MUSKETS – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of Muskets – Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

As we saw in last week’s post, matchlock muskets were large, rather clumsy guns, slow to load, and pretty much useless in wet weather. Despite this, they gradually displaced other projectile weapons like the bow and crossbow. Two main reasons account for this:

• They packed a serious punch. The lead balls they fired were anything up to ¾ of an inch (1.9 centimeters) in diameter. When one of those smacked into a human body, it caused major damage. Men mostly died from blood loss when struck an an arrow; they died of traumatic shock when struck by a musket ball.
• When fired in volleys on a battlefield, the effect of the matchlock musket was devastating. A rank of men in front would all fire together and then kneel to reload. A second rank would then fire and reload. A third rank would then fire and reload. Meanwhile, the first rank was ready to fire again. Employed like this, a squad of disciplined musketeers could keep up a withering, continuous fire, rather like the human version of a machine gun.

Matchlocks had other things to recommend them besides their firepower.

They were relatively easy to use. Before the use of guns, the bow—the longbow and the crossbow—were the only projectile weapons commonly in use. They could be very effective, but they required considerable practice and training, especially the longbow. To wield a longbow effectively, an archer needed to train continuously from a young age. Matchlocks required no such lengthy training. After a few months of drill, pretty much anybody could be taught to use one.

Matchlocks could also be effectively fired from a prone position and through narrow loopholes in protective walls, and a musketeer could carry more ammunition with him that an archer could.

All of this made matchlocks—and after them, flintlocks—the weapon of choice for the military.

They were big, unwieldy things, though. As the decades passed, matchlocks became smaller and lighter. The matchlocks pictured in last week’s post were from the sixteenth century. By the 1620s and 1630s, newer, slimmer versions were becoming common, light enough so that they did not require a rest to support them when firing.

Like everybody else of the time, Barbary corsairs used matchlocks.

We have to make some careful distinctions here, though. Barbary corsairs were not a homogenous group, and the crew aboard a corsair ship didn’t just consist of ‘corsairs.’ There were renegades, that is Europeans who had converted to Islam and become corsairs (many of the captains and officers were renegades). There were indigenous North Africans. There were Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity but had then been expelled from Spain anyway and had settled in North Africa). There were slaves (mostly captured European seamen who were employed to sail the ships). There were also janissaries. Janissaries were professional soldiers. They formed a standard part of the crews of corsair ships from the Ottoman regencies in North Africa: Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers.

Among other things, janissaries were renowned as musketeers.

The first post in this series about musket contained a description of the attack on the island of Heimaey by corsairs from Algiers. Here is part of that description:

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Without ropes, they [the corsairs] climbed up to the caves where the fishermen keep their fish, a height of no less one hundred fathoms. From those caves, they fetched women and children and made them climb down. Those whom they could not capture without a problem, they shot to death. Some of those whom they shot fell from the caves a hundred fathoms, some sixty, some were left where they had been shot, looking as though they were alive.

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The men doing the shooting here—the very accurate shooting—would have been janissaries using the lighter version of the matchlock.

Below is an image of such a janissary. Notice the smoldering slowmatch in his right hand. Notice, also, how much lighter and slimmer his matchlock musket is than the ones depicted in last week’s post.

Janissaries were brought along as part of the crew aboard corsair ships to serve as marines if fighting should prove necessary. Loading and firing a matchlock on the tossing deck of a ship would have been no easy thing, and not just anybody could do it. The captain didn’t simply issue matchlocks to the crew indiscriminately before a fight and say, “Have at it!” It was the janissaries who wielded the matchlocks. They had the skill and experience to do it—especially with the newer, lighter matchlocks. So it was the janissaries who served as musketeers aboard corsair ships.

In the hands of such men, matchlocks were effective at sea. But they were even more effective on land—as shown by the quote about the attack on Heimaey. The land didn’t heave and lurch under one’s feet, making it easier to fire accurately, and the musketeer didn’t have to worry constantly about a surge of seawater or a chance wave dousing his slowmatch.

Janissaries were effective solders, renowned for the skill with matchlocks. They were also fearsome swordsmen (you can see the curved sword slung at the waist of the janissary in the image above). Perhaps surprisingly, they were also known as skilled bowmen.

Guns replaced bows—but not immediately. The two weapons coexisted side by side for some considerable period of time. Barbary corsairs employed both. Matchlocks provided a punch that a bow couldn’t match. But matchlocks had a slow firing rate, and at sea were at constant risk of being soaked and thereby put out of commission. Bows had a much faster firing rate, and a bow could still function even after it had been drenched by a splash of seawater. Bows could also be used to shoot fire arrows and set enemy ships ablaze.

The image at the top of this post depicts a fleet of Dutch merchantmen being attacked by Barbary corsair galleys. If you look closely at the galley in the foreground, you can see archers shooting at the Dutch ships. Here’s a closeup of the galley’s bow:

In the closeup, you can clearly make out the  archers.

So matchlock muskets—in the hands of the janissaries—were an important part of the Barbary corsair arsenal, but they were not the only projectile weapons. The good old-fashioned bow was still used as well.

It’s hard to know exactly when Barbary corsairs stopped using bows. The image at the top of this post that shows archers in the corsair galley is of a painting that dates from 1670, so if bows were not still being used at that date, at least the memory of their use was still fresh enough in people’s minds that bows were included in the painting.

One last point…

The bows wielded by the corsairs in the galley are shown as being longbows—sometimes referred to as stick bows, since they were made from a single piece—a stick—of wood. North African corsairs wouldn’t have used longbows. They would have used Turkish composite recurve bows. Such bows were considerably shorter than longbows, and instead of being straight, the limbs of the bow were curved at the ends. They were, by all accounts, astonishingly effective weapons.

Perhaps they might make a good topic for a post here one day.