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Detail of a crude wall-painting of a castle, madę around 1340, showing additional wooden towers within the main wali.

[In situ, Avio castle; author's photograph)

The top of the main tower of Avio castle with defences at two levels covered. (Author's photograph)

helmets, heavier body protection and Iiorse armonr were re-introduced. The demand for armour gave a boost to the iron industry and led to experimentation with ligliter materials, including leather. Cuir-bouilli (hardened leather armour) was morę widely nsed in late-13th and 14th-century Italy than in other parts of western Europę. It is also interesting to notę that crossbows were used to test armour from at least 1341, when a 'corratiae de media próba (a half-proofed cuirass) was mentioned.

Paradoxically, the boost that tlie crossbow gave to Italian armour technolog)’ was so successful that the crossbow itself fell out of favour in the 14th century, and heavy caralry became the dominant fotce in the battlefield once morę. Its popularity was gradually re-established, altliougli the newer versions were morę complex, morę expensive to manufacture, and liad a reduced rate-of-fire. In Italy the adoption of crossbows by infantry units had already led to changes in militar)’ ideas and organisation: this in turn madę the adoption of firearms in the late-14th and lóth centuries a much easier affair. There had been a genuine ‘crossbow rev-olution’ and it had taken warfare out of the hands of the aristocracy.

Crossbow versions and spanning Systems

A distinct disadvantage of early medieval crossbows was that they were cumbersome. The main advantages such weapons had over hand-held bows though was that they could be left under tension for long periods, and were relatively easy to shoot accurately. The early style of bow survived as large ‘wali crossbows’, often using a simple peg to release the string rather than a revolving nut and being madę mostly of yew or ash. Other woods mentioned in the manufacture of crossbows are laburnum, willow, hazel, elm, mapie and cyprus, though most of these were used in the stock rather than the bow.

Crossbows of composite construction (employing materials such as horn and sinew) may have reached Europę as early as the end of the 12th century, but were cer-tainly in use in Genoa by the mid-13th century. Composite construction gave a much greater power-to-weight ratio, because sinew has a tensile strength approximately four times that of wood, and horn has a similarly better compression ratio: however, wood was still used to make the core of the bow. The bow on a crossbow was considerably shorter, thicker and endured morę prolonged stress than that of a handheld bow. This may explain why in Europę the strips of horn were usually set edgeways along the bow rather than fiat, and why the wooden core continued to take a greater proportion of stress. Up to half the entire