The TRUTH about medieval CATAPULTS

The Medieval Catapult is a very misunderstood siege weapon, so much so that most people don't know the difference between a Mangonel, Onager or a trebuchet. There are even popular ideas about catapults that never existed historically. In this Video I clear up the confusion.

[HebaruSan]

Catapults can be built after the development of Mathematics, and they have six attack power and one defense power. All else is heresy.

[Dvdshaman]

Wait now you wilk tell me that when a group of soldier armed with swords attack a building directly i doesn't go on fire???

[williamp.]

I can 100% confirm this. In high school my father and I built models of both an onager (3ftx4ftx4t roughly) and a trebuchet (close to half the onagers size). The trebuchet was able to launch the same projectile as the onager, but further. We didn’t try cow corpses, but i was only 17.

[edwardfontaine]

In age of Empires 2 onager and mangonals were actually used most effectively against infantry. They were ok against walls but the trebuchets were much better. Just thought I should point that out. Great and interesting video!

[Dwarfurious]

Next you'll tell us that arrows cant destroy castles either.

[secko_]

In age of empires people use the mangonel or the onager to actually kill soldiers and it barely does damage to castles

[avpfreak]

Actually, Shad, the Mangonel/Onager line in Age of Empire II is primarily a massed infantry counter, as it was in real life. Trebuchets, rams and bombard cannons are the anti-building siege units. So yay for Ensemble Studios for getting it right!

[TheNthMouse]

8:15 - FYI, especially in the modern meta (AOE II), mangonels/onagers are predominantly slated for anti-footman deployment, as it's much more efficient and effective to use trebuchets, rams, and cannon to destroy buildings. The mangonel/onager option can take down simple buildings like houses easily enough, and can have some effect against towers, but typically they're not that effective against sturdy structures like castles, or even walls.

[gearfordragnavar]

That kind of catapult did happen once in history. It was not used for battle, but instead was made just to understand if it could be done. It was made by a man named Illida during the second/third era. He was a great craftsman and engineer that understood the workings of many technologies and wanted to see if doing something like this would work. It did not do well so the project was abandoned shortly after the third era started. It was recorded in the Book of Raver Pg. 210 mark 14.

[zolikoff]

Just FYI Shad, in Age of Empires you don't use the "mangonels" against walls, you use them against enemy troops.

[heinzhertz]

I love this guy´s videos, he puts alot of enthusiasm on them. This is what I wanted my school history teacher to be like when I was a kid

[martynkalendar]

The mangonel might be able to destroy walls in age of empires, but so can literally every other unit in the game. The mangonel is primarily designed to be used against massed soldiers in aoe2 whereas trebuchets are used in siege because of their longer range and superior damage against buildings.

Having said that though, when the main criticism of your historical video isn't about historical errors then you're definitely doing it right.

Good job!

[maxthepaladin]

Great, now I want to have a trebuchet

[manyheadedmishaps]

One thing Shad faiked to point out. Unless my information and logic are wrong, no historical onagers used a spoon to lob their rock at things. Instead, they used a sling like on some of Shad's pictures and on trebuchets, increasing the effective arm length and rhus projectile velocity. There are medieval manuscripts showing spooned onagers, but apparently those were all made after cannon replaced them and trebuchets...

[burner]

But does the catapult have machicolations?

[rafaelrodrigues]

I'd risk saying that lobbing construction material onto your enemies fortifications is not the most effective way to bring them down.

[lukaarsovski]

There's a glaring mistake here, in Age of Empires 2, the onager and mangonel are used as they were intended. The game rewards you for targeting soldiers and other units, it does do damage to walls and buildings but it is REALLY slow to bring them down.

[timothymclean]

The strength of a rope (and hence, I believe, its ability to store energy) is proportional to its cross-section. This means that doubling the length, height, and width of a mangonel would quadruple its potential strength. This is still not enough to allow it to scale up indefinitely, but it _does_ mean it does better than the video implies.
Not a particularly critical error, but one I felt I had to point out. Mostly because strength being proportional to the square of length is a good approximation to spread around (and not just for ropes).

[nymalous]

I liked this video. I read an article years ago about a pair of guys who wanted to make a catapult. They made one, but it was one of the hybrid versions, and insisted throughout the article that this was the most historically accurate version (if I recall correctly he said something like, "All catapults are essentially crossbows.") I enjoyed the story of the article but his assertion that historical siege weapons of this type had bows as part of the design always bothered me. Anyway, thanks for clearing it all up!

[cielopachirisu]

It's nice to see Shad cover bigger-picture topics like Medieval Warfare at large. Most people focus on the martial arts and man-to-man scale of combat in this period, because we all just assume that we know how this stuff in actual battles worked. But then you actually look into it and realize just how much public knowledge got wrong.