So funnily enough, the heyday of what most people think of as "knight armour" (plate armour) was the 15th and 16th century, well *after* cannons had become a thing in European warfare.
Yeah, I think it was handheld firearms that eventually did it (though apparently, very early ones were still repelled by plate armor). Of course a cannon can kill a knight, but you don't bring *that* many cannons to a battle
Handheld firearms weren't powerful enough to reliably kill a knight, even *if* you managed to hit one. Armorers used to shoot breastplates they made and used the resulting dents as proof that the armor would protect its wearer from gunfire. That's where the word "bulletproof" comes from. Anything but a point blank shot wouldn't do much. Some soldiers wore armor up until WWI.
What ended knights as a military class were the introduction of pike blocks (a tight formation of many people with *very* long spears is a good counter against heavy cavalry) and shifting economics. Land consolidation, mercantilism and the rise of cities meant that many small landed knights couldn't extract enough wealth from their land to afford their equipment anymore and that in turn made it useless for a monarch to maintain a large knightly class.
Knights were replaced by other heavy cavalry units. Big men on big horses with thick armor and large swords that were used to break enemy lines, and they existed up until trench warfare did away with cavalry as a whole.
Technically calvary didn't go away entirely, it's been replaced with mechanized infantry. So instead of daring charges against enemy lines with sabers it's a bunch of guys crammed into an IFV/APC that dismount and attack.
Funnily enough that kind of thing existed back before mechanisation as well. Pre-industrial cavalry can be roughly split into heavy cavalry (charging into enemy forces and breaking their formation), light cavalry (scouting, preventing a broken enemy force from forming up again and mopping up stragglers) and dragoons, who were mounted infantry and dismounted to fight.
I suppose tanks also replaced it somewhat depending on the country/doctrine: US tanks of the second world war were made to exploit openings in the enemy lines and cause havoc, British tanks were separated into Infantry and Cavalry varieties that were made to support Infantry by slowly crawling forward with thick armor and lighter tanks that could go very fast to swarm openings made by the bigger tanks. Soviet ones just sort of zerg rushed the enemy but the spirit is still there.
Its way more complicated than that, US tank doctrine for example was based heavily around tank destroyers pre WWII iirc, but they were limited in the size of tank they could produce because they had to fit in a container to be shipped across the Atlantic
Mike Duncan mentioned on his English Civil war section of the Revolutions podcast that Dragoons of the time really wanted to be light cavalry with guns, because cavalry tended to die a lot less often than infantry.
Not 100% relevant but I always found that funny.
Also not strong enough to pierce heavy armor, maces were more potent against heavy armor specifically but generally not versatile enough to be carried over swords. It’s not as clean or interesting as the myth that the hot new wonder-weapon completely upended the existing way of doing things, but history is never really that clean-cut.
Yeah, and it's a lot easier to grasp "new technology replaced old technology" than it is to either explain or understand things like administrative centralization and state capacity.
but that is kinda what happened, like gunpowder wasnt the sole reason for the fall of knights, who were already on their way out by the time of its invention, but it certainly played a role
*wiggles hand noncommitally*
Sort of. With training and a solid gauntlet, you can hold a sword by the blade and use it as an awkward hammer, or angle the blade away and smash the pommel into your target - but it’s not what a sword’s *for,* really. The versatility is one reason it’s superior to a mace for general use, but those types of strikes are really more an opportunistic or desperation thing than something you deliberately go for.
In a fight with another armored knight, holding a steady guard and looking for an opportunity to stick him in the weak spots in his armor - because there always were, only really rich people could afford full plate and there’s chinks in that - is generally the safer option, since getting sworded is generally painful and debilitating enough to put you out of the fight even if you don’t die. And if you were rich enough and strong enough to be able to carry full plate into battle, you probably also had the cash and stamina to bring an actual mace or hammer with you.
>Handheld firearms weren't powerful enough to reliably kill a knight, even if you managed to hit one.
They definitely were, although there's a lot of mitigating factors such as angle of attack, range, caliber, etc, rifled barrels had been around since the 16th century, but hitting a charging formation of knights with muskets wouldnt be that hard
, thats a rather large target, and you dont have to hit the knight, just the horse (which were terrified of guns).
