37. Battering Castle Walls
Barring treachery, the quickest way to seize an enemy castle was to storm its walls by attackers using ladders and siege towers. However, that was often hazardous, and cost dearly – often prohibitively dearly – in attackers’ lives. One alternative was to try and batter down the walls, either from a distance with catapults and trebuchets, or up close with battering rams.
Catapults were deployed since ancient times against castles and city walls. They used tension or torsion to slowly build up and store energy in a device, before rapidly releasing the stored energy via an arm that flung a rock at a targeted wall. In the later Middle Ages, catapult technology took a leap forward with the development of trebuchets – the most effective weapon against castle and city walls until the arrival of gun powder.
