world. If Callinicus had not invented Greek fire, Islam might have swept over Europe as it did over the Near East, north Africa, and central Asia.
Chapter 9
Quiet Cannons: Mechanical Artillery
To King Archidamus of Sparta it seemed that his whole world had turned upside down. This was odd because troops had just arrived from Syracuse in Sicily to help him in one of his campaigns.
A Sicilian officer had demonstrated an invention that the Syracusians had used successfully against Carthage. The weapon was a giant bow mounted on a wooden stock. The stock was in two pieces: The top piece slid in a groove cut in the bottom piece. The Syracusians had attached the bowstring to the slider with a catch, then pulled both slider and bowstring back with a winch (a crank or handle). The bow was obviously far too powerful for a man to draw without the aid of machinery. On the sides of the slider were pawls that clicked into ratchet notches on the bottom stock as the slider was pulled back. When the slider had clicked into the last notch, a Syracusian soldier pulled a cord that released the catch. The heavy arrow flew many times farther than any archer could have sent it. The Sicilians reloaded their weapon and shot another arrow at a shield and a corselet. The missile went entirely through all the armor.
The Syracusian officer smiled proudly at the king, expecting praise for the ingenuity of the scientists of Syracuse and gratitude for bringing this powerful new weapon to his aid. Instead, the king was shocked.
“By Heracles,” he said, “this is the end of man’s valor!”
To most Greeks at that time, around 370 B.C., war was a slugging match between masses of shield-carrying, armored warriors. Valor in battle was the high-est virtue for all Greeks, especially for the Spartans. Each Spartan man devoted his whole life to only one thing: becoming the bravest, strongest, most skillful hand-to-hand fighter he could be. Now it was possible for a puny coward with one of these machines to kill the bravest and strongest soldier who ever lived.
The Spartans were not enthusiastic about the new weapon, and most Greeks agreed with them rather than with the Syracusians. Syracuse, a colony of Corinth, was relatively young for a Greek city and even younger as a major power in the Greek world. Its destruction of the Athenian expedition sent against it during the Peloponnesian War was quite unexpected. The ancient traditions of hoplite warfare had less hold on the people of Syracuse than on those of mainland Greece.
Moreover, Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, was a man of imagination. Dionysius aspired to lead all the Greek cities of Sicily against the powerful state of Carthage, which had established colonies on the western end of the island. He recruited designers, mathematicians, and craftsmen from all over the Greek world, offer-ing high wages with prizes for outstanding work on new weapons. For stars, there were places at his table. The leading engineers flocked to Syracuse.
One of their inventions was the gastraphetes, a type of crossbow with a kind of half-hoop fixed at the end of the stock. To cock it, a man put the half-hoop against his stomach and the front of the weapon against a wall or tree and pushed against it. The soldier was thus able to use the strength of his legs — far more powerful than his arms — to bend the heavy bow. The gastraphetes had the same sort of slider-and-rachet arrangement as the catapult shown to Archidamus. The next step was to build a much larger bow and cock it with a winch. The bow itself was of the ancient composite type, with a layer of sinew glued to a wooden core on the back, and a layer of horn glued to the core on the belly. When the archer drew a composite bow, the sinew was stretched and then snapped back.
At the same time the horn was compressed and then regained its length. The wood — a very thin strip — was flexible but added little to the bow’s power.
When the engineers had reached what seemed to be the limits of the composite bow, they began looking for a new type of spring. E.W. Marsden, who has studied all the ancient writings on mechanical artillery and built these machines by following the directions of the ancient engineers, believes they studied the elements of the composite bow — horn, wood, and sinew — and decided that sinew was the springiest element. So, they used the sinew in a new way.
They made cords of sinew and twisted them around the ends of two poles that were opposite each other on a wooden frame. The poles pivoted in their bundles of twisted sinew. Between the ends of the poles opposite the pivots was a cord that acted as a bowstring. The action was the same as that of the machine Archidamus saw, but instead of a flexible bow there were two inflexible poles powered by skeins of twisted sinew. Sometimes there wasn’t even sinew. Someone discovered that hair — human or animal — has the same kind of springiness as sinew, so many catapults were powered by ropes of hair.
The first catapults shot arrows (most of them long, heavy arrows that looked more like javelins) but others were made to shoot stones. These usually had a double bowstring with a pouch between the two cords to hold the stone.
It took the original Greek cities, such as Sparta and Athens, a while to really warm up to mechanical artillery, but the engines were adopted in a big way by King Philip II of Macedon. Like Dionysius, Philip scoured the Greek world for engineers and craftsmen. If the cord-powered torsion catapult was not invented in Macedon, it was first used by Macedon on a large scale. In the middle ages, catapults were mainly siege engines, but Philip and his son, Alexander the Great, used them as field artillery, too. At one point in his march through central Asia, Alexander found himself blocked by the hither-to invincible Scythian horse archers who were on the other side of the Jaxartes River.
Alexander lined up all his artillery on his side of the river and, according to the historian Arrian, “the machines kept firing salvos at the Scythians riding along the bank, some of whom were wounded by the missiles and one, stricken right through his shield and breastplate, who fell from his horse. Thereupon, terrified by the range of the missiles and because a noted warrior had fallen, they retired from the bank a little.” And Alexander’s army crossed the river.
The ancient field artillery obviously had a psychological effect even stronger than the physical effects it was capable of causing. The history of warfare is full of psychological weapons (weapons that induce a disproportionate fear).
Among them are the cavalry lance, the bayonet, the submachine gun, and the dive bomber.
Mechanical artillery was always useful in sieges. The arrow-shooting catapults made it possible to shoot defenders off a city wall from well beyond the range of their bows. Stone-throwing machines could knock down inferior stone walls or could shoot over the walls to demolish houses and other buildings inside.
The engineers continued to improve their machines’ accuracy and durability. The Romans used small catapults, called carroballistae, mounted on wheels with the skeins of cord enclosed in metal cylinders to protect them from moisture. The Romans also invented a new stone-thrower called an onager, which had a single upright arm mounted in an enormous skein of cord. The top of the arm was either shaped like a scoop to hold the stone or the stone was placed in a rope sling at the top of the pole. Roman artillery, like that of Philip and Alexander, was used for both sieges and field battles. Every century in the army (the smallest unit) of the Roman Empire had an artillery piece.
The dark ages that followed the fall of Rome created a temporary hiatus in the development of mechanical artillery in western Europe. Later, when warfare was dominated by armored knights, the powers that be had no incentive to develop field artillery that could mow down mailed horsemen. Sieges were another matter, though. The catapult and the onager were revived and played a prominent part in attempts to capture castles. During the Crusades, the Muslims used their mechanical artillery to throw barrels of flaming naphtha at the Crusaders. The Christian warrior soon adopted this fiery weapon.
The Middle Ages also saw the adoption of a new siege engine in Western Europe. It was called a trebuchet. It was a pivoted beam, heavily weighted on the short end. The long end was tipped with a sling, into which a missile was placed.
The long end was hauled down and loaded. When it was released, the weighted short end fell, and the long
