Why Siege Towers are Wrong - History and Evolution DOCUMENTARY

one of the things that's been bugging me for a while now is the false depiction of siege towers in pop culture this extends to all settings from antiquity to the middle ages usually what you get is something like this scene from kingdom of heaven where dozens of towers are lined up for a mass assault ready to discourage hundreds of troops upon the walls all at once at this point it's become a trope that seems required to convince the audience that the siege taking place is truly an epic one you see this in all kinds of movies video games and artwork the siege tower which has emerged from this is basically a glorified troop elevator used for full-on frontal assaults however this runs contrary to its historical use let's now explore the true history of the siege tower a big thanks to the great courses plus for sponsoring this video they offer subscription-based on-demand lecture videos put together by top professors from renowned universities and specialists from places like the national geographic and the smithsonian you get unlimited access to a huge library of over 11 000 videos which cover topics from history to science math and literature with new content being added every month their history playlist is honestly amazing and i've been working my way through their 24 part long series on greek history to enrich our own recent content definitely check out lectures 19 and 20 which explore the fascinating period of the peloponnesian war for me i found it best to download the app on my phone this allows me to swap from video to audio mode so i can listen to the series as a podcast while going about my daily activities right now the great courses plus is offering a free trial which you can start by clicking the link in the description below or visiting thegreatcoursesplus.com invicta i highly recommend that you take a look at what they have to offer and dive into the material that you are most interested in the history of the siege tower is just a small part of the overall history of siege warfare which began basically as soon as humans thought to protect themselves from attack this started with our earliest civilizations who threw up wooden palisades to protect their settlements or erected mudbrick walls to shield their cities yet soon these first walls would be met with improvised ladders and tree trunk battering rams as a counter the defender would build taller thicker and stronger fortifications which in turn led the attacker to similarly scale up their operations thus over the centuries both attacker and defender became locked into an evolutionary arms race the siege tower got its start quite early on in this competition within the fertile crescent where mesopotamian civilizations had established the first large-scale cities the warlike assyrians of the 11th century bc were military pioneers who began to take the first big leaps forward when it came to siege warfare by the 700s bc they were masters of taking fortified cities of the east this involved undermining walls building ramps deploying scaled ladders and wheeling out never-before-seen engines of war multi-storied wooden towers with wheels a turret and a battering ram here's an evocative reconstruction of the best documented assyrian siege which took place at the city of likish quote the city was first surrounded to prevent escape next archers were brought forward under the cover of giant shields that cleared the battlements the king then used the tried and tested assyrian method of building an earthen ramp close to the enemy wall covering with flat stone and wheeling forward a machine that combined a siege tower with a battering ram the assyrians then staged a two-pronged assault the tower was wheeled up the ramp and the ram brought to bear against the midsection of the enemy wall archers in the tower cleared the battlements while bowman on the ground pushed up close to the wall to cover an infantry assault with scaling ladders the fighting appears to have been intense and the assault probably took several days yet eventually the assyrians entered the city the nearby egyptians too soon began to use similar tactics for example when the khushai king piere set out to conquer lower egypt in the mid 700s bc he would apparently throw up structures outside of cities like memphis to help his archers and slingers fire down upon the enemy a couple things should stand out from these first descriptions of a siege tower when we compare it to the modern idea the first point is that there are only ever a handful of towers deployed and not a mass of them the second point is that the towers are initially used in a support role to clear the battlements rather than rushing the wall immediately and the third point is that when the siege towers do make contact with the wall they proceed to punch holes in them rather than sending men over the top this is already quite different from what we see in most media depictions however admittedly they are never attempting to depict siege warfare from the bronze age so let's cut them some slack for now and see how things hold up as we continue to advance the timeline over the following centuries siege tactics from the near east would trickle out to the rest of the mediterranean the phoenicians who founded carthage for instance brought with the many military ideas from their homeland it's for this reason that early punic armies actually deployed chariots in battle and would bring siege towers to bear against the cities of sicily in the 400s bc the greeks who were exposed to these machines either directly or second hand would take note and begin to adopt them as well for instance dynasius of syracuse would be among the first to sink large sums of time and money into building up a stockpile of siege equipment soon there would be many tinkerers across the greek world sketching up new ideas for the taking of walls when philip ii reformed the macedonian army and began to expand the realm he was reportedly accompanied by several renowned engineers including polyidis of thessaly they helped construct a roughly 35 meter tower at parenthesis and yet more engines outside of byzantium though these proved capable of suppressing nearby battlements both sieges would ultimately end in failure owing to the stout resistance of the defender and their access to support from the sea when alexander the great ascended to the throne he would double down on his father's approach engineers traveled constantly with the