Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shin Okada" data-source="post: 6947372" data-attributes="member: 1956">Basically, both muskets and longbows were used in mass. So usually, bowmen and musketeers in the battle fields were composed of low-rank samurai (technically, Ashigaru were low-rank samurai). But higher-ranked samurais were known as the use those weapons, too. Afterwords, if higher-ranked samurais don't know how to use them, how they can train lower-ranked ones and newbies?In case of Oda Nobunaga, I guess it was just that muskets are not always more useful (or ready to use) than longbow.Well, it depends on individual case and of era. In later Sengoku (civil-war) era, armors of higher ranked samurai were required to withstand musket bullets in some degree. Many type of armor were developed those days. Lighter (or cheaper) ones were more like scale armor. Many of the later ones (especially those for higher ranked samurai) were plate-like. Some of the samurai were using cuirass actually imported from Europe. And some of the craftsmen developed even more improved cuirass which can withstand both blades and musket bullets. Japanese Sengoku era was one of the rare cases when both massed-muskets and heavy metal armor were co-existed in large battles.In regard to chainmail, it was not quite popular and mainly used as undercoat or complement to plate armors. One of the reason is that, in Japan, chainmail were developed AFTER plate armor. It is mainly because the difference in the development of metallurgy. In Japan, the way to make steel wires were developed much after the way to make steel plates.</blockquote>

Verification