The Ordinary Shot Consisted Of Stones Carefully Rounded.
But for these
were substituted on occasion rough stones with fuses attached,[5] pieces
of red-hot iron, pots of fused metal, or casks full of Greek fire or of
foul matter to corrupt the air of the besieged place.
Thus carrion was
shot into Negropont from such engines by Mahomed II. The Cardinal
Octavian, besieging Modena in 1249, slings a dead ass into the town.
Froissart several times mentions such measures, as at the siege of Thin
l'Eveque on the Scheldt in 1340, when "the besiegers by their engines
flung dead horses and other carrion into the castle to poison the garrison
by their smell." In at least one instance the same author tells how a
living man, an unlucky messenger from the Castle of Auberoche, was caught
by the besiegers, thrust into the sling with the letters that he bore hung
round his neck, and shot into Auberoche, where he fell dead among his
horrified comrades. And Lipsius quotes from a Spanish Chronicle the story
of a virtuous youth, Pelagius, who, by order of the Tyrant Abderramin, was
shot across the Guadalquivir, but lighted unharmed upon the rocks beyond.
Ramon de Muntaner relates how King James of Aragon, besieging Majorca in
1228, vowed vengeance against the Saracen King because he shot Christian
prisoners into the besiegers' camp with his trebuchets (pp. 223-224). We
have mentioned one kind of corruption propagated by these engines; the
historian Wassaf tells of another. When the garrison of Dehli refused to
open the gates to Alauddin Khilji after the murder of his uncle, Firuz
(1296), he loaded his mangonels with bags of gold and shot them into the
fort, a measure which put an end to the opposition.
Ibn Batuta, forty years later, describes Mahomed Tughlak as entering Dehli
accompanied by elephants carrying small balistae (ra'adai), from which
gold and silver pieces were shot among the crowd. And the same king, when
he had given the crazy and cruel order that the population of Dehli should
evacuate the city and depart to Deogir, 900 miles distant, having found
two men skulking behind, one of whom was paralytic and the other blind,
caused the former to be shot from a mangonel. (I.B. III. 395, 315.)
Some old drawings represent the shaft as discharging the shot from a kind
of spoon at its extremity, without the aid of a sling (e.g. fig. 13);
but it may be doubted if this was actually used, for the sling was
essential to the efficiency of the engine. The experiments and
calculations of Dufour show that without the sling, other things remaining
the same, the range of the shot would be reduced by more than a half.
In some of these engines the counterpoise, consisting of a timber case
filled with stones, sand, or the like, was permanently fixed to the
butt-end of the shaft. This seems to have been the Trebuchet proper. In
others the counterpoise hung free on a pivot from the yard; whilst a third
kind (as in fig.
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