Consider three regions of the world, east Asia, Europe, and West Asia. All three have faced a common threat, the horse archer. The best solutions, prior to gunpowder, for dealing with horse archers are the foot archer, the heavy lancer, and the heavy horse archer.
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In Asia warfare develops around the horse archer, and large masses of light foot archers. The Eastern Romans used the cataphract for example, and the Turks used Saphias on the flanks of janissary archers.
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Naturally firearms take off in Asia before Europe, it's better then a bow, it's cheaper, and horse archers are lightly armoured on small horses. They get wrecked by guns.
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But in Europe warfare develops around the heavy lancer, great against horse archers. The mongols were stopped in Hungary, and smaller Frankish forces carved out crusader states against larger horse archer armies.
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European armor, especially plate armour, is amazing. The armour of a cuirasser could stand up against pistol and arquebus fire. Unsurprisingly firearms are slow to take off in Europe.
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But it can still destroy armour. An arquebus will rip through asian lamellar armour, so it takes off quickly in Asia but stagnated, their is no point in making it stronger. In Europe however it takes significant firepower to overcome heavy armour and large horses.
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So at first firearms are a bit pointless in Europe, but if you have enough of them they work pretty well, just ask the Hungarians and Czechs. But still they need plenty of protection, especially against large units of heavy cavalry.
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So you need to make more powerful muskets, to overwhelm the armour, fortunatly as armour gets thicker it must cover less of the body, so eventually the cuirasser only wears an especially thick back and front plate.
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But at this point the infantry are nearly completely armed with powerful muskets designed to rip through that armour, with some pikes as just in case.
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Then the pike is replaced by the bayonet, which wonderfully gives even more firepower to hold off heavy cavalry and other large blocks of muskets. Then these armies meet Asian armies which did not have this selection pressure to develop better firearms.
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So asian armies of pike, horse archers and arquebus get annihilated by intense musket fire, which was developed to beat a powerful enemy they never met. Their way was good enough to fight horse archers, but not good enough for Europeans.
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