history2

The Romans owed much of their military superiority to armies of skilled archers. At the beginning of the medieval period the Romans were in turn defeated by the more highly skilled archers of the Goths, Huns, and Vandals. The Huns, Seljuq Turks, Mongols, and other nomadic horse archers dominated large parts of Asia for about 15 centuries from the 1st century AD.

English longbowmen achieved glorious military victories in the Hundred Years' War (1357-1453), while on continental Europe the crossbow became widely used, especially in Switzerland, parts of Germany, France, and the Low Countries. Accounts of European travelers during the Renaissance indicate that the bow and arrow was the most important weapon used in the Far East, the Americas, Central Africa, and the Arctic regions.

In Europe the bow and arrow were displaced by firearms as a military weapon in the 16th century. By the time the Spanish Armada attempted to invade England in 1588, an English county troop levy consisted of one-third bowmen to two-thirds soldiers with guns, and by century's end the bow had been almost abandoned as a weapon. Nevertheless, peoples of the Far East employed archers in warfare as recently as the 19th century, and the use of the bow and arrow in hunting and intertribal fighting continues in central Africa and South America up to the present day.