hese and other improvements in castle defenses made it considerably
harder for an enemy force to capture a large stone castle. Still, many
medieval European fortresses did fall, mainly because the besiegers had
a wide array of lethal military tools at their disposal. he largest, most
imposing, and by far most costly was the siege tower. Because it was
very expensive and time-consuming to move over long distances, it was
nearly always constructed from timber and other materials lying close to
the castle. Hindley describes these formidable contraptions, frequently
referred to as “belfries,” and tells how they carried soldiers up to and over
a fortress’s walls:
At their most elaborate, such towers comprised a wooden structure
in several tiers, hung with soaked animal hides as protection
from ire-arrows and with ladders going up inside the structure
to the top platform. here might be a drawbridge, held in the
vertical and afording protection to the troops waiting for the
assault. As soon as [those soldiers were] assembled, the bridge
was swung down [onto the top of the wall] and the troops forced
themselves across as best they could. Ideally, before the charge,
bowmen in the tower would sweep the enemy wall to clear it of
defenders. [Such a tower was] mounted on a wheeled base so
that it could be rolled against the enemy fortress on the orders
of the commander.30
he larger belfries not only made it possible for soldiers to get inside
a fortress, they were also capable of causing a huge amount of damage beforehand.
A tower often held archers and slingers, along with catapults,
all of which propelled deadly missiles over the walls as it approached.
A giant siege tower employed against Kenilworth Castle in west-central
England in 1266 contained more than two hundred soldiers and eleven
catapults.
As a belfry approached a wall during a siege, the defenders sprang
into action. Knowing the device was made chiely of wood and other
lammable materials, they shot ire-arrows in hope of burning it down.
h ey also unleashed torrents of arrows and rocks on attackers who tried
to deposit debris in the moat so that the tower could cross it to get next
to the wall.
Besiegers also routinely used artillery engines, machines that i red
rocks and other projectiles at or over the walls. An example is the catapults
that were sometimes lodged inside the belfries. Much larger catapults
were typically arrayed outside a besieged castle to aid in the attack.
Another destructive artillery engine employed in many sieges, the ballista,
was an oversize crossbow that discharged spears and/or giant arrows.
More deadly still was the trebuchet, which bore numerous nicknames,
including “God’s stone thrower,” “war wolf,” and “bad neighbor.”
h e device featured an enormous balance beam divided into a short arm
and a long arm. University of California scholar Paul E. Chevedden explains
how it worked. “At the end of the longer arm,” he says,
was a sling for hurling the missile, and at the end of the shorter
one pulling ropes were attached, or, in later versions, a counterweight.
To launch a projectile, the short arm, positioned aloft,
was pulled downward by traction or gravity or by a combination
of both forces. h e impetus applied to the beam propelled the
throwing arm of the machine upward and caused the missile to
be hurled from the sling.31
Trebuchets, which came in a variety of sizes, possessed remarkable
power. A large one could l ing a projectile weighing 220 pounds (100
kg) more than 1,300 feet (400 m)—about a quarter
of a mile. One eyewitness account by an English priest
describes its use in the siege of Acre (in what is now
Israel) by a Crusader army: “It shot with such force,
and its blows were so ef ective, that no material or substance
could withstand the unbearable impact without
damage, no matter how solid or well-built it was.”32
Not to be outdone, the defenders of some castles
countered the use of such artillery by installing their
own artillery inside or atop the walls. In fact, it became
customary to hurl the same rocks an enemy had
thrown right back at him. And so it went. As each new destructive device
or idea incited the invention of an equally hurtful countermeasure, medieval
siege warfare’s relentless arms race plodded on and on.
World History
