Genoese Crossbowmen and French Knights, Hundred Years War (MED0013)

Genoese crossbowmen and the French advance under arrows

Amaury de Clisson, Boucicaut, Guillaume de Martel and Bertrand du Guesclin, with Genoese crossbowmen on the flank. An arrow is already crossing the top of the scene: this is the moment the Hundred Years War repeated for a century — the most expensive armour in Europe walking into shooting it could not answer.

Mercenaries with a trade to sell

Genoa sold crossbowmen to whoever could pay, and France was the best customer. The crossbow hit harder than the longbow and could be learned in weeks rather than over a lifetime: it was the rational answer for a kingdom with no class of trained archers to call up. Its weakness was rate of shooting — three or four bolts a minute against ten arrows — and above all the pavise, the tall shield the crossbowman reloads behind. Without it he is a stationary target. At Crécy the pavises had been left with the baggage.

The man who stopped giving battle

Du Guesclin is the constable who drew the lesson of Crécy and Poitiers and refused pitched battle altogether. His war was sieges, night attacks, towns retaken one at a time and ransoms negotiated — a methodical reconquest that between 1370 and 1380 recovered almost everything the treaties had taken, without producing a single textbook victory. A minor Breton noble with no fortune, he died constable of France and was buried at Saint-Denis among the kings.

Armour walks, it is not dragged

A full plate harness of this period weighs 25 to 30 kg spread over the whole body: a man can run in it, mount a horse and get up after a fall. The knight winched onto his saddle is a nineteenth-century invention. What killed at Agincourt was not the weight of iron but mud, crowding, and the impossibility of breathing inside a closed helm after several hundred metres on foot.

Why the charge was made anyway

The French nobility were not slow to understand. They were caught in a system where a place in the front rank was a social claim as much as a tactical choice, and giving way to common archers cost a kind of capital that is not counted in casualties. Du Guesclin could change the method precisely because he came from low enough to have nothing to prove.

Heraldry as identification

The surcoats are not ornament: in the press, arms told you whom to protect and whom to take alive. A great name was worth more captured than killed, and ransom was the real economy of this war. Giuseppe Rava reconstructs these four men from rolls of arms, the only surviving source for how they looked.