal and Jan.

And the innovation in broad strokes seems to go back, perhaps as early as 400 BCE, at least in principle, though they're essentially two different repeating crossbows from two different eras that you see mentioned. So this first one, this 400 BCE one, this is sometimes referred to as the choose state repeating crossbow.

And the evidence from this comes from archeological finds in Jiang Ling, Hubei, that have been dated to this period according to Dong et al. So this area was known as the Chu State during the Warring States period that would have spanned 475 through 221 BCE. So this contraption seemed to have had a vertical magazine on top of the crossbow of 20 arrows that dropped down into firing position via gravity.

And then you would draw back, fire, draw back, and every time you would draw back with an empty slot for a crossbow bolt, it would drop into place. Sounds pretty advanced, sounds potentially useful, right? However, the thing to keep in mind about the true state crossbow is that it's small. It's only 30 centimeters long, it's less than a foot. And the bow is so short that it would have depended on the elasticity of the bowstring rather than the bending of the bow.

huh so it's more like a slingshot almost yeah and they say that it would have only had a range about 20 to 25 meters so think somewhere in the range of 22 yards

But on the other hand, you'd have something like rapid fire or automatic or semi-automatic fire. As such, this wouldn't have been a weapon of warfare or self-defense, they stressed, but rather a novelty invention that could have best been used, at best could have been used to hunt small birds. The authors also describe it as a, quote, toy of personal invention.

That's interesting. So more of a demonstration of principle or demonstration of ingenuity than something that would have been especially useful in this form. Right. Like I guess if it were a Dungeons and Dragons weapon, it would just do zero damage across the board. But it's interesting. So it should also point out that the author stressed that there are no historical writings that mention this particular crossbow.

And the idea that being a toy of personal invention, it reminds me even of our invention episodes on the wheel, in certain cultures before the wheel could actually really be capitalized upon for transportation and so forth, or other applications. There's still evidence that it was around, sometimes just as a novelty, as a toy. There are various reasons that an idea or technological innovation just

cannot be used, that cannot be employed for anything other than amusement, or at least for a certain period of time. I'm almost tempted to wonder if, in some scenarios, making a toy version of a mechanical device would be taking a patent out. You're not making this device at scale, or in a way that would be used for anything, but you can show the principle in small scale in a toy.

Yeah, now the second variety of Chinese repeating crossbow is the zugay new or zugay new repeating crossbow named for zugay lying apparently 181 through 234 CE military leader and prime minister of shoe Han during the three kingdoms period. He's also apparently the main hero of the fictional romance of the three kingdoms, a 14th century historical novel.

In that, he's portrayed as a sage and a military mastermind. However, apparently he did not actually invent this crossbow. His name just is associated with it in some records and it just has kind of stuck. But this version of the repeating crossbow did see use and was powerful enough to serve as a lethal weapon, sometimes aided by poisoned bolt heads.

Military historian Chris McNabb describes it as follows in a 2020 issue of MHQ, the quarterly journal of military history.

Quote, it featured a top-mounted magazine in which multiple bolts were stacked and a large operating handle. When drawn to the rear, the handle both cocked and at the full extent of the draw released the bowstring, firing the bolt that had dropped automatically into the flight groove. There was no separate trigger. The crossbowman then drove the handle forward, pushing the whole mechanism to the front to reengage the string for firing, as the next bolt took its place in the flight groove, ready to go.

Now, he cites a fire rate of 10 bolts in 20 seconds compared to a more standard, again, very general crossbow fire rate of three or four bolts in a minute. But as impressive as this is, the trade-off was limited power in range, thus the need for poison tips on some of your bolt heads. Still, one can imagine

Using this is kind of like a nuisance or shock weapon alongside other defensive weaponry. Now, Needham discusses the box and tube crossbow used around 1257 that featured a vertical drop magazine atop the crossbow. This was noted for its convenience and steadiness. It apparently could also be used easily at night because you didn't actually have to see what you were doing with the loading, though that raises questions about what you're shooting at.

