Siege Weapon

Let's say you're a medieval lord with 5,000 knights, men-at-arms and peasant levies you've decided to attack and conquer a lesser lord who has 1,000 fighting men of similar abilities. If you line your guys up and fight out in the open, you'll crush him. But the coward/sensible leader does not do this and instead holds up in his castle, which has high walls and heavy gates to keep people out, a large supply of rocks to drop on the heads of people trying to climb said walls, safe vantage points to shoot at attackers before they get to the walls and graineries, larders, wine cellers an cisterns which can keep his troops fed for months. You have several options available to you. You can try to storm the castle while your guys are shot and get rocks and burning sand dropped on them. You can try to starve them out, which is going to take months, lower morale as people are away from the friends and family and incur massive opportunity costs as the peasant levies could be farming, or you could employ Siege Weapons.

Types of Siege Weapons

Battering Ram

One of the oldest and simplest siege weapons, the Battering Ram is, at its most basic, a log that men use to try and break down a door or section of wall. Over time people got ideas like swinging it from ropes to make it easier to smash into enemy fortifications and strong roofs to keep the men inside from being crushed by falling rocks, scalded with boiling oil or shot by arrows.

Ballista

One day a Greek man looked down at his crossbow and thought "what if I made it bigger?" and thus the Ballista was born. Serving as highly accurate artillery (multiple stories exist of single soldiers getting sniped by bolts), it was used by both the Greeks and Romans until cannon made it obsolete.

Catapult

Using weights and levers, ancient and medieval people found they could throw rocks, balls of metal or whatever else they had handy into walls to knock them down. If they had dead bodies handy, they could fling them over the walls of an enemy city and wait for them to get sick and die, as the Mongols did.

• Mangonel: One of the more basic types of catapult and probably what you think of when you imagine one. They had an impressive range, able to hit targets over 1000 feet away.
• Onager: An upgraded Mangonel with a few design overhauls.
• Trebuchet: The big daddy of catapults, it was the biggest, most destructive and longest ranged catapults in history. This was the go-to weapon for sieges until gunpowder became practical.

Siege Ladder

Sometimes the best answer to a large wall is to simply go over it. The siege ladder was invented with this in mind, allowing men to climb over the walls.

Siege Tower

If a Siege Ladder didn't work, the solution was to make it bigger and with protection. Siege Towers allowed men to climb up without having to worry about anyone attacking them from the sides or simply knocking the ladder over. There were also platforms on top to allow archers to fire at the defenders.

Sappers

A good way to weaken enemy walls was to dig under them, weakening the foundation and making them more prone to fracturing and collapsing. It was a dangerous job, but it was effective.

Petards

Before people worked out how to make cannons that were better at killing the enemy than whoever was using them, they would sometimes use Petards. Their job was to run up to enemy walls with barrels of gun powder or other primitive bombs, light the fuse and run like hell, letting the explosion take down the wall. Most of the time this ended up killing the Petard as well, hence the phrase "hoisted by his own petard"

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