![]() The origins of European volley fire date back to the 1590s, but no western army, with the possible exception of the Dutch in 1600, was able to use this tactic in action until the 1620s. Keywords Japan-firearms-handgun-harquebus-Nagashino The conventional view of the process whereby hand-held firearms were developed and disseminated throughout Japan is that it followed a straightforward path of enthusiastically adopting, adapting and improving the revolutionary new weapons, for which two particular events have always been regarded © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 |Īccording to proponents of the “Military Revolution” theory, musketry volley fire was among the military innovations that fundamentally altered early modern field warfare. As for their impact, until the battle of Nagashino in 1575 all the actions involving firearms took place at defended positions with almost no mention of guns being used during open battles. The situation is however complicated by the nomenclature used for the guns themselves, the projectiles, and even the nature of the wounds they caused. In many cases firearms were tried by Japan's rival daimyo (lords) and then either neglected or used ineffectively, a hit-and-miss approach that can even be identified in the person of Oda Nobunaga, the man who is usually credited with Japan's military revolution. This paper demonstrates that the procedure was instead both haphazard and idiosyncratic. The deployment and use of European harquebuses following their introduction to Japan in 1543 is conventionally regarded as having followed a straightforward path of enthusiastic adoption, wherein the Japanese adapted and improved the revolutionary new weapons.
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