- Key People:
- Chaim Herzog
- Robert Morris Page
In contrast to individual weaponry, there was little continuity from classical to medieval times in mechanical artillery. The only exception—and it may have been a case of independent reinvention—was the similarity of the Roman onager to the medieval catapult.
Mechanical artillery of classical times was of two types: tension and torsion. In the first, energy to drive the projectile was provided by the tension of a drawn bow; in the other, it was provided by torsional energy stored in bundles of twisted fibres.
The invention of mechanical artillery was ascribed traditionally to the initiative of Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, in Sicily, who in 399 bce directed his engineers to construct military engines in preparation for war with Carthage. Dionysius’s engineers surely drew on existing practice. The earliest of the Greek engines was the gastrophetes, or “belly shooter.” In effect a large crossbow, it received its name because the user braced the stock against his belly to draw the weapon. Though Greek texts did not go into detail on construction of the bow, it was based on a composite bow of wood, horn, and sinew. The potential of such engines was apparent, and the demand for greater power and range quickly exceeded the capabilities of tension. By the middle of the 3rd century bce, the bow had been replaced by rigid wooden arms constrained in a wooden box and drawn against the force of tightly twisted bundles of hair or sinew. The overall concept was similar to the gastrophetes, but the substitution of torsion for tension permitted larger and more powerful engines to be made. Such catapults (from Greek kata, “to pierce,” and pelte, “shield”; a “shield piercer”) could throw a javelin as far as 800 yards (700 meters). The same basic principle was applied to large stone-throwing engines. The Jewish historian Josephus referred to Roman catapults used in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 ce that could throw a stone weighing 1 talent (about 55 pounds, or 25 kilograms) 2 stadia (400 yards, or 366 meters) or more.
The terminology of mechanical artillery is confusing. Catapult is the general term for mechanical artillery; however, the term also narrowly applies to a particular type of torsion engine with a single arm rotating in a vertical plane. Torsion engines with two horizontally opposed arms rotating in the horizontal plane, such as that described above, are called ballistae. There is no evidence that catapults in the narrow sense were used by the Greeks; the Romans called their catapults onagers, or wild asses, for the way in which their rears kicked upward under the recoil force. The Romans used large ballistae and onagers effectively in siege operations, and a complement of carroballistae, small wheel-mounted torsion engines, was a regular part of the legion. The onager and the medieval catapult were identical in concept, but ballistae were not used after the classical era.
Fortification
Fortress design
Fortifications in antiquity were designed primarily to defeat attempts at escalade, though cover was provided for archers and javelin throwers along the ramparts and for enfilade fire from flanking towers. By classical Greek times, fortress architecture had attained a high level of sophistication; both the profile and the trace (that is, the height above ground level and the outline of the walls) of fortifications were designed to achieve overlapping fields of fire from ballistae mounted along the ramparts and in supporting towers. Roman fortresses of the 2nd century ce, largely designed for logistic and administrative convenience, tended to have square or rectangular outlines, and were situated along major communication routes. By the late 3rd century, their walls had become thicker and had flanking towers strengthened to support mechanical artillery. The number of gates was reduced, and the ditches were dug wider. By the late 4th and 5th centuries, Roman fortresses were being built on easily defensible ground with irregular outlines that conformed to the topography; clearly, passive defense had become the dominant design consideration.
In general, the quality of masonry that went into permanent defensive works of the classical period was very high by later standards. Fortifications were almost exclusively of dressed stone, though by Roman times concrete mortar was used on occasion.
Field fortification
The main purpose of early field fortifications, particularly among the Greeks, was to secure an advantage by standing on higher ground so that the enemy was forced to attack uphill. The Romans were especially adept at field fortifications, preparing fortified camps at the close of each day’s march. The troops usually required three to four hours to dig a ditch around the periphery, erect a rampart or palisade from timbers carried by each man, lay out streets, and pitch tents. During extended campaigns the Romans strengthened the camps with towers and outlying redoubts, or small forts, and used the camps as bases for offensive forays into the surrounding territory.
Siege towers
For breaching fortified positions, military engineers of the classical age designed assault towers that remain a wonder to modern engineers. So large was one siege tower used by Macedonians in an attack on Rhodes that 3,400 men were required to move it up to the city walls. Another 1,000 men were needed to wield a battering ram 180 feet (55 meters) long. The Romans constructed huge siege towers, one of which Caesar mentions as being 150 feet high. The lower stories housed the battering ram, which had either a pointed head for breaching or a ramlike head for battering. Archers in the upper stories shot arrows to drive the defenders from their ramparts. From the top of the tower, a hinged bridge might be lowered to serve a storming party. To guard the attackers against enemy missiles, the Romans used great wicker or wooden shields, called mantelets, which were sometimes mounted on wheels. In some cases the attackers might approach the fortress under the protection of wooden galleries.
