Medieval Research: Titanic Trebuchets

I am a lover of all things medieval.

Uh, let me rephrase that for those people who tend to take things too literally. There are certain things about the medieval times that I do NOT like. Plague, rats, high taxes, the rampant lack of hygiene and the overall negative attitude towards people like me who didn’t ride or swing swords around (i.e., nerds). Those things sort of turn me off.

Also the fact that ladies were considered weak and helpless and et cetera. Not that I’m only saying this because I’m afraid of getting yelled at by certain people, no. It sucks that ladies were not respected back then. Just saying.

But other stuff you can’t help loving. The flashing blades, the sound of the trumpets, the pounding hoof beats of a thousand horsemen charging down on a host of men in steel. The drawing of a bowstring, the hum of arrows.

And the weapons of siege.

You are no true fantasy or medieval fan if you have sat through a scene in any movie where there’s an army trying to take a castle, and not loved it. Seriously. What’s not to love?

And one thing the Hobbit movie trilogy will never have over the original Lord of the Rings; the sieges of Helm’s Deep in “The Two Towers” and of Minas Tirith in “The Return of The King,”

I had always loved watching scenes like that, but those particular ones did it for me. True, there weren’t any catapults in the second movie, but the siege of Minas Tirith more than made up for it. That’s when I realized that I needed to know more about them.

Do I sound like I’m exaggerating? See for yourself.

           

And then there was this one, and it pretty much took the cake.

You have to admit, Peter Jackson does a mean catapult close-up.

There were a lot of ways available to anyone who wanted to take down a castle in the good old days. There was the simple storming in with the old fashioned army, but that could backfire tremendously if the walls were too high. The next thing available were ladders, which were pretty flimsy but did the trick if employed properly.

But by far, the coolest way was to bring up your catapults, knock down those walls, and show those defenders who was boss.

And the coolest siege engine by far was the trebuchet.

Pretty much most people would shrug and go, “Look, it flings rocks. That’s a catapult. Really, what’s the difference?”

Let me tell you, there is a HUGE difference. This is a catapult. Or mangonel, of you want to be accurate.

Notice the spoon like resemblance; most depictions of this medieval massacre device show it with a bowl shaped bucket at the end of the arm.

            Makes sense. This would probably allow it to load up large rocks to break up a wall, or many smaller ones to pepper the opposition.

            The problem, though, is that it wouldn’t have any real power behind the throw, nor much range. So if you really needed it to work, you would have to move it as close as possible to the target you need flattened.

Imagine hauling that great big piece of equipment into place, and then watch as one flaming arrow turns it to cinders. Very few things come close to heartbreaking than that. Actual heartbreak might even be close enough.

That's the catapult. Here, I give you the trebuchet (Tre-boo-SHAY)

The first thing you notice when you look at them; they are taller. Much, much taller. The height is pretty much part of the essential difference between catapults and trebuchets, besides making it look way cooler, that is. 

Catapults were spring driven. In terms you and I can understand, they stored energy through tension, like when you pull on a bowstring, or torsion, where they twisted these thick cords around a wooden frame. Pretty much sixth grade science textbook on kinetic energy. Release the cords, arm whips forward, and there you go, flattened knights.

Trebuchets used something called counterpoise, or simply, a counterweight system for the ones not bothered to walk around with a dictionary in their pockets. Besides being much more awesome, it was also a lot more effective. It was just a heavy weight on one end of a really long arm, with a sling on the other end. 

             Drop the weight, arm whips up, sling opens, and not only do you get your flattened knights, you also receive a crumbled wall and a deep sense of accomplishment as a bonus.

That picture probably made it a lot easier to understand than I did.

The one end of the sling was attached to the peg at the end of the arm. As you can see above, when the arm reaches the end of the arc, the end of the sling falls off the peg, and adds a slingshot effect to the projectile (probably why it’s called a sling in the first place).

This grants the trebuchet much more power, accuracy and range than any catapult before it. This bad boy was THE go-to siege weapon of the day, and with good reason. Power like that, a good hit could bring the entire bottom part of a wall down. One breach would be good enough for you to start roaring and running in.

              And another thing; trebuchets had such immense range, they could be set up as far away from the target as needed. And if you think about the physics, the greater the distance, the more intense the force of the blow. The range factor was one heck of a weakness, though; catapults could be used to fire at enemy advancing on them. Trebuchets, on the other hand, would be helpless if the foe got too close. Nothing is perfect, I guess.

I found this little titbit on YouTube from the movie The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Luc Besson, 1999). Kind of hard not to love it

At the risk of turning this even more into a boring history lesson, catapults go back to ancient times, though it gets rather hazy where they turned up first. They might have originally been invented by the Greeks, like almost everything medieval that you hear about. They later were adopted by the Romans, like everything else they took from the Greeks because they were too lazy to come up with their own stuff.

  

Eventually, they branched out into different weapons. Namely, the ballista (plural, ballistae), the onager, and the mangonel. 

Trebuchets, on the other hand, are much more recent; relatively speaking. Records say they turned up somewhere around the Middle Ages; invented by the Chinese and then perfected by the Arabs during the Crusades. Unfortunately for them, it turns out that soon after the trebuchets were invented, gunpower was, too. The olden siege weapons lasted about two centuries more, though.

On a final note, it wasn’t always rubble, greek fire, or arrows that catapults and trebuchets used as ammo. You could call them the world’s first bio weapons as well; they could kick start and spread disease among enemy ranks far too easily. All you had to do was find a dead cow or a rotting corpse and lob it over the walls. With closed walls, dwindling food and cramped quarters, disease thrived among defenders of a stronghold under siege. Well, the plague did love those times, and people did love the plague... at least when it wasn't them having it.

And to swiftly gloss over that bit of unsavory information, here’s something else I found online that I thought was totally awesome:

I know what I want for Christmas

All thanks to Wikipedia and YouTube. Also, footage from Lord if the Rings Return of the King