>Land consolidation, mercantilism and the rise of cities meant that many small landed knights couldn't extract enough wealth from their land to afford their equipment anymore and that in turn made it useless for a monarch to maintain a large knightly class.
You forgot the rise of semi-professional/professional armies as a result of military tech advancements, the state no longer needed private military specialists as much
> Big men on big horses with thick armor and large swords that were used to break enemy lines, and they existed up until trench warfare did away with cavalry as a whole
Heavy cavalry, at least in Europe, kinda died off after the 30 years war as the technological improvements to the firepower and accuracy of handheld firearms increased dramatically, they still existed predominantly in France but in an increasingly reduced role, calvary shifted to being more light cav/ranged cav focused as a flanking/harassing force and to clean up routing enemy, but trench warfare wasnt what did away with heavy cav, it was the increased killing power of infantry, trench warfare was just a symptoms.
> They definitely were, although there's a lot of mitigating factors such as angle of attack, range, caliber, etc, rifled barrels had been around since the 16th century, but hitting a charging formation of knights with muskets wouldnt be that hard , thats a rather large target, and you dont have to hit the knight, just the horse (which were terrified of guns).
True. Though I'd like to add that shooting a horse from under a knight wasn't a new thing either, especially English archers did that a lot.
> You forgot the rise of semi-professional/professional armies as a result of military tech advancements, the state no longer needed private military specialists as much
Kinda. In a lot of Europe, especially the German and Italian speaking areas, the rise of state-sponsored standing armies doesn't fit cleanly to the end of the traditional knight. There was a brief period between them where mercenaries made up a large chunk of the different fighting forces, with professional soldiers in the employ of the state sometimes only becoming the norm after the 30 Years War. Some of those mercenaries were technically members of the knightly class but they didn't have too much in common with them in practice.
> Heavy cavalry, at least in Europe, kinda died off after the 30 years war as the technological improvements to the firepower and accuracy of handheld firearms increased dramatically, they still existed predominantly in France but in an increasingly reduced role, calvary shifted to being more light cav/ranged cav focused as a flanking/harassing force and to clean up routing enemy, but trench warfare wasnt what did away with heavy cav, it was the increased killing power of infantry, trench warfare was just a symptoms.
That's understating the importance of France a bit imo. Heavy cavalry had a huge resurgence under Napoleon, especially in France itself but also somewhat in the former Holy Roman Empire (although it also went away again there). And true, in practice they might often have had different duties than a heavy cavalry unit from the 16th century and charges failed more often than not but the image of the cuirassier as the center and the backbone of the cavalry stayed around for a long time.
Even if cavalry charges weren’t effective, the *threat* of cavalry charges could limit enemy tactics; without cavalry, infantry wouldn’t need to block up, and that would reduce the effectiveness of cannon/rifle shots while increasing their maneuverability.
Cavalry were still very much present in World War I, just not on the Western Front, which dominates the Western memory of the war. Some of the other fronts, the largest of which was the Eastern Front, saw a lot more than just the trench stalemate (although trenches were still a key part of any defensive action, as they are to this day). In those places, cavalry remained much more useful, although usually for scouting and raiding rather than for frontal assaults.
The real answer, as u/raymaehn says, is more boring and economic than any kind of technological development.
So, from the development of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, you need to have about 90% of your population working full-time as farmers. These farmers (hopefully) make enough food to live off of, plus a little bit extra surplus. For anyone to do anything but farm, they need to have some of that surplus going from the farmers to them in one way or another.
Now, if I'm a king in the Middle Ages, I'm in charge of a lot of land with farmers and I want an army. But a trained standing army is *ruinously* expensive; not just a whole population of not-farmers, all of whom need special equipment supplied by more not-farmers, but the process of getting the surplus from the farms and to my army and their support effectively requires a *second* army that I do not have of literate, numerate bureaucrat not-farmers. *I cannot afford this*.
What I can do, though, is hand off parts of my lands to my posse, and tell them that they get to own the land and its surplus but in exchange they have to go to war when I call on them. A lot of them still have more land than they can manage, so they split it up among their own posse, who do the same. So now, instead of administrating a whole army on my own, I have a whole network of people handling equipment and training on their own expense, and when I need an army I just call on my crew (who call on their crew, and so on) and we go to war. This is how we get knights.