Land transportation
In antiquity and classical times the transportation technology of land warfare largely amounted to man’s own powers of locomotion. This was due in part to limitations in the size, strength, and stamina of horses and in part to deficiencies in crucial supporting technologies, notably the inefficiency of harnesses for horses and nonpivoting front axles for wagons. A more basic underlying factor was the generally low level of economic development. The horse was an economically inefficient animal, consuming large quantities of food. Of more importance, keeping horses—let alone selectively breeding them for size, strength, and power—was a highly labour-intensive and capital-intensive enterprise for which the classical world was not organized. An efficient pulling harness for horses was unknown, and mules and donkeys fitted with carrying baskets, or panniers, balanced in pairs across the back, were the most common pack or dray animals. The ox, the heavy-duty dray animal of the Mediterranean world, was used for military purposes when heavy loads were involved and speed was not critical.
The horse
Because it was not possible to maintain a breed of war-horses sufficiently powerful to sustain mounted shock action, the horse was restricted to a subsidiary role in warfare from the eclipse of the chariot in the middle of the 2nd millennium bce until the rise of the horse archer in the 4th century ce. Evidence as to the size of horses in classical times is equivocal. Greek vase paintings from the 7th century bce depict Scythians riding apparently powerful tall horses with long slender legs, implying speed; however, this breed evidently collapsed and disappeared. Later Mongolian steppe ponies, though tough and tractable, were probably considerably smaller.
Horses were rarely if ever used for drayage. This was partly because their rarity and expense restricted them to combat roles, and partly because of the lack of a suitable harness. The prevalent harness consisted of a pole-and-yoke assembly, attached to the animal by neck and chest harness. This was developed for use with oxen, where the primary load was absorbed by the thrust of the animal’s hump against the yoke. With a horse, most of the pulling load was borne by the neck strap, which tended to strangle the horse and constrict blood flow.
The elephant
The war elephant was first used in India and was known to the Persians by the 4th century bce. Though they accomplished little subsequently, their presence in Hannibal’s army during its transit of the Alps into Italy in 218 bce underscored their perceived utility. The elephant’s tactical importance apparently stemmed in large part from its willingness to charge both men and horses and from the panic that it inspired in horses.
The chariot
The chariot was the earliest means of transportation in combat other than a soldier’s own powers of locomotion. The earliest known chariots, shown in Sumerian depictions from about 2500 bce, were not true chariots but four-wheeled carts with solid wooden wheels drawn by a team of four donkeys or wild asses. They were no doubt heavy and cumbersome; lacking a pivoting front axle, they would have skidded through turns.
Around 1600 bce, Iranian tribes introduced the war-horse into Mesopotamia from the north, along with the light two-wheeled chariot. The Hyksos apparently introduced the chariot into Egypt shortly thereafter, by which time it was a mature technology. By the middle of the 2nd millennium bce, Egyptian, Hittite, and Palestinian chariots had become extraordinarily light and flexible vehicles, the wheels and tires in particular exhibiting great sophistication in design and fabrication. Light war chariots were drawn by either two or three horses, which were harnessed by means of chest girths secured by one or two poles and a yoke.
That horses were long used for pulling chariots rather than for riding is probably attributable to the horse’s inadequate strength and incomplete domestication. The chariot was subject to mechanical failure and, more importantly, was immobilized when any one of its horses was incapacitated. Moreover, the art of riding astride in cavalry fashion had been mastered long before the chariot’s eclipse as a tactically dominant weapon. The decline of the chariot by the end of the 2nd millennium bce was probably related to the spread of iron weaponry, but it was surely related also to the breeding of horses with sufficient strength and stamina to carry an armed man. Chariots lingered in areas of slower technological advance, but in the classical world they were retained mainly for ceremonial functions.
The age of cavalry, c. 400 ce–1350
The beginning of the age of cavalry in Europe is traditionally dated to the destruction of the legions of the Roman emperor Valens by Gothic horsemen at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 ce. The period that followed, characterized by the network of political and economic relationships called feudalism, was an age during which the mounted arm assumed an ascendancy that it began to relinquish only in the 14th century, with the appearance of infantry capable of taking the open field unsupported against mounted chivalry. Cavalry, however, was only part of the story of this era. However impressive the mounted knight may have been in battle, he required a secure place of replenishment and refuge. This was provided by the seigneurial fortress, or castle. In a military sense, European feudalism rested on a symbiotic relationship between armoured man-at-arms, war-horse, and castle.
