History books tell me that the advent of gunpowder and cannons brought the decline/end of castles, because cannon could be used to blast holes in castle walls. However, before cannons were used, I know that there were many different kinds of engines of war used to breach a castle’s defenses. But because it seems like cannons were the major technological turning point, I have to assume that pre-gunpowder devices must have been relatively poor at breaching walls.
Battering rams- I’m not quite sure how exactly these were effective. I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that while the battering ram itself may not be particularly strong/sophisticated, the gate it was attacking, and more importantly, its hinges were even less so. Because off-hand, I can think of a lot of ways to defeat a battering ram- shoring up the other end of the gate with soil/rocks/debris to absorb the shock of the ram, or butressing the door, focusing on the point of where the ram is impacting the gate (which shouldn’t be too hard to estimate).
Catapults- When I was younger, I used to visualize catapults as house-sized contraptions which flung beachball-sized boulders. I’m pretty sure they are much smaller, limited to the strength of the materials at hand, time restrictions, and logistics. I have heard of stone-throwing devices that could hurl 40 pound stones. Even still, against a stone wall, a 40 pound rock doesn’t sound like its going to do much damage. And unless these things had decent range, I don’t see whats stopping the defenders from hurling rocks/burning arrows/etc back to destroy the engine. The only way I see this working is if the attackers had a lot of them firing at a concentrated area.
**Seige towers-**I’ve heard these were built to impressive sizes but the problem with having a big tower is how could they get it to the wall quickly? Also if it was big and heavy they’d probably need to make sure the ground it was on was firm enough. With moats and trenches and other tricky stuff the defenders could have waiting these seems like a frustrating task, not to mention the thing must be terribly ponderous and little more than a giant tinderbox…
Ballistae- My main question is, do crossbow-type weapons scale up? In other words, given the same general types of materials (timber and iron) will a bigger crossbow have a proportionally increased range/hitting power? Could a ballista be used to impale several soldiers in a massed formation? Because if they don’t, it seems like man-portable crossbows are a much better deal; they’d be easier to aim and you could probably make more of them.
No, not those that explode. Actual mines, like a coal mine. The besieging force would dig a mine to the city wall, then put a lot of wood at the end and set fire to it. The mine would collapse, taking the city wall with it. Then it was forward into the breech.
Oh, I’m aware that sappers would undermine walls, but I was speaking specifically of *seige engines. * I would consider mining a tactic. And couldn’t castle designers counter the risk of mining by building deep foundations, or building on places where digging wouldn’t be practical?
In age of empires 2 they are the best seige weapons you can find are the tresbuckets, they have an attack of 200 if that helps.
a heavy scorpion (the cross bow thing) has an attack of 16
a seige ram has an attack of 4, but it will also damage adjasent walls
Siege Onager (catapult basically) has an attack of 50
And finally a Bombard cannon has an attack of 40.
So you see tresbuchets are much more powerful than anything else. Even a gun powder cannon. We can assume from the large attack of the Tresbucket that non gunpower weapons were exceptional at breaching castle walls.
Well some of these siege weapons were likely more effective as psychological weapons of war, but that’s not to say that they were little effective in a more practical way.
Imagine being in a castle constantly pounded on by stone weighing hundreds of pounds. Never knowing when the next one will land. It’s demoralizing to the troops garriosoned inside.
Trebuchets, according to contemporary texts, were quite effective against castle walls, though it would have likely taken constant bombardment of a single area to cause significant structural damage.
The Siege tower, when it was possible to use it, was also quite effective. There is one account of Saladin’s men in the crusades holed up in a walled city besieged by Richard the Lion Heart being shaken to the core at the sight of these things crawling with soldiers comeing closer and closer.
Gunpoder weapons were bad for castles because non gun powerder weapons need skilled people to fire and maintain.
Where as fire arms . . . any yahoo (for real word example see any of the Southern United States) can shoot a gun, even a big one, so armys could use many of these seige weapons, because they were cheaper to use. Don;t need to pay an inbread hick as much as a skilled catapult operator; more people can now capture castles then before.
Trebuchets, in particular, seem to fascinate people, and there have been many modern reconstructions of them. A large trebuchet is impressive:
They arced quite a bit. You may calculate the kinetic energy possessed by a 400 pound projectile which achieves a few hundred feet at the top of its arc yourself.
The one NOVA built demonstrated that they could shatter castle walls with it quite handily.
