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Subsequent siege towers down through the centuries often had similar engines. However, large siege towers could be defeated by the defenders by flooding the ground in front of the wall, creating a moat that caused the tower to get bogged in the mud. The siege of Rhodes illustrates the important point that the larger siege towers needed level ...
Greek siege tower first used in Rhodes. [5] Polybolos: 289 BC Greece: A siege engine with torsion mechanism, drawing its power from twisted sinew-bundles. Sambuca: 213 BC Sicily: Roman seaborne siege engine build on two ships. Siege hook: 189 BC Rome: A siege hook is a weapon used to pull stones from a wall during a siege.
Helepolis (Greek: ἑλέπολις, meaning: "Taker of Cities") is the Greek name for a movable siege tower.. The most famous was that invented by Polyidus of Thessaly, and improved by Demetrius I of Macedon and Epimachus of Athens, for the Siege of Rhodes (305 BC).
Siege engine in Assyrian relief of attack on an enemy town during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III 743-720 BC from his palace at Kalhu (Nimrud). The earliest siege engines appear to be simple movable roofed towers used for cover to advance to the defenders' walls in conjunction with scaling ladders, depicted during the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. [2]
Following a basic design, details of tower construction varied from siege to siege and there is no known treatise which specifies at which level siege equipment should be placed. Vegetius noted that, “besiegers sometimes built a tower with another turret inside it that could suddenly be raised by ropes and pulleys to over-top the wall”. [17]
Gate tower: a tower built next to, or on top of the city gates to better defend the city gates. Wall tower: a tower built on top of a segment of the wall, which usually extended outwards slightly, so as to be able to observe the exterior of the walls on either side. In addition to arrow slits, ballistae, catapults and cannons could be mounted ...
These terms were rejected. The crusaders spent this time building a siege tower, which allowed them to pour over the walls of the city, [6] while at the same time, a group of knights scaled the undefended walls on the other side of the city. The Crusaders used the siege tower to destroy a wall on December 11 and began pillaging.
A moat made access to the walls difficult for siege weapons such as siege towers and battering rams, which needed to be brought up against a wall to be effective. A water-filled moat made the practice of mining – digging tunnels under the castles in order to effect a collapse of the defences – very difficult as well.