Time to talk about siege warfare! This includes, but is not limited to: Battering rams, trebuchet, catapults, and ballista.
Siege weapons are big. Some are stationary, others mobile. Some are cheap, some are expensive. At any rate, they all share a similar purpose: Assaulting castles/forts. The very first siege weapons were literally roofs on wheels. They were designed to give light soldiers cover from archers, allowing them to get close to castle walls and scale them with ladders. Later on came battering rams, structures of wood the size of an apartment, with a tree log suspended by ropes in the center. Soldier would wheel the vehicle to the castle doors, then push the log back, before letting it go. This allowed soldiers to utilize multi-ton tree trunks to break down castle doors.
In later times, people invented the catapult, a rudimentary machine that could fling small boulders hundreds of feet. Also, there were ballista, basically huge crossbows that fired spears. These were more for infantry combat then actually taking down walls, but they’re still pretty cool.
A more advanced catapult-type weapon, the trebuchet, could throw larger boulders farther distances, and with a lot more force. Weapons like these took many men to operate, and if they failed it could be catastrophic, with logs and rocks flying all around just because one rope snapped. They were also fairly easy to disarm, because the loss of one man could stop the entire firing process.
And of course we can’t forget the cannon. These were smaller, cheaper, easier to build, and could outdo a trebuchet’s power tenfold. Cannons were constructed of a large iron cylinder, filled with gunpowder and a large iron sphere, sometimes as big as 20 inches in diameter! Weapons like these made catapults and trebuchets obsolete, although they might still be used in case of an iron shortage.
Next week I will go over the evolution of ships, from wooden ones to iron ones, even cotton-clad ships used by the South in the American Civil War.
The Wooshing King 