CHAPTER XVII
PROJECTILE-THROWING ENGINES
No evidence is extant respecting the inventor of the first machine for missile throwing, but we know that they have existed from the earliest ages, and have been used by all the great nations of antiquity. Under the Greeks and Romans, but especially the former, they attained a remarkable degree of excellence, and many accounts of their extraordinary efficiency have come down to us. The Romans took their ideas from the Greeks as a basis to work upon; among their best authorities Vitruvius may be classed. The principles involved in these engines were not altogether lost, but descended to the mediæval ages, and probably during that period more elaborate, powerful, and gigantic machines were constructed than at any previous time.
PLATE XXX*
Armour of Charles V., from Augsburg or Nuremberg
A. F. Calvert
The complicated methods by which a fortress was captured or a town carried during the Middle Ages are not generally known, and the means adopted at the present time are as a general rule credited with being the outcome of the skill and science of the past few centuries. This, however, will not bear the test of investigation, for we find that almost every device has had its prototype in past ages, and nearly every idea has been forestalled. It comes almost with a shock to some, and produces feelings of incredulity, to be told that huge missiles vieing in destructive effect with the modern shell, and as a rule many times larger, were sent with unerring aim into the heart of a besieged town, levelling houses to the ground and dealing destruction far and wide. The idea of a siege in mediæval times is generally that of a tree to batter down a door, archers to shoot down the defenders on the walls, desperate charges of cavalry against sallies of the garrison, and forlorn hopes of men carrying scaling-ladders with which to surmount the walls. These are, however, only a few concomitants of the complicated methods by which a siege was accomplished.