Arbalest

Origins

The Crossbow was known in Europe from the eleventh century, and by the twelfth it was powerful enough to worry the Church: in 1139 the Second Lateran Council condemned its use against Christians, a ban nobody obeyed. Richard the Lionheart, a great user of crossbowmen, was himself killed by a crossbow bolt at Châlus in 1199. Early military crossbows had bows of wood or of horn, wood and sinew laminated together, and were drawn by standing in a stirrup and hooking the string to a belt. Through the fourteenth century crossbow makers built ever stronger bows, and from around 1400 steel bows appeared. These heavy weapons, needing mechanical help to draw, are what English writers called the arbalest.

Design & Construction

An arbalest has a wooden stock, the tiller, with a revolving nut of horn or bone that holds the drawn string, released by a long trigger lever under the stock. The bow, or prod, is lashed to the front of the stock, and a stirrup at the front lets the shooter hold the weapon down with his foot while spanning it. A steel prod might have a draw weight of several hundred to over a thousand pounds but a very short draw, so the bolt, or quarrel, was short and heavy, with a square-sectioned head. To draw such a bow the crossbowman used either an English windlass, a pair of cranks turning pulleys and cords, or a German cranequin, a rack-and-pinion device turned by a handle. Either took time: a heavy arbalest might shoot one or two bolts a minute, against perhaps ten or twelve arrows from the English Longbow.

Combat Use

Because of its slow rate, the arbalest was at its best in sieges, where the crossbowman could shoot from behind a wall or a large shield and wait for a target. On the open field, crossbowmen worked in teams with a pavise, a tall shield set up in front of them or carried by a companion. Italian cities, above all Genoa, raised famous companies of professional crossbowmen and hired them out to kings; Genoese crossbowmen fought for France at Crécy in 1346, where, caught without their pavises and with rain-soaked strings, they were shot down by English archers in one of the famous episodes of the Hundred Years War. In city militias, garrisons and on ships, the crossbow remained an important weapon well into the fifteenth century, and crossbowmen's guilds held shooting competitions across the German and Flemish towns.

Legacy

The arbalest's advantages over the longbow were that it needed little strength or training, and that it could be kept loaded and aimed. The same advantages belonged to early firearms, and in the sixteenth century the Arquebus replaced it in almost every army. The crossbow survived as a hunting and target weapon, and guild shooting with heavy crossbows continues in parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Germany to this day. Surviving arbalests with their windlasses and cranequins are among the most striking pieces in European armor collections.