macedonian army developing even more advanced siege towers for the conquerors unprecedented campaigns at the famous siege of tyre alexander built a long causeway and two 50-meter towers to take the island fortress as with most of the siege towers they were large wheeled structures made of wood and protected from fire by water-soaked rawhides they were filled with all manner of offensive weaponry including catapults and bolt throwers in addition to archers and slingers when the two primary towers were destroyed by the enemy alexander built new towers on board his ships with artillery and rams with which to assault the walls from the sea only a small number of these were actually given boarding equipment to then storm the walls a similar pattern would repeat itself in the rest of alexander sieges where towers might increasingly adopt bridges for special cases but by and large stuck to their primary role of suppressing or battering down fortifications a generation later the successors of alexander the great would carry on the tradition of sage warfare this is best epitomized in the siege of roads in 305 bc it is here that the engineer epimonkus would build the infamous helipolis for demetrius of macedon the beast measured some 40 meters in height with eight massive wheels its nine stories were filled with shuttered windows from which would fire a complement of almost 200 ranged troops as well as torsional stone and arrow throwers similar but smaller designs would be used in other sieges of the period when the romans rose to conquer the mediterranean they would absorb much of what the greeks and others had previously pioneered we covered this topic in our previous episode on roman artillery which you can check out if you're interested however after several centuries of relying on greek engineers the romans eventually got a hang of things for themselves and became quite the experts by the late republic this is best evidenced by julius caesar who made a regular habit of deploying large-scale fortifications at avericum mobile siege towers were built atop massive ramps to overlook the enemy fortifications and eventually stormed them while at alicia and raquium static siege towers were built to reinforce his lines of encirclement we see yet more roman war machines deployed throughout its military history there are too many of these to cover so i'd like to just focus on perhaps the most famous examples from the great jewish revolt in the first century a.d it is here that in the siege of jerusalem a total of three siege towers were brought against the walls of the city at the same time and only one tower was brought against the walls of masada thus we see that even in the most climactic of roman sieges only a handful of towers are ever used and again their primary role becomes one of suppression and wall battering rather than storming okay so so far that's two strikes against the pop culture idea of siege towers perhaps though they will find redemption in the middle ages let's find out following the fall of the roman empire western warfare generally reverted to a smaller scale army sizes were reduced logistics were simplified and the capacity to carry out complicated operations crippled this meant that for a while you just weren't seeing many sieges anywhere near what had taken place in antiquity for example when the crusaders besieged jerusalem in 1099 ad they did so with just about 15 000 troops and two towers as compared to when the romans had done so 1 000 years prior with roughly 60 000 men and three towers yet there were still some developments worth noting over the course of the medieval period after all the pressures of the evolutionary arms race made sure that both attacker and defender constantly competed to outdo one another castles for instance increasingly sported moats with all kinds of impediments thrown up for protection a common medieval tactic was to employ armored shelters to allow workers to fill in moats and level the ground in advance for an assault once this had been done a tower might be built in the distance which could then be rolled into position as in the period of antiquity from here it could provide additional covering fire slowly this tower would then be advanced closer and closer to the walls the besieger would have to carefully guard it against counter-attacks launched either with projectiles or with sally's eventually however the tower would reach the walls themselves at which point it could batter its way in or deploy men across the boarding bridge from our records it seems that this was usually the meek or break point for the siege if the defender failed to dislodge the tower their position would be fatally compromised however if the defender did repulse the tower then the attacker would probably be forced to abandon the whole operation at this point given just how much time and money it took to carry on such sieges it's for this reason that most fortified positions were taken with more low-risk approaches using starvation or subterfuge eventually as advanced technology like trebuchets and gunpowder made their way into the medieval arsenal this provided a more efficient way to take fortifications than building a massive siege tower from then on this iconic piece of equipment would begin its decline thus we have seen that for most of history the siege tower does not align with what gets depicted in most pop culture media the three main points of divergence being one only one or at most a handful of towers are ever used at the same time two towers are initially used in a support role to clear the battlements rather than rushing the wall immediately and three when the siege towers do make contact with the wall they usually proceed to punch holes in them rather than sending men directly over the top anyways thanks for letting me get this off my chest i hope you found the video both entertaining and enlightening a huge thanks to the patrons for funding the channel and to the researchers writers and artists who made this video possible thanks for watching and see you in the next one

Channel: Invicta

Views: 517,470

Keywords: siege tower, siege, siege warfare, assyrian army, assyrian warfare, medieval history, medieval siege tower, kingdom of heaven siege, total war siege, siege battle movie, roman army, alexander the great, siege of rhodes, siege of jerusalem, siege of alesia, history, history documentary, roman history documentary, medieval warfare

Id: fWPC9BPVYc4

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021