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It’s a rare occasion indeed when anything crossbow related gets traction basically anywhere, so I’m going to use the popularity of this tweet as a spring board to talk about my favorite weapon. 1/lots https://twitter.com/marinamaral2/status/1300009077347700741
I would like to start by saying that I’m not ragging on this person specifically. In fact many of the issues I’m about to talk about are common in even academic works of military history. The problem is that basically nobody studies the crossbow so it's never challenged. 2/
Firstly, let’s talk Second Lateran Council. The actual relevant text is Canon 29 and it says: “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.” 3/
You may notice immediately that it singles out both archers and crossbowmen, i.e. any weapon used to kill your fellow Christians from a distance was frowned upon by the council. You may also notice that it is Canon 29 (of 30) 4/
You see, the Second Lateran Council included bans on a lot of things and one of its areas of focus was on stopping so many Christians from killing each other all the goddamn time. 5/
For example, Canon 12 says “We decree that the truce is to be inviolably observed by all from sunset on Wednesday until sunrise on Monday, and from Advent until the octave of the Epiphany, and from Quinquagesima until the octave of Easter …” 6/
The text then goes on to describe the punishments for engaging in battle on any day that isn’t Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday (but only during daylight!) - Spoilers, it's basically excommunication. As you can imagine, people continued to fight battles on Saturday after this. 7/
My other favourite is Canon 14, “We entirely forbid, moreover, those abominable jousts and tournaments in which knights come together by agreement and rashly engage in showing off their physical prowess and daring, and which often result in human deaths and danger to souls.” 8/
Keep in mind that this is 1139, so the type and style of tournament and/or joust you probably picture in your mind (e.g. A Knight’s Tale stuff) hasn’t even come into being yet and we’re already declaring it banned. Obviously this didn’t work. 9/
The actual majority of the council’s decrees focus on boring clerical stuff like banning simony (the buying of religious offices) and clerical marriage, both of which were big bugbears of the time. You can read the full text here: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum10.htm 10 /
My point is that the council included lots of bans, and the fact that the papacy banned crossbows in 1139 is a widely circulated “fact” that while technically kind of true leaves out a lot of much needed context. 11/
We have no evidence that anybody actually followed this ban. Crossbows only became more popular in the following centuries. It is also worth noting that the ban only applied to killing Christians, you were more than welcome to take your crossbow on Crusade. 12/
I’ve also seen a lot of comments in the replies saying that the reasoning behind this ban was that a common peasant (or Yeoman, and I must stress these terms are not interchangeable) could use a crossbow to kill a knight and the powers that be could not support that. 13/
This just wasn’t the case. Firstly, the church was more concerned with knight’s murdering clergy and peasants (a much more common occurrence than the latter, I assure you) and noble violence in general than they were with those same nobles being shot while waging war. 14/
At the same time, crossbows were very expensive weapons. You couldn’t just stop by your local Walmart and buy them in bulk. These were specially made by highly skilled (and pricey) artisans. They were also complicated to use correctly. 15/
The crossbow gets a bad rap as an “easy weapon” to use, but it wasn’t. To use it efficiently and effectively required training and time, something peasants didn’t have even if they somehow got a hold of one of these weapons, which let me add they usually didn’t. 16/
The crossbow was a weapon of elite warfare. Throughout the Middle Ages you were far more likely to find them in the hands of specialist mercenary companies (famously but not exclusively from Genoa) than in the hands of the common soldier. 17/
My final, arguably petty, point is that the crossbow in the initial picture is an East Asian crossbow, if I had to guess I’d say Chinese, and not in fact a European one. It’s a very different design. 18/End
