introduction
Living in the information age, people can always get all kinds of information from the Internet, and readers who believe that readers who are interested in ancient history and military must have heard about the so-called "riding and shooting invincibility" or similar rhetoric and film and television dramas published by some authors. They mainly talk about how powerful the cavalry is, how invincible, and they also like to set up a target, such as the Mongol cavalry using riding and shooting to beat the European cavalry with full body plate armor, etc., so as to argue that the "mounted cavalry" is far stronger than the "assault cavalry".
But unlike what everyone gets from film and television dramas and literary works, riding shooting in real history is not as powerful as most people think, of course, this is not to say that riding shooting is useless.
Realistic riding shooting
First of all, the impression of the cavalry riding a fast horse to the enemy's neat array of troops, taking advantage of the momentum of the charge to shoot at the archers in the enemy line, the other side's arrows raining down, and then riding the archer to turn the horse's head to skim past the formation, is a very uneconomical thing, in this case the riding archer does not have the advantage of firepower at all.
Even the nomadic army with many mounted archers did not rush and shoot indiscriminately when attacking the enemy with its mounted archery, but surrounded the enemy's army and then began to ride and shoot in a circle. If you find that the enemy has no crossbowmen somewhere or only a small number of crossbowmen, you will ride close to the horse and shoot, and if you find that there are many crossbowmen in the enemy's front, you will throw a distance, as far as possible to prevent the enemy crossbowmen from having the opportunity to aim at themselves and avoid shooting.
Because most of the bowstrokes used by horse archers and rifle archers are quite different, the bows and arrows used by general rifle archers are mostly longer and harder, and more pulling force is needed to pull them apart, while the riding archery bow is because the shooter wants to shoot arrows on the horse, and the bumps on the horse will lead to a reduction in shooting accuracy and awkward posture, limiting the use of high-pound bows (large pull bows), so they will generally be designed to be shorter and smaller, and the corresponding number of pounds, that is, the strength required to pull the bow and arrow is smaller.
Tip: In general, most riding archery bows are not as powerful as rifle archery bows, but they are not absolute, such as the Qing bow used by the Eight Banner Army in the Qing Dynasty is one of the alternatives, and some cavalry will carry double bows, riding bows on horses, and infantry bows for stationing or dismounting horses. In the 13th century, when the Pope's envoy, Berant Guest, went to Mongolia, he wrote the "Burrang Guest Mongolian Chronicle", which recorded that the basic weapon of Mongolian warriors was three bows, which were used for different situations such as rifle shooting and riding shooting.
Station static shooting
Due to the low pulling force of the riding archery bow, this directly leads to the range and power of the riding archery bow being generally weaker than the rifle archery bow (not an exception), and the effective range of the riding archery is only 10 to 30 steps, less than 50 meters (here we are talking about the effective range, not that the riding bow can only shoot less than 50 meters).
Pay attention to the distance between the mounted shooter and the target
In the Chronicle of History, Sima Qian recorded the archery habits of the flying general Li Guang as follows:
"Its shooting, seeing the enemy's urgency, is not within a few tens of steps, and if it is not hit, it will fall in response to the string." Biography of General Lee
It can be seen from this that even a top mounted archer like Li Guang must wait for the enemy to be close to his own dozens of steps before he can ensure that the arrows are not false. However, because the mounted archers rode on warhorses and carried out rapid archery strikes in front of the enemy positions, more areas of activity and space were required, and their firepower density could not be compared with the infantry crossbowmen with neat arrays and smaller space requirements.
Therefore, if the cavalry shoots against the infantry archers, it is actually a very bad thing, not to mention that there are many crossbowmen in the long-range troops of the infantry. At the same time, riding archery is also a very difficult skill to practice, not just riding a horse to pull a bow and archery so simple, cavalry must be trained for many years to master the skill of shooting with a bow on the back of a galloping horse, as for the skill of opening the bow left and right on the horse, it is even more difficult, such a class of soldiers and infantry archers shooting is too wasteful, that is, the nomadic army has this kind of soldier can afford to play.
