[totally anecdotal story and hijack]
In our school’s senior Physics class, the students, in pairs, have to build a trebuchet and launch a ping pong ball. The formula for score is Weight of Projectile (a constant) x Time all over Length of Arm. My two friends, being clever guys, rigged up a spoon on a brick (pretty much) and just dropped a rock onto one end of the spoon to launch the pingpong ball. Since their arm was about .08 of a metre long, they won. The teacher gave them 100% for their ingenuity :).
[/totally anecdotal story and hijack]
I don’t think so. That was a mine. The wierd thing was that there were a bunch of guys standing around it with torches and, from the Saruman/Grima scene, we know that you can set it off with normal flame. So why have the Olympic torch thing? (I know, it looked good 
).
Been watchin’ those Rutger Hauer movies again’ aint’cha? 
It will come as a surprise to no one that www.trebuchet.com exists, complete with a sister site www.mangonel.com. Trebuchet.com includes a $49 kit for building your own pvc pipe trebuchet; Mangonel.com has kits for scorpions, mangonels, and others, as well as videos.
No.
For one thing, if I was in the besieging army, I sure wouldn’t want to be up against the wall like the Orcs were when the guy carrying the bomb came running up next to me. Traditionally, the petard came into play when you were still a good distance from the wall.
From what I understand, you basically organized your cavalry for a charge at the gate. Then you’d get several petards ready, and look for crazy volunteers. They didn’t have to be crazy, either. Offering someone a choice between a pouch of gold or beheading wasn’t unheard of.
You’d have several petards, because you’d either want to be ready to try again if the first one didn’t make it, or you’d want to assault several points on the wall simultaneously, to confuse the defenders.
Yes, everyone lined up on the top of the wall would frantically be shooting arrows and flinging stuff at the petardier, trying to nail him before he got to the wall or gate. For that matter, it wasn’t unheard of to simply open the door and stick him with your sharp object while he was trying to hang the thing on the door… but, then, that left HIM open to simply detonating the thing on the spot, if he knew he was gonna die, and you didn’t kill him quick.
Alternatively, you could simply wait for him to run, then open the door and yank the fuse. This was one of the decisions the petardier had to make when he measured and cut the fuse – long enough to escape, but short enough that the besieged couldn’t defuse the thing.
Yes, it was a cockeyed way to besiege a castle. Makes me think of the “bomb scene” in the old Adam West Batman movie… “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”
I was not aware that trebuchets were built of local materials at the scene of the siege. Hell, where did you FIND local materials of that size, strength, and caliber? Seems like being able to count on that would be sort of iffy. If I knew the besiegers were coming, I’d sure as hell torch the local lumberyards…
It also occurs to me that gunpowder weapons are fun. Blowing stuff up is fun, in ways that an onager or trebuchet just can’t match. Big loud boom. Explosions at the gate. Exploding shells hitting stone walls. Boom! What medieval lord WOULDN’T wanna cannon?
At least, as long as you’re the besieging noble, who doesn’t have to stand next to the actual gun. I understand medieval cannon were prone to bursting…
Cocking a trebuchet wouldn’t have to be that difficult. The counterweight (often a large box of rocks) could be filled after the arm has been cocked. Then you have a bucket brigade of men fill the counterweight box. And after the trebuchet has been used, empty the box before cocking it again. The box wouldn’t have to be completely emptied before cocking, only enough so that your men could raise the counterweight.
Yes, this would be a slow, ardous process, but labor was cheap and seiging took months, if not years.
This is a reminder from the Bard that petards were used in mining castle walls, too. That is, digging tunnels beneath the walls to ensure their collapse.
That would be a bad idea for your accuracy to do it that way. Part of the input to calculations of where the boulder is going to land is exactly how much weight is in the bucket. If your men put an extra few shovel-fulls of dirt in the box, your rock will fly an extra few feet.
Flash-57, you’re absolutely correct about variations in the mass of counter-weight changing the projectile’s range. But since the projectiles themselves were hardly uniform in mass or shape, range was never going to be consistent anyway. Such was the nature of medieval warfare.
But then the gate is no longer useful. If you have some of your soldiers out in the field and some inside the walls, you need a certain amount of flexibility. You need to allow more soldiers out if you succeed in driveng the enemy away from the walls, and and you need a path of retreat for your field soldiers.
I won’t add to the lengthy discussion of catapults and trebuchets. They were quite powerful indeed.
All valid concerns, but all possible to overcome as well. And certainly worth the effort if what you want is your forces storming right over the tops of the walls.
My understanding is that ballistae were mainly used against large targets, such as all of the above plus ships, if you were that close to the water. While I’m certain that they made formidable anti-personnel weapons, I don’t think that was their main purpose.
The key to everything you’re asking about is the fact that technology dictates strategy. The whole idea of besieging the castle in the first place is to render it incapable of supporting your opponents forces. Getting your soldiers on the other side of the wall is the most effective way of achieving that end, so everything revolves around that.
You can either destroy the barrier at its weakest point (battering the gate), destroy the wall (mines, bombs and catapults/tebuchets) or render it ineffective as a barrier (siege towers). You wouldn’t go into battle using one of these technologies unless you had attendant technologies at your disposal to defend them against whatever the enemy had to throw at you.
For instance, if you had catapults, but found yourself unable to pierce the walls or aim effectively enough to smash the gates, and had enough people and materials to put together a siege tower, you might do that, and use your heavy artillery to try and take out, for instance, the ballistae on the turrets, or the apparent point beyond the walls where their catapults seemed to be, so that you could get your siege tower close enough. If the ground were muddy, the moat too wide, or your manpower insufficient, then you simply wouldn’t use siege towers, but might try using miners if you had them on your side.
