Trebuchet

A trebuchet (trébuchet) is a type of catapult that uses a long arm to throw a projectile. It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder. The design of a trebuchet allows it to launch projectiles of greater weights and further distances than that of a traditional catapult. There are two main types of trebuchet. The first is the traction trebuchet, or mangonel, which uses manpower to swing the arm. It first appeared in China in the 4th century BC. Carried westward by the Avars, the technology was adopted by the Byzantines in the late 6th century AD and by their neighbors in the following centuries. The later, and often larger and more powerful, counterweight trebuchet, also known as the counterpoise trebuchet, uses a counterweight to swing the arm. It appeared in both Christian and Muslim lands around the Mediterranean in the 12th century, and was carried back to China by the Mongols in the 13th century. The origin of the word "trebuchet" is uncertain. D.J. Cathcart King suggests that it is derived from "trebucher, to rock or tilt". The numerous forms of the word that appeared during the 13th century, including trabocco, tribok, tribuclietta, and trubechetum, have made it impossible to identify the source with any certainty. In Arabic the counterweight trebuchet was called manjaniq maghribi or majaniq ifranji. In China it was called the húihúi pào (Muslim trebuchet). The earliest appearance of the term "trebuchet" dates to the late 12th century. The word trabuchellus appeared alongside manganum and prederia in a document in Vicenza on . Trabucha is found a decade later with predariae at the siege of Castelnuovo Bocca d'Adda in an account by Iohannes Codagnellus. It is unclear, however, whether these referred to counterweight trebuchets. Codagnellus did not specify a specific type of engine with the term and even implied that they were "fairly light in subsequent references". Only in the late 1210s do variations of "trebuchet" in sources, described as increasingly powerful machines or utilizing different components, identify more closely with the counterweight trebuchet.