Informative Speech On Medieval Catapults

Today I’m going to tell you about Medieval catapults, crossbow, swords, and maces. They helped people in war a long time ago. I hope that you will like my project, and I learned a lot. This is about weapons.

The weapons were used in the European warfare. There was a weapon that could cause havoc and destruction. The Onager Catapult would throw the big rocks into the castle to break the stuff inside. They even sometimes used missiles. Castles and fortified walled cities were common during this period, and catapults were used as siege weapons against them. The Viking siege of Paris in 856 A.D saw the employment by both sides of virtually every siege craft known to the classical world. There were a variety of catapults to little effect

in failure. Trebuchets were probably the most powerful catapult employed in the Middle Ages.The most commonly used ammunition were stones, but "darts and sharp wooden poles" could be substituted if necessary. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s, a powerful catapult, a trebuchet, was used by thrill-seekers first on private property and in 2001-2002 at Middlemoor Water Park, Somerset, England to experience being catapulted through the air for 100 feet 30 m.

Defensive techniques in the Middle Ages progressed to a point that rendered catapults largely ineffective.

This machine was designed to throw heavy projectiles from a "bowl-shaped bucket at the end of its arm". Mangonels were mostly used for “firing various missiles at fortresses, castles, and cities. The missiles with a range of up to 1300 feet. These missiles included anything from stones to excrement to rotting carcasses. Mangonels were relatively simple to construct, and eventually wheels were added to increase mobility. He Greek Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, who was looking to develop a new type of weapon, invented the catapult about 400 BCE. Also there were other weapons like hammer ,axe , or a mace. Out of those weapons the mace was the most common to use. Sometimes they even

used

On November 21, 1096, at the Dracon passage, a Turkish army caught up with Peter’s wild-eyed crazy people and, in an orgy of slaughter and annihilation, proceeded, with great relish, to slay them to bits

A crossbow is a type of ranged weapon based on the bow and consisting of a horizontal bow-like assembly mounted on a frame which is handheld in a similar fashion to the stock of a gun. It shoots arrow-like projectiles called bolts or quarrels. Historically, crossbows played a significant role in the warfare of East Asia and Medieval Europe. The earliest crossbows in the world were invented in ancient China and caused a major shift in the role of projectile weaponry. In many cultures, bowmen were considered a separate and superior caste, despite usually being drawn from the common class, as their archery skill-set was essentially developed from birth similar to many horseman cultures and was impossible to reproduce outside a pre-established cultural tradition, which many nations lacked.

The flail/mace was the most used weapon in the medieval times. The flail/ was a ball with spikes that could be thrown or hit with to kill. Sometimes they had more than one ball on it, it evan sometimes had 4! The mace was also called a flail because it was a smaller flail. The flair was longer and could hold a lot more balls than other maces or flairs of some types of flail.

Swords were used back then for killing people better than knives or daggers would, also they were longer than others.

Some swords had one blade or many blades on them like a tomahawk . Swords were the most common weapon in the medieval times. The precise definition of the term varies with the historical epoch or the geographical region under consideration. The blade can be straight or curved. Thrusting swords have a pointed tip on the blade, and tend to be straighter slashing swords have a sharpened cutting edge on one or both sides of the blade, and are more likely to be curved. Many swords are made for both thrusting and slashing. The thrusting swords such as the rapier and eventually the smallsword were designed to impale their targets quickly. The use of a sword is known as swordsmanship or, in a modern context, as fencing. In the Early Modern period, western sword design diverged into roughly two forms, the thrusting swords and the sabers.

I hope that you liked our project.The catapults,swords,mace/flail and crossbows were extremely important back then during war. Hope you have a good rest of you day and good luck seeing more projects.

http://www.lordsandladies.org/catapults.htm
Medieval war catapults,
http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/weapons-of-the-middle-ages-the-medieval-catapult/,http://www.lordsandladies.org/catapults.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catapult

Crossbow info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranged_weapon

Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Apr. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword.’