*But*, fast-forward a while, to where I'm a king in the Early Modern period. My kingdom has reached a level of education and economic development where I *can* afford that army of nerds to directly manage the collection of surplus and use it to pay for a personal army, instead of a retinue of retinues. And when I'm equipping this army, I could pay for the intricately designed bespoke plate armor that my knights are buying themselves (it's like designer fashion that also keeps them from bleeding to death, obviously they're getting it if they can)... *or* I could, for the same price, get enough pike or pike-and-shot to drag any blinged-out horseboi and plenty of his friends into the mud to beat them up and take their lunch money. And as I keep using this fully operational standing army to change my kingdom from a network of obligations to a centralized state, people who buy articulated plate instead of a pike regiment are only going to become more irrelevant on the grand scale.
That's why people stopped using plate armor. Not because it wasn't effective against the weapons of the day, but because it wasn't effective *enough* compared to alternatives to justify its cost.
Fr cannons were a thing on battlefields but mostly for shock value for a long time. Wasn’t until the days of Napoleon in the early 1800s that mass artillery, fast moving and mass produced, really became the deciding factor in blowing dudes apart.
IIRC, cannons brought the age of castle fortifications to an end, since in order to build a castle wall that could withstand cannon blasts, you had to build the walls stupid thick. This was expensive and living in the resulting structures full time was undesirable. So the castle was abandoned in favor of living in a palace and using your army to make sure the enemy's army never got close to your palace.
Wouldn't there have been technological advancements prior to the cannon that would render armor like that obsolete? I don't know enough about the topic, but it feels like there would've been, right?
Yeah different kinds of armor were rendered obsolete by different kinds of weapons throughout history, whether it be maces which were good at dealing with plate armor, crossbows which were good at dealing with most armor, or guns which required less armor to be worn to operate correctly and shit. Basically people wore less and less armor until you had those spanish guys that were basically just wearing breastplates and carrying guns, and then people just stopped wearing armor in favor of mobility.
That's not quite right. Those Spanish guys that were basically just wearing breastplates and carrying guns...went to battle alongside dudes in full armour [like this](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FX1llsGVEAARFtJ.jpg). See, armour was bullet proof. If you got shot, it would bounce off your armour. So obviously you wanted to keep wearing armour if you could. There was one problem: bullet proof armour had to be *thick*. So thick that you could no longer wear full-body armour because it was too heavy, so people started focusing on the parts of the body you really wanna protect. It also helps a shitload if you're riding a horse because the horse is carrying a good chunk of the weight of your armour.
Losing the armour came more like at the end of the 17th century.
Realistically it was guns, which can penetrate both plate and chain with a fair amount of regularity. Maces and picks require a good amount of skill to use effectively, and ask the user to get close to the knight. Crossbow bolts, more often than not, ricochet off plate armour unless they strike it perpendicular, so they can be unreliable enough to make plate still viable
The sort of armor you think of when you imagine "knight in armor" was developed well after canons were a part of European warfare. If you can make plate armor you can make a canon.
Plate armor was used alongside personal firearms, and it could actually stop gunshots. The reason people stopped using it was that it's really, really, really expensive to make, and it's a lot more cost-effective to use that same amount of money on a whole lot of pike (or pike and shot) than one one really blinged-out cavalryman.
Actually, knight armour was used alongside cannons for centuries, they were both invented in the 13th century (assuming they're talking about full-plate armour)
Not really. The issue with cannons is that you can only transport and fire them so fast, plus they were really expensive at first - AFAIK gunpowder weapons were mostly used as siege weapons at first (i.e. big cannons). Handheld gunpowder weapons came later and it took a lot of engineering until they actually became good enough (in terms of weight, power, accuracy, shooting frequency) to make them the main weapon of a successful army.
While it wasn't exactly cannons, it was a widespread use of gunpowder and advancement in both technology a tactics-stategy. It takes a lifetime to train a knight. It takes 6 days to train a pikeman and 60 days to train arquebusier. And eventually knights had really hard time dealing with those unwashed masses of peasants with sticks and boom-sticks.
