One of the last occasions on which the trebuchet was used with success is described by Guillet in his ‘Life of Mahomet II.’[23] This author writes: ‘At the siege of Rhodes in 1480, the Turks set up a battery of sixteen great cannon, but the Christians successfully opposed the cannon with a counter-battery of new invention.[24]
[23] Guillet de Saint George, born about 1625, died 1705. His Life of Mahomet II. was published in 1681. He was the author of several other works, including one on riding, warfare and navigation, termed the Gentleman’s Dictionary. The best edition of this book is in English and has many very curious illustrations. It is dated 1705.
[24] Called a new invention because the old siege engine of which this one (probably a trebuchet) was a reproduction had previously been laid aside for many years.
‘An engineer, aided by the most skilful carpenters in the besieged town, made an engine that cast pieces of stone of a terrible size. The execution wrought by this engine prevented the enemy from pushing forward the work of their approaches, destroyed their breastworks, discovered their mines, and filled with carnage the troops that came within range of it.’
At the siege of Mexico by Cortes in 1521, when the ammunition for the Spanish cannon ran short, a soldier with a knowledge of engineering undertook to make a trebuchet that would cause the town to surrender. A huge engine was constructed, but on its first trial the rock with which it was charged instead of flying into the town ascended straight upwards, and falling back to its starting-point destroyed the mechanism of the machine itself.[25]
[25] Conquest of Mexico. W. Prescott, 1843.
Though all the projectile engines worked by cords and weights disappeared from continental warfare when cannon came to the front in a more or less improved form, they—if Vincent le Blanc is to be credited—survived in barbaric nations long after they were discarded in Europe.
This author (in his travels in Abyssinia) writes ‘that in 1576 the Negus attacked Tamar, a strong town defended by high walls, and that the besieged had engines composed of great pieces of wood which were wound up by cords and screwed wheels, and which unwound with a force that would shatter a vessel, this being the cause why the Negus did not assault the town after he had dug a trench round it.’[26]
[26] Vincent le Blanc, Voyages aux quatre parties du monde, redigé par Bergeron, Paris, 1649. Though the accounts given by this author of his travels are imaginative, I consider his allusion to the siege engine to be trustworthy, as he was not likely to invent so correct a description of one.
Plutarch, in his Life of Marcellus the Roman General, gives a graphic account of Archimedes and the engines this famous mathematician employed in the defence of Syracuse.