One of the real difficulties in answering high-level questions in medieval military history – for example assessing leadership quality, determining true logistic capacity, determining the effectiveness of any particular “arm” of a military force – is that we are frequently left with nothing but informed conjecture regarding physical realities on the ground. It is impossible to answer “bird's-eye-view” questions without understanding the “worm's-eye-view” realities that determine why one formation was used and not another, or why an event in a chronicle might be perfectly straightforward, yet sound nonsensical or else reeking of literary convention when read without contextual information taken for granted by the author. Without that context to provide illumination, one is left with Ouroboros-like, unfalsifiable arguments regarding the trustworthiness of any given source when compared to others with which it seems to disagree. It was at precisely such a point of ignorance that a Hungarian colleague and I decided that it was necessary to perform ballistic tests against mail in order to solve an otherwise intractable problem concerning medieval archery: how effective could bowmen be against armored men at arms, particularly in the case of mail?

In particular, working in the Hungarian context, correctly stereotyped as something between East and West, we were curious as to why archers seem to have been so effective in some contexts, and not others.