During the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the great general Li Ling went out to attack the Xiongnu, with 5,000 infantry, and shook the Xiongnu's 80,000 cavalry, and the Xiongnu left more than 10,000 corpses in front of their formations, before finally exhausting their materials, and only then did they fill in the tragic victory with human lives:
"And the Lingti infantry was less than five thousand, and the land of horses and horses, or tens of thousands of divisions, saved the dead and the wounded, and attacked and besieged them with bows. Turning thousands of miles, exhausting the road, the soldier Zhang Empty, the white blade, the northern head fighting for the enemy, the death force of the people, although the ancient famous generals are not but also. ”
Moreover, although the distance of riding and shooting is long for infantry, it is very short for other cavalrymen, when the shooter bursts into the enemy's place of about 20 steps to pull the bow and shoot arrows, as long as the enemy is attacked in or near the area where the cavalry is deployed, then the enemy's assault cavalry with a sword shield or spear can rush to the front of the mounted archer in a few seconds to engage it, the whole process will be very fast, because the two are too close, and the riding archer will have to waste some time to turn forward, Otherwise he would crash directly into the enemy's heavily armored infantry line in the spear bushes, which was the most dangerous time for the mounted archer, and it was easy to be recklessly penetrated by melee cavalry.
In the absence of cavalry, even light infantry can solve the urgent need and drive the mounted archers out of a certain distance, and in the Battle of Calais, in the face of the attack of the Parthian mounted archers, Crassus's response was to send the Celtic light infantry of the army forward to drive the enemy's mounted archers into the distance.
Parthian tactics
When Tang Taizong Li Shimin was young on the battlefield, he inherited his father's superb archery skills and he was one of the top riding archers at that time, and his superb archery technique made the enemy frightened, but even if Li Shimin was so strong, he also had the experience of being attacked by the enemy's assault cavalry several times in the process of riding and shooting, and almost died on the battlefield.
There is no way, even if the riding archer uses the impact of the horse to increase the power and range of the arrow, then it can not change the embarrassing situation that the effective range of the riding archery is short, and because the ancient soldiers will wear armor, some classes will also carry shields, the body is protected, and the thrown arrows are difficult to penetrate, so sometimes the riding archer will rush to less than ten steps away from the enemy to shoot arrows in order to increase the power of the riding shooting, and shoot the enemy's face without armor protection or other parts. The Eight Banners of the late Ming Dynasty would even rush to five steps away from the enemy before shooting, a technique known as the "five-step firing surface", which was also used by Tibetan troops active on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and some old photos have relevant records.
The Tibetan Army's "Five-Step Shooting Surface"
The Qing Dynasty martial arts examination will test the reference's bow and horse skills, but it is only to let the reference shoot the target more than ten steps away, and even french missionaries record that the running horse runway of the Qing army martial arts examination is only six feet away from the target (less than two meters), and the martial arts person is already the absolute ceiling in the Qing army, so everyone has a clear understanding of the range of riding and shooting.
The so-called Mongol cavalry with mounted archery tactics to hang european plate armor knights is more pure brainless theology, first of all, the Mongol cavalry is not only "riding shooting" to take the world, most people do not know that the Mongolian cavalry actually has nearly 40% of the heavy cavalry existence, which is a very terrible proportion, and the Mongols also attach great importance to cavalry impact tactics (about the specific tactics of the Mongols after the special article detailed, please pay attention).
In fact, there were nearly 40% of the heavy cavalry in the Mongol cavalry
The Mongols have also established a better combat system than the enemy in the perennial war, and the most significant feature of its Mongol cavalry is its high-speed mobility, long-distance detours, long-distance raiding operations and combined attack and encirclement are the tactics that the Mongol cavalry is best at, compared to blowing the Mongols' riding and shooting, these tactics of the Mongols are the advantages that are really worthy of the big book.
Secondly, everyone should know that when the Mongols marched to Europe, the Europeans had not yet invented plate armor! Where did the plate armor knights come from, and the armor of the European knights at that time was not necessarily as good as that of the Mongols.
postscript
In fact, until now, some places in the world still exist riding archery, such as some Hungarian equestrian schools, Japan's "flowing dysprosium horse" martial arts, etc., if you are interested, you can go to the Internet to search for relevant videos to watch the real riding shooting, so that the understanding of the power of riding archery can be clearer.
Flowing dysprosium horses, pay attention to the distance between the riding shooter and the target, of course, there are also long distances, but not far