My last art competition was won by Jack Sargeant, and as his prize
he got to pick a topic which I then had to make a video about, and this is that video.
And the topic he picked was "Sieges and Siege-Craft".
Great choice of topic Jack, but may I point out that it's actually quite a large topic,
so I hope you forgive me if I don't do perfect justice to the entirety of it.
I won't be talking about every ruse, every fortification design, every weapon used by every culture in all periods.
But I hope to make a few general points, well, two main general points
and a number of lesser ones along the way.
So my first general point is that there is a way of thinking of fortifications.
Think of them as devices that enable small numbers of men to hold out against large numbers of men.
That is sort of what they're for.
Now if you're defending a position, ideally you want the minimum number of people on the inside,
because if you have more than is necessary they'll be eating food and drinking water,
and getting annoyed and bored and into mischief, and perhaps one of them will betray you.
Generally having more people than you need on the inside is a fuss, bother and itch, you don't want it.
So before sieges it wasn't very uncommon for people to get rid, to cast out, all the people on the inside
that they felt were not going to contribute very much to the defence of the place,
whose loyalties were perhaps suspect, and were frankly just going to just be another mouth to feed.
"Bye! Go and fend for yourself."
So that was something that happened before sieges quite a bit. Now,
if you have a fortified city here, another one here, another one here, and an unfortified city here,
then when the brigands come riding through, which city are they going to attack?
(This one.)
Now the people in the fortified cities, they could sleep easily at night.
They ... would be in calm repose because they knew that a lot of people living
in a big fortified city were just brigand-proof. "The brigands aren't going to take us on."
And they would be right to, because what you do is you say, "Well, we've got this defensive position,
we can hold out against these small groups,
because it takes a large group to stand even a chance of taking us on.
So, brigands, we don't have to worry about them, it's only really big armies that we have to worry about."
And of course in the ancient world really big armies were really big.
I mean, they were many tens of thousands strong.
In 1415, when Henry V was on holiday in France,
you know, taking Harfleur and beating the French at Agincourt, he had 6-9,000 men.
Yeah, that's how many men you needed in an army to take on the might of France in his day.
But in the ancient world cities were the things that got besieged, not castles,
and they had many, many thousands of people living in them.
Rome: when Hannibal was being criticised for not taking on Rome,
Rome had between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people living in it, and was very well fortified.
It was an incredibly tough nut to crack, it was a gargantuan task to take on,
and he didn't take it on. He actually didn't have that big an army.
He didn't have the resources to take on Rome directly like that.
But he could, with his resources, take on the smaller cities about the place.
Now in the ancient world if you have tens of thousands of people to do something it's quite a different nature.
You see in the medieval period things were small. A medieval castle, this may surprise you,
when the lord was not in residence might have 5 or 6 blokes in it, something like that.
It doesn't take very many men to look after a castle. There's not a huge amount in it to steal.
And it's very well fortified, and the guys on the inside have got crossbows and halberds and things.
And brigands wouldn't take on a castle.
When the lord was in residence, or perhaps trouble was expected, there might be
20 or 30 men in a typical castle from medieval England. And maybe 15 other people.
It was a very masculine world as well, you didn't want the general population in the [castle].
The wife and daughters of the lord might be there, so there would be a few women.
And you might have a washerwoman or two because washing clothes
was something that men didn't do in medieval England.
But the rest of the servants and the cooks would all be men, generally adult men.
And even the washer women might be brought in, clean the clothes.
"Thank you. Oh that's very lovely and clean. Right, bye bye, go away."
Back to just the lads in the castle.
So medieval castles were quite small, and the amount of personnel within a castle is quite small.
The biggest, the Krak des Chevaliers for instance,
(which wasn't actually called Krak des Chevaliers when it was garrisoned, ... that name comes about in the 19th century),
but anyway, that had a garrison of 2,000. Which by medieval standards was huge.
But in the ancient world things were different in scale. You didn't besiege castles, you besieged typically cities.
And you had tens of thousands of men.
And when you've got very large numbers of men like that, you can go about the siege in quite a different way.
For instance you've got the manpower to simply build a ramp.
There's something called an
but you might just think of it as a ramp, a socking great big earth ramp.
So the city has, let's say, got a 70 foot wall. Yeah, you couldn't possibly get over a 70 foot wall.
No brigands would take on a 70 foot wall, it's just beyond them.
But if you've got tens of thousands of men, you could say, "Right, you 10,000 men over there,
my orders for you this week is every single man has to deliver 12 baskets of earth onto the
and then the rest of the day you can lounge around and drink and talk to your friends and play dice."
And if every ... man in an army of 10,000 strong did that, and then handed over to another 10,000,
you'd have that ramp built in a week, less than a week in fact.
And a lot of ancient city sieges were over quite quickly.
If a big enough army turned up then they were able to build these massive siege works
so quickly that the inhabitants didn't really stand that much of a chance.
Now what could you do if someone's building an
In a lot of periods it would happen from about 60 yards out. 60 yards out is effective bowshot.
So you would set up a number of mantlets and screens and so forth to protect yourself,
and you'd start building your
Which would extend in height and length, both at the same time, towards the wall.
And as you are watching them do that you think, "Okay, we can make the wall taller."
Okay, now if you make the wall taller you're increasing the area of the wall.
But to make the ramp bigger you have to increase the volume of the ramp,
because the ramp isn't just a tall thin narrow thing, it's largely a pile of earth, so that would just collapse.
So you have to have the sides of the ramp at this sort of angle to support it.
So it's a big volume of earth to come to the top of the [wall].
So, you sort of have an advantage on the inside because you only have to increase by area,
whereas the attackers have to increase by volume.
But there are usually an awful lot more attackers, and so they were able to do that.