The tactical dominance in Europe of the heavy mounted elites had a number of complex causes. It is clear that a basic reorientation of the means of production and of the social distribution of the means of armed violence was involved. Horses required large quantities of grain, and in an agricultural economy where returns on seed grain were as little as 2 to 1, mounted shock action could not have solidified its dominance without improvements in agricultural production. Perhaps ironically, these improvements seem to have involved the development of a means of harnessing the horse to agricultural transport and the plow—particularly beginning in the 14th century, when seed-to-yield ratios began to improve.
The age of heavy shock cavalry did not come on suddenly, ushered in by the stirrup or any other single invention. Improvements in the breeding of war-horses played a major and perhaps dominant role. The Germanic tribes that pressed against the boundaries of Rome from the 3rd century on may have made a breakthrough in horse breeding, and, in the Arab conquests of the 7th century and following, the superior breed of the Arabian horse was a major determinant of tactical success. The stirrup alone meant little without powerful war-horses and supporting technologies such as saddle, girth, and bridle.
Using scattered artistic and archaeological evidence, historians have constructed an approximate chronology of technological innovation in medieval Europe. The war saddle with a single girth was introduced by the 6th century, and the iron stirrup was common by the 7th (having probably been known earlier in the East). The curb bit, vitally important for controlling a war-horse, probably dates from about the same time. According to literary evidence, iron horseshoes date from the end of the 9th century, and, based on pictorial evidence, spurs date from the 11th. By the 12th century the European knight was using a war saddle with high, wraparound cantle and pommel that protected the genitals and held him securely in his seat; the saddle itself was secured to the horse by a double girth that held it firmly in place fore and aft. These developments welded horse and rider into a single unit and enabled the knight to apply much of the force of his horse’s charge to the point of the lance, held couched beneath the arm, without being driven over the horse’s rump on impact. An associated development dating from the end of the 12th century was the incorporation of a rigid backplate into knightly armour; this, backed with several inches of padding, braced the man-at-arms against the shock of head-on impact and protected his kidneys from the cantle. These developments were accompanied, and in part caused, by increases in the size and power of war-horses and steady improvements in personal armour.
The war-horse
The destrier, or medieval war-horse, was central to the tactical viability of European feudalism. This animal was a product of two great migrations of horses originating in Central Asia. One, moving westward, crossed into Europe and there originated the vast herds of primeval animals that eventually roamed almost the entire continent. The second flowed to the southwest and found its way into Asia Minor and the neighboring lands of Persia, India, and Arabia. Ultimately it crossed into Egypt, then spread from that country along all of North Africa. At the same time it crossed from Asia Minor into Greece and spread along the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
There were two channels through which the horses of Arabia and North Africa were distributed into northern Europe. One was through the conquest of the Romans across the Alps into France and the Low Countries, where, previously, descendants of the horses of Central Asia had constituted the equine population. The other channel led northward through Greece, Macedonia, and the Gothic countries into the land of the Vandals. When these barbarian peoples invaded the empire, the vast number of horses that they possessed helped them to overthrow the Romans. The era that followed witnessed the collapse of the Roman breeds and the gradual development—especially during the era of Charlemagne in the late 8th and early 9th centuries—of improved types, owing largely to the importation of Arabian stock. The most important of these was the “great horse,” which originated in the Low Countries; its size and strength were required to carry the heavy load of the armoured knight. These horses, the ancestors of modern draft breeds, were bred from the largest and most powerful of the northern European horses, but there was apparently an admixture of Arabian breeds as well.
The Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries took the nobility of Europe into the native land of the Arabian horse. The speed and agility of these light horses so impressed them that large numbers were imported into England and France. Over a long period of time the Moors took Arabian and North African horses into Spain, where they were crossed with the native stock and produced the superior breeds that were sought after by other nations. (Spanish horses were also taken to the New World, where they became the principal ancestors of the equine population of North and South America.)
The breeding, care, and maintenance of medieval war-horses, and the mastering of the skills of mounted combat, required immense amounts of time, skill, and resources. Horses strong enough to be ridden did not exist everywhere, and European horses in particular tended to revert in a feral state to a small animal not much larger than a Shetland pony. On the other hand, the horse was genetically tractable, and breeders learned that hard inbreeding could produce larger, more powerful animals. Still, it was difficult to establish a breed, and only careful control of bloodlines could maintain one. While crossbreeding could produce size and power, it also promoted instability and was best abandoned as soon as the desired traits were “fixed.” This was not easy, particularly where the resources available to maintain a nonproductive breeding stock were limited. The net result was that breeds of large, powerful horses suitable for mounted combat were difficult to establish and expensive to maintain, and they were often lost in the turmoil of war. Even when herds were not dispersed or destroyed, a breed could be lost through indiscriminate breeding arising from a need for numbers.