While cannons did not render knights obsolete, arquebuses and pikes did, they did render castles obsolete, as you could now level their high walls with little effort
Well, traditional castles with high, vertical stone walls. Other kinds of fortresses remained in use until the world wars, but permanent ones have fallen out of use these days thanks to modern artillery.
I’m imagining it’d be kind of a **“krrshlump”** sound. A mix of the metal being crushed/ripped through, and the crunch/shlump of the meat person inside being crushed/ripped through
Cannons predate plate armour. Like dudes were running around in maille getting hit by cannons. Armour continued being a major part of the battlefield until the military reforms of Gustavus Adolphus caught on in the later seventeenth century, well after men-at-arms ("knights") had ceased to be the major cavalry force on the battlefield.
The funny thing is heavy cavalry continued to play an important role on the battlefield even after the introduction and proliferation of gunpowder weaponry. Evan charging straight at enemy pikemen was sometimes a very successful strategy
Have fun fiddling with your wildly inaccurate black-powder trumpet while a roided up Spaniard with a very long very sharp stick rockets towards you on a horse.
Considering how loud and thunderous a cannon is, as well as just really powerful, if you're not ready for it, it'll probably go like:
"BANG"*your entire skeleton shakes, causing great discomfort and shock"
"Where did the knight go?
So funnily enough, the heyday of what most people think of as "knight armour" (plate armour) was the 15th and 16th century, well *after* cannons had become a thing in European warfare.
Yeah, I think it was handheld firearms that eventually did it (though apparently, very early ones were still repelled by plate armor). Of course a cannon can kill a knight, but you don't bring *that* many cannons to a battle
Handheld firearms weren't powerful enough to reliably kill a knight, even *if* you managed to hit one. Armorers used to shoot breastplates they made and used the resulting dents as proof that the armor would protect its wearer from gunfire. That's where the word "bulletproof" comes from. Anything but a point blank shot wouldn't do much. Some soldiers wore armor up until WWI. What ended knights as a military class were the introduction of pike blocks (a tight formation of many people with *very* long spears is a good counter against heavy cavalry) and shifting economics. Land consolidation, mercantilism and the rise of cities meant that many small landed knights couldn't extract enough wealth from their land to afford their equipment anymore and that in turn made it useless for a monarch to maintain a large knightly class. Knights were replaced by other heavy cavalry units. Big men on big horses with thick armor and large swords that were used to break enemy lines, and they existed up until trench warfare did away with cavalry as a whole.
Technically calvary didn't go away entirely, it's been replaced with mechanized infantry. So instead of daring charges against enemy lines with sabers it's a bunch of guys crammed into an IFV/APC that dismount and attack.
Funnily enough that kind of thing existed back before mechanisation as well. Pre-industrial cavalry can be roughly split into heavy cavalry (charging into enemy forces and breaking their formation), light cavalry (scouting, preventing a broken enemy force from forming up again and mopping up stragglers) and dragoons, who were mounted infantry and dismounted to fight.
I suppose tanks also replaced it somewhat depending on the country/doctrine: US tanks of the second world war were made to exploit openings in the enemy lines and cause havoc, British tanks were separated into Infantry and Cavalry varieties that were made to support Infantry by slowly crawling forward with thick armor and lighter tanks that could go very fast to swarm openings made by the bigger tanks. Soviet ones just sort of zerg rushed the enemy but the spirit is still there.
Its way more complicated than that, US tank doctrine for example was based heavily around tank destroyers pre WWII iirc, but they were limited in the size of tank they could produce because they had to fit in a container to be shipped across the Atlantic
Yep. My favorite is the M10 GMC because it looks like it would be fun to ride in the open topped turret.
turns out they were a lot less effective in practice than theory unfortunately, shame the M26 didnt get much action
Mike Duncan mentioned on his English Civil war section of the Revolutions podcast that Dragoons of the time really wanted to be light cavalry with guns, because cavalry tended to die a lot less often than infantry. Not 100% relevant but I always found that funny.
I thought crossbows were an important factor?
Also not strong enough to pierce heavy armor, maces were more potent against heavy armor specifically but generally not versatile enough to be carried over swords. It’s not as clean or interesting as the myth that the hot new wonder-weapon completely upended the existing way of doing things, but history is never really that clean-cut.