It seems that practically everyone since the Romans has got the names of these two machines backwards, and it’s obvious if you examine the meaning of the words ‘ballistic’ and ‘catapult’. Ballistae launch things on ballistic arcs, catapults catapult bolts forwards.
I wonder how the names of the machines managed to get switched, yet the words that the machines get their names from did not. After all, we dont put our nukes on “catapulted missiles”.
My only guess is that some historian messed it up a few hundred years ago, and everyone copied him.
Sadly, exploding shells weren’t developed until the end of the 18th century, and didn’t get reliable* until the mid-1800s. Up until then it was just solid balls of stone or cast iron (which could do a hell of a lot of damage).
[sub]*that is, more likely to blow up than not, and usually getting past the muzzle of the gun before exploding.[/sub]
ARGH, I was going to mention that this morning, but I was late for work
I tip my hat to you sir.
Also, as historian James Burke points out, the original cannon were simply repurposed bells loaded with a ball and a lot of gunpowder, and had a tendency to blow apart (before the casting of real cannon became its own art). They were originally used for psychological warfare, because IF the cannon(bell) managed to get off a good shot at your walls before exploding (and that was a big IF), you could really be badly screwed.
The idea of firing an exploding shell came with the mortar, as described by Gunslinger. the historical tour of Fort Ticonderoga in Vermont includes (at least it did 20 years ago) examination of a half a mortar leftover from an unsuccessfully halted failed firing (the other half got blown to the bottom of the adjoining lake). As described to me at the time, the bomb’s fuse was lit and placed in the mortar on top of some powder. If the powder failed to light, the commander would select someone (usually someone unpopular with the rest of the men), to fish his gloved arm down into the mortar to try and pinch off the fuse before it blew…
There’s no way anyone would go to this much effort. It’s not that hard to winch down a treb arm with block and tackle, and it would be a hell of a lot faster than loading and unloading thousands of pounds of counterweight every time.
Or with enough manpower, a traction trebuchet as opposed to a counterweight. At the siege of Lisbon in 1147, two counterweight trebuchets manned by 100 workers apiece delivered about five thousand projectiles in ten hours – or slightly over 4 shots per machine per minute. The University of Toronto mimicked this in April 1991 and demonstrated that such a rate of fire isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Trebuchet balls generally weren’t the “40 pound rocks” hinted at in the OP - they tended to be about 40 to 90 kilograms, and 230kg trebuchet balls (2 meters across!) were excavated at Tlemcen.
Gunpowder artillery, on the other hand, wasn’t a guaranteed blow-the-wall-down weapon either. Emphasis was more on placing the shot on the best possible target than a high rate of fire. William Eldred’s 1646 work The Gunners Glasse recommended no more than 8 rounds per hour (including periodic halts to rest the gun), while the Austrians of the era held their large guns to 50 rounds per day. And even then, to achieve a breach 20-30 yards across, artillerymen budgeted nine to ten thousand shots. While it was an undeniable technological advancement, we should be careful not to overestimate their power.
I highly recommend Fire & Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860 for further reading.
Indeed. I think the big advantage of gunpowder siege weapons was range and portability, not power. Fire them too quickly and they overheat and blow up. Oops. And they never did fire as large projectiles as the big trebs, though I’d imagine at the higher speeds there would have been more kinetic energy even with the smaller projectiles.
Traction trebs are pretty nifty. They seem to have potential for serious range and rate of fire, though you’d need a lot of pullers to launch anything very big. Ideal for naval action, I should think, or for counter-battery fire - lob gobs of burning pitch at the counterweight treb being built on your doorstep, etc.
Remember that most of Europe was still heavily forested during this period, so finding suitable trees wasn’t likely to be a problem. Another source of materials was nearby houses and other buildings - the post and beam construction methods meant that these were a good source of ready-cut and well seasoned wood for siege engine construction. The only bits normally carried to the site by the besiegers were the metal fittings needed, and even these could be made on the spot by a competent blacksmith.
Eventually some bright lad discovered that the flame of the burning propellant charge would light the fuse quite well as the mortar was fired, eliminating this particular little problem, much to the relief of artillerymen of the period.
Of course, the defender would have trebs, too. And his would be permanent structures and positioned higher, both of which would give the defender a range advantage, presuming equal levels of technology.
As for being easy to assemble, a common competition at Boy Scout camps is “Coracles and Catapults”. One group of boys builds catapults of whatever type (usually trebuchets) from wooden poles and ropes, while another builds rafts from straw and old tents, and they then launch into the lake and race while the catapults try to sink the coracles. Both groups are given only an hour to build their contraptions, and I’ve yet to see one in such a competition that couldn’t hurl a water balloon fifty yards. If that’s what a group of teenagers with no formal training can make out of inch diameter poles in an hour, imagine what a trained engineer with a crew of hundreds and a forest at his disposal could do in a day.
And on the terminology, all types of medæval missile seige weapons catapulted projectiles on a ballistic arc. “Catapult” and “ballista” are both general terms. A catapult with two horizontal torsion arms is a scorpion, a catapult with one vertical torsion arm is an onager, and a catapult with a vertical gravity-driven arm is a trebuchet.
I’d imagine that one gets it from the same place they got the stuff to build the town/castles from. Recall that in medieval times, there was more forested areas and typically denser forests than today.
Didn’t the Romans use Ballistae against massed troops? Gratned if you’re a beseiger, you can’t really use it for this.