Historic Traction Trebuchet Illustrations Part 4

This "Rock Hurling Engine" is a redrawn miniature of the Chevalier au Cygne (Bibl. Imp de Paris, No.340, S.F.), published in "The Arts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" by Paul Lacroix, 1870

Just because a drawing is "old" (or even, if you prefer, "period"), doesn't make it accurate.
This illustration looks rather garbled, but shows a few interesting features:

1. a large number of pulling ropes, implying a large crew
   
2. a boxlike structure up at the top of the ropes, perhaps representing some kind of extra weight (or perhaps, just a confusion between human- and weight-powered machines)
   
3. a crewman at the sling who has his hands where a hold-down rope like that in Illustration No. 4 would be.

The sling release (or, in this case, "non-release") doesn't engender confidence in the drawing's accuracy, but this detail may have crept in as a result of the later copying. It is taken from a miniature, after all..

This drawing is of a sketch of a wall painting from the palace of Piandjikent, Transoxania. (Hermitage Museum, Leningrad) and is from the 7th - 8th Centuries.

Note the similarity to the Chinese machine shown in Illustration No. 8.
The two lines at the end of where the sling would have appeared are plausibly the same sort of double release cords seen in Illustration No.7 and Illustration No.8.

This painting is claimed to be one of the oldest representations of a traction trebuchet known.

Note also the way the crew appear to be inside the framework. Although other interpretations are certainly possible, the positioning of the crew within a framework also allows them to be protected by hoardings, skins etc hung on the frame's sides. Such protection was reported to have been used on eastern machines.
John, Archbishop of Thessaloniki, described traction trebuchets with similarly-shaped bases in his account of the Avaro-Slavic siege of Thessaloniki in 597, a battle in which the besiegers used 50 stone-throwing engines, or "petroboles".

"They also covered those tetragonal petroboles with boards on three sides only, so that those inside firing them might not be wounded with arrows from those on the walls.
And since one of these, with its boards, was burned to a char by a flaming arrow, they returned, carrying away the machines.
On the following day they again brought up these petroboles covered with freshly skinned hides and with the boards, and placing them closer to the walls, shooting, they hurled mountains and hills against us."

(This quote taken from W.T.S Tarver's paper "The Traction Trebuchet: A Reconstruction of an Early Medieval Siege Engine".)
For the complete quotation from John's trebuchet description and a few comments, click here.

Another heavy traction trebuchet similar to the one in the simple drawing in Illustration No.9 and the machine in Illustration No.11.
The base looks like a single-post one at first glance, especially with the wooden structure at the top of the uprights, but you can see that the artist has drawn in the rear upright slightly higher than the front one and the base shows this too. Note the multiple bracing timbers.

The beam is re-enforced with a lot of whipping and has a heavy cross-member at the end fitted with rings to take the pullers' ropes (which are just visible).

The artist has given the machine a huge projectile. The apparent inward-of-vertical position of the sling is consistent with a counterweight machine's trough launch - but I suspect the artist's choice of position here is more to do with fitting everything into the frame...
This drawing definitely makes the extremely large and apparently heavy end timber appear to be vertical.

(Note: This illustration appears in "Crusades", a BBC book by Jones and Ereira, as a counterweight machine - which it is obviously not, unless they mean a "weight augmented" traction machine.)

The familiar single post (with multiple bracing timbers) supporting a rectangular frame which in turn holds the axle and beam can be seen here too.
Note the position of the machine high on a tower to maximize range and field of fire. The use of light trebuchets, even if heavier one were in use elsewhere, might well have been dictated by the places on defense works available to site them.

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This page was last edited Jan 2000