A while ago, I had a conversation with Fishfry online about like objects and personality and whatnot. I was saying that she would be a stiletto (ie, a very long slender dagger). At the time, I couldn’t come up with a cool one that I wanted to be though.

But then I was reminded of a cool fact while reading the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

One of the clearest, classic triumphs of technology over tyranny I see is the invention of the man-portable crossbow. With it, an untrained peasant could now reliably and lethally engage a target out to fifty meters–even if
that target were a mounted, chain-mailed knight. (Unlike the longbow, which, admittedly was more powerful, and could get off more shots per unit time, the crossbow required no formal training to utilize. Whereas the longbow required
elaborate visual, tactile and kinesthetic coordination to achieve any degree of accuracy, the wielder of a crossbow could simply put the weapon to his shoulder, sight along the arrow itself, and be reasonably assured of hitting his tar-get.)

While I don’t know that I agree that it was a “triumph over tyranny,” its certainly very cool. I especially like the whole idea that the crossbow allowed basically untrained peasants to take on heavily armed mounted knights. That’s a very apt image, I think, for how I like to approach things. Here’s another page about crossbows in the medieval period.

The crossbow played an important role in the late Medieval period. The crossbow was really the first hand-held weapon that could be used by an untrained soldier to injure or kill a knight in plate armour. The most powerful crossbows could penetrate armour and kill at 200 yards. Crossbows are easier to aim than longbows because the crossbowman doesn’t have to use a hand to hold the string back while aiming. … On a similar note, a crossbow can be loaded long before the bowman might need to shoot. In this way, the bowman would be able to shoot immediately if surprised. Crossbows require less upper body strength to operate as well. One can use both arms to span (draw back) a crossbow.

Yeah, anyway, I just thought that was cool. It reminds me back when I was in middle school and I was really heavily into reading about European history, especially military history, and the medieval times. Those were certainly the days. But it’s probably for the best that I grew out of it (in some sense) before I ended up as a costumed weirdo working at a Renaissance Faire.