5 weapons cataloged
Siege weapons exist because walls work. For most of human history, a well-built fortification could hold off armies for months or years. The catapult was the first serious answer: a machine that could throw heavy stones farther and harder than any human. The trebuchet refined the concept to its mechanical limit. Then the cannon arrived and made stone walls irrelevant overnight. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Ottoman bombards breached walls that had stood for a thousand years, is the dividing line between medieval and modern warfare.
The catapult in its earliest form — the torsion-powered ballista and onager — was the artillery of the ancient world. Greek engineers in Syracuse developed the first catapults under Dionysius I around 399 BCE. Roman engineers refined the technology i...
The trebuchet is the most powerful mechanical siege weapon ever built. The counterweight variant, which appeared in the Mediterranean around the 12th century, uses a massive weight (up to 10 tonnes) on a pivoting beam to hurl projectiles weighing 100...
The cannon transformed warfare more completely than any weapon since the spear. Ottoman bombards breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire and the medieval concept of the impregnable fortress. Cannons could reduce in d...
The field gun is mobile artillery designed to accompany armies on the march and provide direct fire support on the battlefield. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden pioneered the use of light, horse-drawn field guns in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), integ...
The earliest grenades were ceramic or glass containers filled with Greek fire, naphtha, or gunpowder compositions, thrown by hand at enemy fortifications and ships. Byzantine incendiary grenades terrorized Crusader forces. Chinese thunderclap bombs p...
54 Weapons. Five Epochs. One Poster.
All 5 siege weapons & artillery are featured on the poster.
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