Guillaume le Breton, in the Philippidos, tells us:—
"Interea grossos Petraria mittit ab intus
Assidue lapides, Mangonellusque minores."
Among the effects recorded of these great projectiles, we may cite the account of Otto of Frisinga, who tells us that when the Emperor Frederic attacked Tortona in 1155, a stone was cast from one of the periers of such magnitude, that, falling before the door of the cathedral, where three of the principal citizens were in deliberation on the best means of defending the city, it killed them all[251].
The term mangonneaux is sometimes applied to the stones or other missiles discharged by the instrument. From the name mangona our word gun appears to be derived: a supposition that seems strengthened by the fact that the earliest "gonnes," like the mangonæ, were employed to cast stones.
The terrors of the balistæ were occasionally aggravated by their being made the instruments of a special vengeance. Thus Malmesbury informs us that, at the siege of Antioch in 1097, the Turks, irritated by losses sustained from the besieging Crusaders, "wreaked their indignation on the Syrian and Armenian inhabitants of the city; throwing, by means of their balistæ and petraries, the heads of those whom they had slain into the camp of the Franks, that by such means they might lacerate their feelings." A somewhat similar incident is reported by Froissart in his account of the siege of Thun l'Evêque in 1327[252]; so that these cruelties do not appear to be mere tales of credulous pilgrims, or inventions of monkish chroniclers.
Forts of wood were of occasional employment, the materials of which were transported from place to place, so that the structure might be speedily raised. Wace gives us a description of that brought over by William the Conqueror, and built up at Hastings:—
"Donc ont des nés mairrien[253] geté,
A la terre l'ont traïné,
Trestut percié è tut dolé:
Li cheviles tutes dolées
Orent en granz bariz portées:
Ainz ke il fust bien avespré,
En ont un chastelet fermé."—Line 11,658.
Mines were in use both by Richard I. and Philippe Auguste. At the siege of Acre in 1191, Richard attacked the city with archers and balistæ: "But more important than these," adds Devizes, "were the miners, making themselves a way beneath the ground, sapping the foundation of the walls, while soldiers bearing shields, having planted ladders, sought an entrance over the ramparts." The French king employed the mine at the siege of the Castle of Boves, as we learn from William the Breton. See also Rigord, page 185. The mines of these days were large caverns in which pillars of wood supported the incumbent mass. The posts being smeared with pitch and surrounded with combustibles, fire was then brought, and the stanchions being consumed, the walls fell in. With the mine came the counter-mine; an example of which occurs in the description by Guillaume le Breton of the siege of Château-Gaillard; where the English, countermining against the French, met them in their works and drove them back with slaughter:—
"Suffodiunt murum. Sed non minus hostis ab illâ
Parte minare studet factoque foramine nostros
Retrò minatores telis compellit abire."—Philipp., lib. vii.
Later, challenges were made, to be fought out in the mines, the combatants contending over a barrier of wood fixed in the midst. And Upton tells us that the aspirant to knighthood in a besieging army, no church being at hand, performed in the mine his vigil of arms.