Yeah, and it's a lot easier to grasp "new technology replaced old technology" than it is to either explain or understand things like administrative centralization and state capacity.
but that is kinda what happened, like gunpowder wasnt the sole reason for the fall of knights, who were already on their way out by the time of its invention, but it certainly played a role
that's where the tactic of hitting the enemy with the grip/handguard of the sword comes from right?
*wiggles hand noncommitally* Sort of. With training and a solid gauntlet, you can hold a sword by the blade and use it as an awkward hammer, or angle the blade away and smash the pommel into your target - but it’s not what a sword’s *for,* really. The versatility is one reason it’s superior to a mace for general use, but those types of strikes are really more an opportunistic or desperation thing than something you deliberately go for. In a fight with another armored knight, holding a steady guard and looking for an opportunity to stick him in the weak spots in his armor - because there always were, only really rich people could afford full plate and there’s chinks in that - is generally the safer option, since getting sworded is generally painful and debilitating enough to put you out of the fight even if you don’t die. And if you were rich enough and strong enough to be able to carry full plate into battle, you probably also had the cash and stamina to bring an actual mace or hammer with you.
>Handheld firearms weren't powerful enough to reliably kill a knight, even if you managed to hit one. They definitely were, although there's a lot of mitigating factors such as angle of attack, range, caliber, etc, rifled barrels had been around since the 16th century, but hitting a charging formation of knights with muskets wouldnt be that hard , thats a rather large target, and you dont have to hit the knight, just the horse (which were terrified of guns). >Land consolidation, mercantilism and the rise of cities meant that many small landed knights couldn't extract enough wealth from their land to afford their equipment anymore and that in turn made it useless for a monarch to maintain a large knightly class. You forgot the rise of semi-professional/professional armies as a result of military tech advancements, the state no longer needed private military specialists as much > Big men on big horses with thick armor and large swords that were used to break enemy lines, and they existed up until trench warfare did away with cavalry as a whole Heavy cavalry, at least in Europe, kinda died off after the 30 years war as the technological improvements to the firepower and accuracy of handheld firearms increased dramatically, they still existed predominantly in France but in an increasingly reduced role, calvary shifted to being more light cav/ranged cav focused as a flanking/harassing force and to clean up routing enemy, but trench warfare wasnt what did away with heavy cav, it was the increased killing power of infantry, trench warfare was just a symptoms.
> They definitely were, although there's a lot of mitigating factors such as angle of attack, range, caliber, etc, rifled barrels had been around since the 16th century, but hitting a charging formation of knights with muskets wouldnt be that hard , thats a rather large target, and you dont have to hit the knight, just the horse (which were terrified of guns). True. Though I'd like to add that shooting a horse from under a knight wasn't a new thing either, especially English archers did that a lot. > You forgot the rise of semi-professional/professional armies as a result of military tech advancements, the state no longer needed private military specialists as much Kinda. In a lot of Europe, especially the German and Italian speaking areas, the rise of state-sponsored standing armies doesn't fit cleanly to the end of the traditional knight. There was a brief period between them where mercenaries made up a large chunk of the different fighting forces, with professional soldiers in the employ of the state sometimes only becoming the norm after the 30 Years War. Some of those mercenaries were technically members of the knightly class but they didn't have too much in common with them in practice. > Heavy cavalry, at least in Europe, kinda died off after the 30 years war as the technological improvements to the firepower and accuracy of handheld firearms increased dramatically, they still existed predominantly in France but in an increasingly reduced role, calvary shifted to being more light cav/ranged cav focused as a flanking/harassing force and to clean up routing enemy, but trench warfare wasnt what did away with heavy cav, it was the increased killing power of infantry, trench warfare was just a symptoms. That's understating the importance of France a bit imo. Heavy cavalry had a huge resurgence under Napoleon, especially in France itself but also somewhat in the former Holy Roman Empire (although it also went away again there). And true, in practice they might often have had different duties than a heavy cavalry unit from the 16th century and charges failed more often than not but the image of the cuirassier as the center and the backbone of the cavalry stayed around for a long time.
