The Trebuchet: Cortés's Failed Shot, Acre's 92 Engines and Modern Use

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In 1521, with his gunpowder exhausted at Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés had his engineers build a trebuchet, and its first stone flew straight up and smashed the machine. That failure opens a history of the trebuchet as an engineering advance over Roman torsion engines like the onager, which slammed into a padded crossbeam and battered itself apart. The trebuchet's pivoting beam follows through freely, and its sling adds a second pendulum that multiplies projectile speed, allowing the machine to grow to enormous size.

The earliest versions, traced to the Mohists of China around the fourth century BC, were traction machines hauled by crews of up to 250 men. Counterweight designs replaced the crews with boxes of rock or lead, described by al-Tarsusi in a manual for Saladin in 1187, and the Mongols brought Muslim engineers to build them at Xiangyang in 1268. Rediscovered by modern engineers in the 1980s, the design now throws pumpkins and cars, and it has reappeared in Ukraine in 2014, Aleppo in 2013 and on Israel's northern border in 2024.

The Mamluks reportedly brought up to 92 trebuchets to Acre in 1291 but still had to tunnel under the walls to take the city.
Song dynasty defenders draped 34-foot ropes of straw soaked in wet clay down their walls to absorb impacts and smother incendiaries.
Al-Tarsusi called the counterweight machine a Persian trebuchet, and Chinese records called it the Huihui Pao, the Muslim trebuchet.
In 2015 a flaming shot from the 22,000 kg replica at Warwick Castle burned down a Victorian boathouse.
Floating arm designs let the counterweight drop straight down, converting nearly all its potential energy into motion.

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