I’m reading a book about the Mongols )Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World) and have gotten to the bit where the Mongols invaded Rus’.
The author says that the Mongol arrows were fashioned in such a way that the Russians could not pick them up and shoot them back with their own bows. However, the Mongols were apparently able to shoot back recovered Russian arrows with no problem.
The book gives no details about why this would have been the case. The best guess I’ve been able to come up with is that the Mongol arrows could have been very short, making it difficult to fire them from larger bows if that’s what the Russians were using. I don’t really know anything about archery so I’m likely way off base.
Mongol arrows were definitely not short. The Mongols used quite long composite bows (surviving specimens are about 56" long), which only work well with long draws. If anything, the medieval Russian arrows were shorter than the Mongol ones, and again, the few surviving artefacts bear that out.
One plausible explanation could simply be that the Mongol arrows’ string nocks were too tight for the Russians’ bowstrings. The lone original Mongol bowstring found has a diameter of only 2.9 mm, which isn’t much. No medieval Russian bowstrings have survived, but later historical examples from the area have bowstrings up to 5 mm in diameter.
The thin string guy can shoot both tight nock and loose nock arrows, while the thick string guy can only shoot loose nock arrows.
Yes, and the Russians were adverse to using the cup method, assuming a priori that it was an inferior method. But it turned out to work well for the Mongolians. This led to the coining of the common phrase “don’t nock it until you try it.”
This is false. There is no evidence that Mongolian arrows didn’t have nocks, or that the bowstrings had cups attached. If you have any, please present it. This is General Questions, after all. Evidence that Mongolian arrows had nocks and the strings didn’t have cups is there.
The recent Mongolian find of a 14th century composite bow fitted with a string I mentioned above is presented: here:
Note Fig. 3, and the conventional bowstring with no cup attached. The same burial also contained a quiver filled with arrows that have string nocks. The same type, if not size, as the Chinese, Russian etc. arrows.
I do a sport called primitive flight shooting, we use natural string materials. The Mongolian bows used silk while the Russian bows most likely used a plant fiber or animal sinew, possibly gut material. The silk is a much smaller diameter on a finished string and it would make sense that the Russians could not fit the arrows on their nocks. Old flight arrows I have seen all have nocks.
OK, then, I might well have been misinformed (the history of archery is certainly not an area of expertise for me). But I’d be willing to guess that the author that Johnny Bravo was reading was similarly misinformed, and that that’s what he was referring to.
Here is an earlier, inconclusive thread on the topic.
I’ve actually read the Weatherford book before, and pulled up the ebook right now, but the source listing is too sparse and poorly organized for me to figure out where he got that information.
I’m not sure this would fit the timeline, though. The Mongol invasion of China only began a couple of decades prior to their forays into Russia. They certainly brought back literal tons of silk from China, but was this enough time for their entire military culture to switch to silk bowstrings?
Hah.
It’s nice to know that another Doper had the same niggling thought! I’m reading this an Audible, so I couldn’t check the sourcing at all.
I read through that old thread and KP is pretty convincing when he says it’s pretty implausible.
The author spends quite a bit of time in this book talking about all of the wildly incorrect reports of the Mongols during their invasions. I think it might be reasonable to assume that the source reporting Mongol arrows being somehow unusable on European bows might have also been unreliable, and Weatherford either failed to realize it or failed to mention it.
The Mongol invasion of China may have been recent, but the Mongols had been around trading and raiding for some time. It’s certainly possible they had acquired enough silk for bowstrings to switch over from what they used before.
Going back to the OP, does the author actually validate his claim that
Rather than picking through some technical reasons why this might be the case, might it not be better to validate the claim first, to see if there needs to be a technical reason?
Some sources say mongol arrows were longer (composite bows often provide a longer draw), others say European self bows had a shorter range, while still others say mongol nocks were narrower.
So putting those three together, the self bow users cannot reach the composite archers, while the composites can reach the selfs. The selfs cannot shoot the composite’s arrows back while the composites can do it the other way round (but with less effectiveness.)
The above problems don’t leave the selfs helpless (though disadvantaged). They just have to deploy differently.
There’s a difference between zero contact and having a large and steady enough supply of silk for every mongol warrior to string his bow with, especially before Genghis Khan united them into a single polity.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were stringing their bows with silk by the time they got to Russia. I would be very surprised to find that they all were.
And they’d probably want all of their arrows to be interchangeable, to simplify logistics, so if some of them still had thick bowstrings, they’d want all of their arrows to be compatible with those strings.