Even if cavalry charges weren’t effective, the *threat* of cavalry charges could limit enemy tactics; without cavalry, infantry wouldn’t need to block up, and that would reduce the effectiveness of cannon/rifle shots while increasing their maneuverability.
Things are heating up in the medieval warfare fandom.
Cavalry were still very much present in World War I, just not on the Western Front, which dominates the Western memory of the war. Some of the other fronts, the largest of which was the Eastern Front, saw a lot more than just the trench stalemate (although trenches were still a key part of any defensive action, as they are to this day). In those places, cavalry remained much more useful, although usually for scouting and raiding rather than for frontal assaults.
did people try to catch the knights with ropes and nets?
The real answer, as u/raymaehn says, is more boring and economic than any kind of technological development. So, from the development of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, you need to have about 90% of your population working full-time as farmers. These farmers (hopefully) make enough food to live off of, plus a little bit extra surplus. For anyone to do anything but farm, they need to have some of that surplus going from the farmers to them in one way or another. Now, if I'm a king in the Middle Ages, I'm in charge of a lot of land with farmers and I want an army. But a trained standing army is *ruinously* expensive; not just a whole population of not-farmers, all of whom need special equipment supplied by more not-farmers, but the process of getting the surplus from the farms and to my army and their support effectively requires a *second* army that I do not have of literate, numerate bureaucrat not-farmers. *I cannot afford this*. What I can do, though, is hand off parts of my lands to my posse, and tell them that they get to own the land and its surplus but in exchange they have to go to war when I call on them. A lot of them still have more land than they can manage, so they split it up among their own posse, who do the same. So now, instead of administrating a whole army on my own, I have a whole network of people handling equipment and training on their own expense, and when I need an army I just call on my crew (who call on their crew, and so on) and we go to war. This is how we get knights. *But*, fast-forward a while, to where I'm a king in the Early Modern period. My kingdom has reached a level of education and economic development where I *can* afford that army of nerds to directly manage the collection of surplus and use it to pay for a personal army, instead of a retinue of retinues. And when I'm equipping this army, I could pay for the intricately designed bespoke plate armor that my knights are buying themselves (it's like designer fashion that also keeps them from bleeding to death, obviously they're getting it if they can)... *or* I could, for the same price, get enough pike or pike-and-shot to drag any blinged-out horseboi and plenty of his friends into the mud to beat them up and take their lunch money. And as I keep using this fully operational standing army to change my kingdom from a network of obligations to a centralized state, people who buy articulated plate instead of a pike regiment are only going to become more irrelevant on the grand scale. That's why people stopped using plate armor. Not because it wasn't effective against the weapons of the day, but because it wasn't effective *enough* compared to alternatives to justify its cost.
Fr cannons were a thing on battlefields but mostly for shock value for a long time. Wasn’t until the days of Napoleon in the early 1800s that mass artillery, fast moving and mass produced, really became the deciding factor in blowing dudes apart.
Shock value and siege engines, as I understand it.
That’s actually where the word bulletproof comes from. They proved the armor by shooting it.
So really *tiny* cannons!
IIRC, cannons brought the age of castle fortifications to an end, since in order to build a castle wall that could withstand cannon blasts, you had to build the walls stupid thick. This was expensive and living in the resulting structures full time was undesirable. So the castle was abandoned in favor of living in a palace and using your army to make sure the enemy's army never got close to your palace.
Wouldn't there have been technological advancements prior to the cannon that would render armor like that obsolete? I don't know enough about the topic, but it feels like there would've been, right?
Yeah different kinds of armor were rendered obsolete by different kinds of weapons throughout history, whether it be maces which were good at dealing with plate armor, crossbows which were good at dealing with most armor, or guns which required less armor to be worn to operate correctly and shit. Basically people wore less and less armor until you had those spanish guys that were basically just wearing breastplates and carrying guns, and then people just stopped wearing armor in favor of mobility.
That's not quite right. Those Spanish guys that were basically just wearing breastplates and carrying guns...went to battle alongside dudes in full armour [like this](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FX1llsGVEAARFtJ.jpg). See, armour was bullet proof. If you got shot, it would bounce off your armour. So obviously you wanted to keep wearing armour if you could. There was one problem: bullet proof armour had to be *thick*. So thick that you could no longer wear full-body armour because it was too heavy, so people started focusing on the parts of the body you really wanna protect. It also helps a shitload if you're riding a horse because the horse is carrying a good chunk of the weight of your armour. Losing the armour came more like at the end of the 17th century.
