Pt8
There is a good example of a traction-trebuchet at Caerphilly castle, which seems to approximate in size those illustrated in the Maciejowski Bible and the work of Peter of Eboli: it throws a 15kg ball about 120m. It would have taken a long time to demolish stonework and was probably at its most effective against the fighting top of a wall or tower, the merlons, walkways, machicolations and hoardings that were so much more vulnerable. This would have shortened its range to 50–60m, although mounting it on a tower or a mound, as Edward I did at Edinburgh, would increase this. But machines were always very vulnerable to a sudden sally and had to be protected carefully: at the siege of Acre, Philip of France failed to do this and his artillery was burned. At the siege of Jacob’s Ford, Saladin sent his men to find vine poles to set around his siege engines.
Of course, the effectiveness of lever-artillery could be enhanced by continuous use and/or deployment of large numbers of machines. At Rouen in 1174, batteries of machines were kept going in eight-hour shifts. Uninterrupted action by massed forces of large machines would surely have smashed masonry in time, but the conditions in which large numbers of such machines could be gathered and operated were relatively rare, and before the end of the twelfth century there is little evidence of artillery smashing the main masses of castles and walled cities. Moreover, defenders could make very good use of traction-trebuchets which, if they were mounted on towers, could certainly out range attacking machines.
In sieges in the Holy Land, siege-towers were the most important engines of assault. At Jerusalem in 1099, the defenders mustered 14 missile-throwers and concentrated nine of them against the tower of the Count of Toulouse, which was severely damaged. At Tyre in 1124, an Armenian artillery expert was brought in to direct counter-fire at the defenders’ machines. At Milan in 1158, Barbarossa’s troops seized the Roman arch and mounted a traction-trebuchet on it, but the defenders replied with two machines of their own, firing from the walls, and put this out of action.
Accounts of late twelfth-century sieges do not suggest that siege-warfare had undergone any considerable change. On 26 July 1188, Saladin and his son al-Malik al Zahir besieged Saône. The Muslim army divided into two. Saladin attacked the east wall from across the great rock-cut ditch with four stone-throwers, causing damage at the northeast corner, where signs of repair are still evident. Al-Zahir’s forces established themselves by the northern wall of the castle-town, where they set up two siege engines, almost certainly at the spot where the walls follow the clifftop and leave a roughly triangular and relatively flat piece of land undefended. On 29 July, al-Zahir’s forces made a breach and followed it up with a sudden assault, surprising the defenders and pouring into the town and the main fortress. The garrison fled to the great towers and negotiated terms of surrender.
The impact on the walls of the battering by a relatively small number of engines working over only two days is interesting, but it must be remembered that there was no counter-fire from within the castle. The main cause of the fall of Saône was simply that its garrison was hopelessly outnumbered, cut off from all hope of aid, and subjected to a two-pronged attack by Saladin’s huge army, which divided their forces.
Again, at the siege of Acre we hear of severe damage being inflicted upon the walls of the city. Roger of Hovenden reports an unsuccessful attack made into a breach created by French engines, while Alberic Clement lost his life in another; although, interestingly, in this case only a part of the wall had fallen and the attackers had to carry in siege-ladders. Richard’s men broke down a tower, but the rock-thrower seems to have supplemented mining, and this reminds us that, at the siege of Château Gaillard, Philip Augustus used a large traction-trebuchet to demolish the inner gate only after it had been undermined.
The garrison of Acre were well supplied with engines of their own and destroyed the French traction-trebuchet, “Malvoisin”. Their chief weapon against assault seems to have been “Greek Fire”, brought to them by a Damascene coppersmith, which at least sometimes was projected by artillery. Descriptions of the damage inflicted suggest that it was largely on the walkways and that the walls were intact: a petraria built by the crusaders damaged part of a tower by shaking down two poles’ length of its wall. This probably means a part of the walkway wall rather than the main structure. Moreover, Acre was besieged for a very long time and attacked by many methods – including mining, which may well have done much of the damage.
