HKB
said to have shot stones of “a kantar and even more.” (Makrizi, III. 125; Reinaud, Chroniques Arabes, etc., p. 570; De Excidio Urbis Acconis*, in *Martène and Durand, V. 769.)
How heavy a mangonade was sometimes kept up may be understood from the account of the operations on the Nile, already alluded to. The King was trying to run a dam across a branch of the river, and had protected the head of his work by “cat-castles” or towers of timber, occupied by archers, and these again supported by trebuchets, etc., in battery. “And,” says Jean Pierre Sarrasin, the King’s Chamberlain, “when the Saracens saw what was going on, they planted a great number of engines against ours, and to destroy our towers and our causeway they shot such vast quantities of stones, great and small, that all men stood amazed. They slung stones, and discharged arrows, and shot quarrels from winch-arblasts, and pelted us with Turkish darts and Greek fire, and kept up such a harassment of every kind against our engines and our men working at the causeway, that it was horrid either to see or to hear. Stones, darts, arrows, quarrels, and Greek fire came down on them like rain.”
The Emperor Napoleon observes that the direct or grazing fire of the great arblasts may be compared to that of guns in more modern war, whilst the mangonels represent mortar-fire. And this vertical fire was by no means contemptible, at least against buildings of ordinary construction. At the sieges of Thin l’Evêque in 1340, and Auberoche in 1344, already cited, Froissart says the French cast stones in, night and day, so as in a few days to demolish all the roofs of the towers, and none within durst venture out of the vaulted basement.
The Emperor’s experiments showed that these machines were capable of surprisingly accurate direction. And the mediæval histories present some remarkable feats of this kind. Thus, in the attack of Mortagne by the men of Hainault and Valenciennes (1340), the latter had an engine which was a great annoyance to the garrison; there was a clever engineer in the garrison who set up another machine against it, and adjusted it so well that the first shot fell within 12 paces of the enemy’s engine, the second fell near the box, and the third struck the shaft and split it in two.
Already in the first half of the 13th century, a French poet (quoted by Weber) looks forward with disgust to the supercession of the feats of chivalry by more mechanical methods of war:—
“Chevaliers sont esperdus, Cil ont auques leur tens perdus; Arbalestier et mineor Et perrier et engigneor Seront dorenavant plus chier.”
When Gházán Khan was about to besiege the castle of Damascus in 1300, so much importance was attached to this art that whilst his Engineer, a man of reputation therein, was engaged in preparing the machines, the Governor of the castle offered a reward of 1000 dinars for that personage’s head. And one of the garrison was daring enough to enter the Mongol camp, stab the Engineer, and carry back his head into the castle!
Marino Sanudo, about the same time, speaks of the range of these engines with a prophetic sense of the importance of artillery in war:—