I don't know if that's more properly eliminated. I guess you can imagine a scenario where there's moonlight in play and you're in the shadows. And it's also worth noting, especially in the writings of Needham about Chinese history and technology, that the repeated fire innovations would continue during the gunpowder era of Chinese weaponry. Needham mentions the nine dragon guns that could shoot nine arrows at a time off a single ignition.

This was part of the 15th century frontier arsenal. They also made use of a form of multi-barrel gun that was, this is much later on, but it was apparently in line with the European concept of the Roboticon or late medieval volley gun of the same time period.

Now, I have one more kind of mystery weapon to bring up here. This is one that came up pretty early in my research, but coming to it last year, because I couldn't really get a straight answer on it. And it concerns something called the ponjagan.

So, this would have been either a bow or a crossbow or some sort of a bow technique. It's uncertain associated with the Sasanian Empire. This was, of course, an Iranian Empire from 224 to 651. We discussed this empire on past episodes of the show.

Yeah, it seems to have been a weapon or a weapon system or just a strategy. And it's unclear if descriptions are referring to a projectile weapon or an archery technique. It's even been speculated, though, that it might have been a repeating crossbow of some form.

I was looking at a book by Cavei Faruoka titled, Sasanian Elite Cavalry, AD 224 through 642. I should note that this book has an illustration on the front, and this may be like a stock illustration, because I found it some other places as well, that shows a man on a horse in armor firing some sort of strange weapon that has like five arrow slots or five grooves, and they're like five arrows flying out of the thing.

Mm.

So I assume that that is supposed to be an artist depiction of the pangigan, but the book itself goes into more detail here. So the name means five device, but there are no known surviving examples to go on. The author here writes that it might have been a quiver system for accessing five arrows in a row fairly quickly, rather than what was apparently the typical Sasanian approach of holding three arrows in the same hand as the bow while you were firing.

He speculates that it was likely intended, whatever it was, as a spreadfire weapon or some sort of a technique to spread your fire, while other perhaps more highly skilled archers, and certainly Roman accounts speak of Sasanian archery skill, could focus their fire. So you have, like say, multiple arrows flying through the air.

And this proposes a certain threat, but then perhaps you have more skilled archers that are actually doing the lethal work alongside this. But ultimately, who knows? Maybe it was some sort of repeating crossbow, but the details are lost to history, apparently. Interesting. Where are the repeating crossbows and dungeons and dragons, though? Not sure. I don't know. I've never come across one. I assume that means they're not there.

I mean, they've got to be there. Someone has at least homebrewed repeating crossbow, right? And a quick search on D&D Beyond shows that there are some references to them. So maybe the Darrow used them in the Underdark. Looks like they maybe show up in Waterdeep, but they don't have a prominent place in the player's handbook or anything.

It's maybe a dumb question, but how do you get lumber in the underdark? Because they don't have trees down there, right? It's just big mushrooms. So do you use mushroom fiber as lumber to make your, you know, your wooden structures and tools or do you have to go to the surface to get trees for lumber? Well, you've answered your own question because yes, you use the mushrooms. There's a particular mushroom that is called zirka wood or zirka wood that is the primary building material of the underdark.

Man, you know all the answers. I didn't know there wasn't an answer to that. I ran a campaign in the Underdark for a while. So the Underdark, I have a lot of answers on, but other parts of the D&D world, my knowledge is a little more vague and spread out. And I guess we end where we began with D&D. Well, does that do it for you with the Crossbow Rob?

I think so. There are a lot of things in the history of the crossbow that we didn't have time to touch on, but I think we had all the most important things. But we'd love to hear from anyone out there. If you have examples of what we've been talking about in medieval-flavored media concerning the crossbow, if you yourself are a crossbow enthusiast, then I'm sure you have some insight to share with us. Everything's fair game.

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