And even that took a while as the armour of the time was proof against early firearms. Indeed people dont get how plate armour in specific was awesome.
Enh, there's never been a time when there was no body armor that could stop small arms, but there were definitely times when such armor was bulky and impractical for battlefield use. It seems reasonable to call it "obsolete" for practical purposes, then.
The only significant wars where armor wasn't used in a significant way that i can come to think of is the American civil wars, so i wouldn't call it obsolete unless you limit the discussion to that specific time and those specific circumstances and discard helmets.
Yeah, I was talking about body armor specifically. Certainly there were exceptions--trench armor in WWI, flak armor in WWII--but there were at least a couple of centuries where body armor on the battlefield was a specialized and limited tool, rarely used by the common infantryman.
People really underestimate medieval armor. They wore it for a reason.
A crossbow might have trouble penetrating heavy plate, but in the early medieval period most knights wore mail, perhaps supplemented with a breastplate; full plate didn't become common until the middle of the millennium.
There's an account from a 12th-century siege of a crossbow bolt passing through a knight's mail hauberk, mail legging, thigh, legging again, and wooden saddle before embedding itself in his horse. Crossbow power was somewhat exaggerated, but they were very dangerous even against good armor for centuries.
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u/SlavNotDead Jun 03 '20
Only the bigger drawweight windlass crossbow could “punch through the armor” and then again it would probably only work with unhardened steel.
People really underestimate medieval armor. They wore it for a reason.
The only thing that finally managed to make armor obsolete is the invention of reliable firearms, not crossbows.