The History of the Trebuchet
The invention of the trebuchet derives from the ancient sling. A variation of the sling contained a short piece of wood to extend the arm and provide greater leverage. This was evolved into the traction trebuchet by the Chinese, in which a number of people pull on ropes attached to the short arm of a lever that has a sling on the long arm. This type of trebuchet is smaller and has a shorter range but is a more portable machine and has a faster rate of fire than a larger counterweight powered one. The smallest traction trebuchets could be powered by the weight and pulling strength of one person using a single rope; but most were designed and sized to utilize from 15 to 45 men, generally two per rope. These teams would sometimes be local citizens helping in the siege or in the defense of their town. Traction trebuchets had a range of from 100 to 200 feet when casting weights up to 250 pounds. It is believed that the first traction trebuchets were used by the Mohists in China as early as in the 5th century BC, descriptions of which can be found in the Mojing (compiled in the 4th century BC).
The traction trebuchet next appears in Byzantium. The Strategikon of Emperor Maurice, composed in 539, calls for "baltae revolving in both directions”, probably traction trebuchets. The Miracles of St. Demetrius, composed by John I, archbishop of Thessalonike, clearly describe traction trebuchets in the Avaro-Slav artillery: "Hanging from the back sides of these pieces of timber were slings and from the front strong ropes, by which, pulling down and releasing the sling, they propel the stones up high and with a loud noise."
There is some doubt as to the exact period in which traction trebuchets or knowledge of them reached Scandinavia. The Vikings may have known of them at a very early stage, as the monk Abbo de St. Germain reports on the siege of Paris in his epic De bello Parisiaco dated about AD 890 that engines of war were used. Another source mentions that Nordic people or "the Norsemen" used engines of war at the siege of Angers as early as AD 873.
Our first clear written record of a counterweight trebuchet comes from an Islamic scholar, Mardi al-Tarsusi, who wrote, "Trebuchets are machines invented by unbelieving devils." (Al-Tarsusi, Bodleian MS 264) This by itself suggests that by the time of Saladin, Muslims were acquainted with counterweight engines, but did not believe that Muslims had invented them. Al-Tarsusi does not specifically say that the "unbelieving devils" were Christian Europeans, but Saladin was in fact actively engaged against Crusaders for much of his career, and the manuscript predates the Chinese and Mongol weapons (Needham p. 218). The trebuchet was as some people say the flingable wrecking ball. They took about twelve days to build depending on how big the structure was going to be.
At the Siege of Acre in 1191, Richard the Lionheart assembled two trebuchets which he named "God's Own Catapult" and "Bad Neighbor". During a siege of Stirling Castle in 1304, Edward Longshanks ordered his engineers to make a giant trebuchet for the English army, named "Warwolf". Range and size of the weapons varied. In 1421 the future Charles VII of France commissioned a trebuchet that could shoot a stone of 800 kg, while in 1188 at Ashyun, rocks up to 1,500 kg were used. Average weight of the projectiles was probably around 50-100 kg, with a range of ca. 300 meters. Rate of fire could be noteworthy: at the siege of Lisbon (1147), two engines were capable of launching a stone every 15 seconds. Also human corpses could be used in special occasion: in 1422 Prince Korybut, for example, in the siege of Karlštejn shot men and manure within the enemy walls, apparently managing to spread infection among the defenders.
Counterweight trebuchets do not appear with certainty in Chinese historical records until about AD 1268, when the Mongols laid siege to Fancheng and Xiangyang, although Joseph Needham has propounded the view that Qiang Shen, a Chinese commander of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, 1115-1234, may have invented an early counterweight engine independently in AD 1232 (Needham, Volume 4, p. 30). At the Siege of Fancheng and Xiangyang, the Mongol army, unable to capture the cities despite besieging the Song defenders for years, brought in two Persian engineers who built hinged counterweight trebuchets and soon reduced the cities to rubble, forcing the surrender of the garrison. These engines were called by the Chinese historians the Huihui Pao or Xiangyang Pao, because they were first encountered in that battle.
The largest trebuchets needed exceptional quantities of timber: at the siege of Damietta, in 1249, Louis IX of France was able to build a stockade for the whole Crusade camp with the wood from 24 captured Egyptian trebuchets.
With the introduction of gunpowder, the trebuchet lost its place as the siege engine of choice to the cannon. Trebuchets were used both at the siege of Burgos (1475-1476) and siege of Rhodes (1480). The last recorded military use was by Hernán Cortés, at the 1521 siege of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. Accounts of the attack note that its use was motivated by the limited supply of gunpowder. The attempt was reportedly unsuccessful: the first projectile landed on the trebuchet itself, destroying it.
In 1779 British forces defending Gibraltar, finding that their cannons were unable to fire far enough for some purposes, constructed a trebuchet. It is unknown how successful this was: the Spanish attackers were eventually defeated, but this was largely due to a sortie.
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