The “piano flinging” scene in the tv show “Northern Exposure” was a real trebuchet flinging a real piano. From a description of shooting the episodes by the guy who built the thing:
Y’see, onagers, siege towers, battering rams, and ghod help us, trebuchets… all required a substantial investment in your supply train. A good sized trebuchet could reduce a castle to rubble, sure… but not quickly, and they were a tremendous pain in the bahonkus to transport and assemble. Furthermore, once Lord Dunderhead saw a trebuchet going up, he had quite an incentive to put together a nasty sally force to go out there and torch the thing, no?
On the other hand, we have the petard: a keg of gunpowder on a rope, with a length of slow match. All you need is one insane volunteer to run like mad, straight up to the main gates, packin’ the thing and another length of LIT match. He spikes the thing to the door, measures a length of fuse, cuts it, lights it, and runs like a deadbeat dad on Father’s day, hoping the whole time that the local lords haven’t heard of “murder holes.”
Far cheaper. Far easier to transport. Far quicker to use. Much more workable with the “element of surprise,” since anyone with eyes can see a trebuchet coming, or even an onager, and certainly a siege tower… but who can set up a defense in ten seconds against a madman with a keg of gunpowder?
Siege engines just couldn’t compete. A medieval mortar could do as much damage as any trebuchet, and took about as much trouble to transport, and far less time to set up.
Probably it isn’t. Castle walls could be several meters thick. Breaking a useful breach into that by huling stones takes a lot of effort. However as soon as you hurl rocks over the wall you have a real chance of causing severe damage to roofs and other relatively fragile structures. Especially behind city walls you can hit ordinary houses. If you combine this with burning projectiles you can cause real trouble to the defenders.
I’m sorry, you can’t really assume much from a video game, expecially one like Age of empires 2.
Wrong. Seige engines were typically built by engineers out of local materials and run mostly by peasents. They were not maintained after battles, in fact most were not even mobile.
Cannons on the other hand were immensely expensive and while they required less people to operate they required supplies of gunpowder and horses and such to transport them around. So you got it pretty much backwards.
They used them anyway becase they were ALOT more powerful and could launch projectiles much farther. A trebuchet could launch a rock some 200 - 300 meters while a cannon could launch a cannonball some 700 meters. Its not so much that siege engines were ‘relatively poor’ at smashing castle walls as much as castles were built around resisting them and cannons were so much better.
Considering the source of the word petard do you mean: “Into the breeches?” Otherwise I’m with Hal and going into the breach.
I think yabob’s got the right idea, at least for the link. I saw the show and was impressed that one of the criteria was for building the trebuchet with a greater range than an archer’s. Seriously demoralizing is the idea of watching the attackers having tea and petit fours while knocking down your walls.
I’m not, however, going to argue that gunpowder based weaponry wasn’t superior when it got invented. Only that a trebuchet could pack a rather impressive wallop, which addresses the OP’s question about the power of medieval siege weaponry. Other posters remarks about how cumbersome and slow they were to set up and operate are quite to the point. Note, for instance, that modern reconstructions are generally cocked using a vehicle of some type. Cocking a trebuchet with a 6 ton weight on it had to be one hell of chore using muscle power.
You had to cock the thing. A trebuchet derives its flinging energy from a very large suspended counterweight. You had to get that energy into the system by drawing the throwing end of the boom back down to raise the counterweight. The NX trebuchet was cocked with a bulldozer. The Nova guys used their work crew hauling on ropes. Their description:
My guess is that the trebucheries used a sort of reverse pliers type grip to allow an over-center grip on the release point and still give them the leverage they needed to release it. And wasn’t that a nasty sentence.
It brings to mind a Junkyard Wars episode, or something of that ilk, that tried the same shit with a guillotine realease. They were going to chop a car in two and were stymied when they couldn’t pull the pin that bore the full weight of their multi-ton car chopper.
This one sentence description doesn’t do the thing justice. They were launching boulders quite some distance, and putting massive holes in a 6’ thick stone wall. The wall was built as a typical castle wall, and had a wooden structure on top to protect archers from incoming arrows. One of the “misses” as they were aiming managed to take out most of the wooden structure in one fell swoop.
It was a very impressive display of just how powerful these ancient machines were.
Junkyard Wars has had several episodes with varying types of seige machines. I vaguely recall them launching a washing machine a fair distance with a trebuchet in one episode. More commonly, they launched something much smaller (and less deadly, especially if something goes wrong) like pumpkins and footballs. I get the impression that if you know what you are doing, a trebuchet is surprisingly easy to build out of fairly common materials.
I built one out of a cardboard box once, using a pill bottle full of pennies for a counterweight. It lobbed little balls of foil about 20’. I’ve always meant to build a serious one from scrap iron out on the farm, but haven’t ever gotten around to it.
Don’t forget that one of the other uses of catapults and trebuchets was to launch dead bodies into the beseiged target. Nothing like letting disease do your work for you.
