medieval crossbow on a modern day tank chassis model

Guns first appeared in Europe in the first quarter of the fourteenth century and there seems to have been an industry making and exporting guns in Ghent at that time. Gunpowder became known in the West about the end of the thirteenth century. Also called a mangonel, it worked with a heavy stone counterweight that fell to provide the necessary power. The trebuchet, a medieval siege weapon, was designed to hurl stones. The only siege engine to be invented in the Middle Ages was the trebuchet, which used a heavy counterweight that imparted velocity to the missile. A ballista had a range of about 500 m (1,640 ft) and fired a missile weighing up to 150 kg (330 lb). It could be used to throw a variety of missiles, including stones, Greek fire (a mixture of pitch, sulfur, and naphtha), live or dead prisoners and filth. Similar weapons were still being used by the Chinese in the 1890s.Ī development of the bow, known to the Romans as the ballista, used a single arm inserted into a band of fiber that was tightened by a winch (Fig 2). Before the invention of gunpowder there were three ways of doing this: the compression and tension of fibers, as in a bow the torsion (twisting) of sinew or fiber as in the catapult and – much later – the use of a counterweight, as in the trebuchet.Īrtillery using the bow principle was known in Syracuse in 399 BC, at about which time a repeating bow firing bolts was developed by Dionysus of Alexandria. Powder, elongated shells, rifling, and rapid-fire breach loading, and madeĪll artillery makes use of stored energy that can be released and expended quickly to propel the missile. Advances in the nineteenth century included smokeless The Turks to take Constantinople in 1453, artillery changed the whole strategyĪnd tactics of siege warfare. Weapons appeared in Europe and the Near East in the fourteenth century. The exact origin of artillery using gunpowder is unknown, although such Generally one of four types: gun, howitzer, mortar, or missile launcher, and is classified according to caliber ranging from underġ05 millimeters for light artillery to more than 155 millimeters for heavy. But with large missiles, the mechanism used is too heavy to carry, and the definition of artillery is now generally limited to weapons of this type, which have a carriage or mount.

The term 'artillery' strictly includes any weapon that projects a missile farther than a man can throw it by hand.

Medieval crossbow on a modern day tank chassis model