And they would also put logs and so forth into the embankment to tie it together and make it a bit more stable.
Although one drawback of that is it meant that you could set fire to an
And this did happen on a number of occasions.
In the Siege of Edessa for instance, when the Persians were attacking,
the Romans foiled them by digging a room into the centre of the
and filling it with pitch and sulphur and ... timber treated with cedar oil and so forth,
lots of really flammable stuff essentially, and then setting fire to it.
And I often wonder how they managed to get enough air to it.
So presumably they didn't just tunnel into the room. They must have ... had a
tunnel out somewhere so they could get a through draft. Otherwise, where did the oxygen ...
But anyway, they were able to set fire to the
But there was a problem of course because the Persians might notice this,
but they disguised the source of where all the smoke was coming from
by throwing loads and loads of pots of burning coals onto the
And they created loads of smoke, and so the Persians didn't notice until it was too late that their
So that's one thing you could do. Another thing you could do is just physically remove the centre of the
by tunnelling out from your wall and just digging it away.
And that's what the Plataeans did when they were besieged by the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War.
Now if you read an account a one siege, ... I think the siege of Plataea though in Thucydides,
(or Thoukydides as they call him in modern Greece), is an absolute cracker and that might be the best.
I just remember the first time I ever read that, being so enthused by it.
I think Thucydides is my favourite ancient historian, anyway.
So the Plataeans put a hole in their own wall, went out through it,
and dug away the ramp that the Spartans were creating.
But the Spartans eventually got wise to that and they filled up the hole,
and they were able to get their
But they were still having to pile onto it to get to the necessary height
because the Plataeans made their wall much taller and a little bit thicker.
So then Plataeans dug down on the inside of their city, tunnelled underneath the
and secretly removed earth from the middle of the bulk of it.
And another thing they did was they built a semi-circular wall on the inside of their fortification.
So if ever the Spartans did actually manage to get over the wall using their ramp
they would find themselves, oh, having conquered a small semi-circular space.
And then they've got another wall to deal with, and then
how are they going to get tens of thousands of people in here to build a ramp
because it's really small and they keep dropping stones on us and ... you know, this is awful.
So, loads of other things happened in the Siege of Plataea, maybe it's a video on its own.
Anyway, definitely worth reading if you can get access to Thucydides, it's bound to be available online.
So that's the
when you've got armies of tens of thousands
these sort of things become really quite feasible, and quite easy to do in fact.
And ... loads of sieges were successful because of the threat of this.
Although the amount of labour was also made enormously greater in the Hellenistic period
when people started producing really powerful catapults
and the defenders could use these to stop the engineers making the
Which meant that you didn't have to start 60 yards away from the wall,
you had to start 120, 150 yards away from the wall to get a safe location.
Now, how would you actually build the
is have a little shed that you could work in, so that you don't get shot.
A
And
So ... this would be a light wooden frame with perhaps two layers of leather,
and sometimes they put seaweed in between, packed in seaweed in between.
Which would be spongy and absorbent against the impacts of missiles.
And was also quite good against incendiary devices because the seaweed would stop the thing catching fire.
You often see them pictured by modern artists as being on wheels,
but as far as we know in fact a lot of them just had the bottoms of the frames trimmed to a spike.
And ... there was no wheels, just everyone went, "One, two, three," grabbed hold of the inside of the frame,
and "lift," and walk, walk, walk, walk, and "drop," down.
And then you've exposed the next little bit of the
you start pouring baskets of earth down the front face of the ramp.
And then you can also lay down rails for bringing up more siege engines.
And they often smoothed off the top as well with fine rocks and mortar and so forth.
... Oh, and ... the front [shed] of course would just protect the workers right at the front,
but you'd have several more behind forming a tunnel.
And every time the front thing went forwards a bit, everyone else would "Hup, yer, op, drop,"
and the whole tunnel would go forwards, protecting the workers.
You could also bring forwards a siege tower.
Now the siege tower doesn't necessarily have to deliver troops into the town,
because the ramp's going to do that. But you'd still want a siege tower on the ramp.
One thing is it's really intimidating. So there you are, a guard on the wall, and you see this tower coming above you.
And ... the people at the top of the tower can see over your head into the town,
they can watch what you're doing, and that's really intimidating.
And of course if you try to stop the workers doing stuff by shooting them and so forth,
then archers on the tower can make life difficult for you.
So the archery support, the missile support, that a tower afforded was very useful for the workers,
even if the tower itself wasn't ... used for the final assault.
So there you go, so ancient world, massive difference in scale in what you could achieve as an attacker,
and what you were defending as a defender.
To go to the opposite end of the scale, for instance, a very famous and oft quoted example
of a siege in England is Corfe Castle, which was defended by Lady Mary Bankes.
... Her husband was away and she decided,
"Well, I'm not going to give in to these Parliamentarian fiends. I'm going to defend this castle with my ...
five blokes." She had five men to command.
And successfully they held out. After while she managed to get 80 blokes in.
They were being attacked by 500 or 600 hundred [Parliamentarians],
and they held out for the necessary six weeks, and even inflicted over 100 casualties on the enemy,
despite only losing two of their own men.
So well done ... Lady Mary Bankes.
Yes, so the difference of scale is enormous.
And the function of a fortification is
to allow a small number men to defend against a large number of men.
So if you've got a large number of people on the inside and you perhaps outnumber people on the outside,
just sally out, just see them off, just physically go out there and see them off.
Being in a siege in the ancient world is not pleasant,
you really wouldn't want to endure a siege if you didn't have to.
Right, that's enough for now. And, as always, don't feed chocolates to dogs.
[ How many Spartans did it take to refill an oil lamp? ]
Lindybeige!
[ 3,584. One to force a helot to do it, and 3,583 to prevent an uprising of the