The only known trebuchet casualty in history | Hacker News Reader

The only known trebuchet casualty in history

arstechnica.com

69 pointsTomte19 comments

Simply not true. See: https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/ae8c0c7b-0905-4...

There have been some serious injuries, too:

https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2006/10/child_tv...

Not the only known trebuchet casualty in history, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/oct/31/highereduc...

So, is this because Trebuchet are not particularly lethal, or because they were not used much?

They typically weren't trying to hit people with them.

Trebuchet were used primarily to hammer the walls of the castle to break them down. Not really possible to aim at a person; the soldiers clambering over the broken walls will do that.

People didn't really bother recording cause of death for every casualty on medieval battlefields

the key word is "known"

More like ‘named’. There are accounts of trebuchets causing hundreds of deaths, but individual casualties in medieval battles are rarely identified.

This person is not named, unless you consider Skeleton 150 a name. 'known' is the appropriate word here.

Trebuchets crushed their victims so hard that they were erased from history.

This is the only man known to have died in a medieval siege of a medium-sized boulder falling on him.

Trebuchets were used for a variety of purposes in siege warfare, from (uniquely) breaching walls with large boulders to (less uniquely) setting things on fire to (probably) suppressing massed formations of archers with smaller shot. But smaller shot would not leave a characteristic trebuchet injury, it would leave a generic blunt-force trauma injury.

In some cases they’d hurl dead cattle, people’s heads, and flaming projectiles over the walls to damage morale and potentially damage infrastructure.

And to spread disease.

> they’d hurl dead cattle

I learned that from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I would not want to hurl dead cattle ("Valuable beef primal cuts") across the walls onto a starving populace.

Clearly you guys have never played medieval ii total war!

"Only known trebuchet casualty" - also known as "the guy who had the worst luck in 14th century Scotland." Imagine surviving the siege, then taking a 90kg rock to the back at 300km/h. At least it was quick

> surviving the siege

It's pretty clear he didn't pull that off...

Also pretty clear that there are plenty of unknown casualties from that period, and that GP is an AI spambot

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