38 Chapter Twopractice allowed an ordinary man to use a crossbow quite effectively.
Yet Chinese crossbows of the thirteenth century were lethal up to
four hundred yards.^28
Second, the simple skill required for using a crossbow was counter
balanced by the high skill needed for its manufacture. An army of
crossbowmen had to rely on expert artisans to produce precisely
shaped trigger mechanisms and other necessary parts. Moreover, to
supply such craftsmen with everything required to manufacture cross
bows in large numbers was not easy. A powerful crossbow was com
pounded of laminated wood, bone, horn, and sinew, all cunningly
fitted together to assure maximal springiness when bent out of its
unstressed shape. The art of making such compound bows, however,
was highly developed throughout the Eurasian steppelands. What dis
tinguished crossbows was their trigger mechanism, which had to be
made strong enough to withstand heavy stress when the bow was
cocked and awaiting discharge. Only skilled artisans with access to
appropriate supplies of metal could make a reliable trigger.^29
A market economy, ranging across diverse landscapes, was better
able to assure a suitable flow of the requisite materials into artisan
workshops than any but the most efficient command economy. The
same consideration applied to the varied machines for projecting
stones, arrows, and incendiary materials with which Chinese armies of
the eleventh century were also equipped.^30 Explosive mixtures, in-
- Corinna Hana, Berichte über die Verteidigung der Stadt Te-an wàhrend der Penode
K’ai-hsi, 1205–1209 (Wiesbaden, 1970). As we shall see in chapter 3, powerful cross
bows checked the expansion of knighthood in the thirteenth century when these
weapons became common in Mediterranean Europe. In China, crossbows may have
helped to discourage reliance on the Iranian style of heavily armored cavalry, for if a
crossbowman could knock even an armored cavalryman off his horse, it made no sense
to invest in the heavy horse and the expensive armor that put Iranian barons and
European knights at the apex of their respective societies. Heavily armored cavalry,
after some three centuries of importance in China, disappeared in the seventh century.
It is, however, not certain that Chinese crossbows were powerful enough to penetrate
armor before the invention of the foot stirrup in the eleventh century. Cf. Joseph
Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London, 1969),
pp. 168–70. - For a literary account of bowmaking and prints showing crossbow artisans at
work, see Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu, translated as Chinese Technology in the
17th Century, by E-tu Zen Sun and S. C. Sun (Univeristy Park, Pa., 1966), pp. 261–67.
Weaker bows could be made of simpler material; indeed it was even possible to shape a
workable trigger entirely out of wood; but such weapons lacked the power needed to
penetrate armor. For an account of nineteenth-century Chinese crossbows made of
wood and designed to fire a magazine of arrows at a very rapid rate, see Payne-Gallwey,
The Crossbow, pp. 237–42. These weak but ingenious weapons (actually used against
British troops in the 1860s) relied on poisoned arrows to make their wounds dangerous. - Sergej Aleksandrovic Skoljar, “L’artillerie de jet à l’époque Song,” in Françoise