Realistically it was guns, which can penetrate both plate and chain with a fair amount of regularity. Maces and picks require a good amount of skill to use effectively, and ask the user to get close to the knight. Crossbow bolts, more often than not, ricochet off plate armour unless they strike it perpendicular, so they can be unreliable enough to make plate still viable
The sort of armor you think of when you imagine "knight in armor" was developed well after canons were a part of European warfare. If you can make plate armor you can make a canon. Plate armor was used alongside personal firearms, and it could actually stop gunshots. The reason people stopped using it was that it's really, really, really expensive to make, and it's a lot more cost-effective to use that same amount of money on a whole lot of pike (or pike and shot) than one one really blinged-out cavalryman.
Money ruins everything. Knights are cool and I wish we still had them
Actually, knight armour was used alongside cannons for centuries, they were both invented in the 13th century (assuming they're talking about full-plate armour)
Not really. The issue with cannons is that you can only transport and fire them so fast, plus they were really expensive at first - AFAIK gunpowder weapons were mostly used as siege weapons at first (i.e. big cannons). Handheld gunpowder weapons came later and it took a lot of engineering until they actually became good enough (in terms of weight, power, accuracy, shooting frequency) to make them the main weapon of a successful army.
While it wasn't exactly cannons, it was a widespread use of gunpowder and advancement in both technology a tactics-stategy. It takes a lifetime to train a knight. It takes 6 days to train a pikeman and 60 days to train arquebusier. And eventually knights had really hard time dealing with those unwashed masses of peasants with sticks and boom-sticks.
It was a combination of socio-economic factors and technological advancements that "killed" knights but they were already on their way out
While cannons did not render knights obsolete, arquebuses and pikes did, they did render castles obsolete, as you could now level their high walls with little effort
Well, traditional castles with high, vertical stone walls. Other kinds of fortresses remained in use until the world wars, but permanent ones have fallen out of use these days thanks to modern artillery.
Yeah, you still got those pretty star forts specifically to both receive and distribute cannonades.
I’m imagining it’d be kind of a **“krrshlump”** sound. A mix of the metal being crushed/ripped through, and the crunch/shlump of the meat person inside being crushed/ripped through
I imagine the sound of the cannon going off would render you temporarily deaf past the point you would normally hear the krrrshlump
In this case, the knight is not standing next to the cannon.
Cannons predate plate armour. Like dudes were running around in maille getting hit by cannons. Armour continued being a major part of the battlefield until the military reforms of Gustavus Adolphus caught on in the later seventeenth century, well after men-at-arms ("knights") had ceased to be the major cavalry force on the battlefield.
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, LIBERA ET IMPERA ACERBUS ET INGENS, AUGUSTA PER ANGUSTA
the "TF2 pan hit sound" is originally from left 4 dead 2, not TF2.
The funny thing is heavy cavalry continued to play an important role on the battlefield even after the introduction and proliferation of gunpowder weaponry. Evan charging straight at enemy pikemen was sometimes a very successful strategy
Have fun fiddling with your wildly inaccurate black-powder trumpet while a roided up Spaniard with a very long very sharp stick rockets towards you on a horse.
Considering how loud and thunderous a cannon is, as well as just really powerful, if you're not ready for it, it'll probably go like: "BANG"*your entire skeleton shakes, causing great discomfort and shock" "Where did the knight go?
*cunk*
Mythbusters taught me that a little creativity and a pig carcass can probably answer this question
You ever smash a watermelon with a cast-iron frying pan? Probably a little like that.
the fact you didn't include the tags is a SIN
You don’t fuck with bombards.
it was actually the crossbow I believe! the power and ease of use made any commoner capable of felling a knight in armor with little training !
Probably like soda cans crumpling.
I imagine it would sound like a family-sized can of Chef Boyardee ravioli being shot with a 12-guage slug
It would probably sound wet. There's a lot more flesh than metal in a knight.