Reading 23

“In the hands of an experienced soldier, a smoothbore musket stood about a fifty-fifty chance of striking a man-sized target at which it was aimed, one hundred yards distant; at fifty yards, it was much more accurate. At anything over one hundred yards, though, the ball’s flight path was unpredictable. Beyond two hundred yards, there was little chance that the ball would hit, much less seriously hurt, a human target, and at three hundred yards it would be harmless.

“So, were these first infantry firearms powerful and accurate? Obviously, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, the answer is a resounding ‘no.’ But accuracy is a relative concept, and the term is all but meaningless when it’s divorced from the context in which a weapon is used. If the arquebus and the musket seem inaccurate and weak, their loading process overly complicated and overly long, it is because we judge them from the perspective of our time. Taken on their own merits and seen within the context of sixteenth-century (and earlier) warfare, they appear much different. They were powerful and accurate enough. The range of the longbow was not that much greater than that of the musket, and medieval combat took place face-to-face more often than not. Perhaps a shot fired from an arquebus was likely to miss an individual man at one hundred yards, but then battles weren’t fought between individuals at one hundred yards—they were fought between armies, between large groups of individuals. As long as armies operated in anything resembling closed formations, then the arquebus and the musket were unquestionably effective weapons. If a shot from an arquebus hit the man it was aimed at or a man standing five yards to either side of him, it made no difference. The target was the enemy, not an enemy.”

- Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (2021)