ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the historical development, construction, performance, and dynamic characteristics of those types of missile-throwing machines that derived their propulsive force from the rotation of beams supported at a fulcrum. The word "trebuchet" has been used for convenience to designate the rotating-beam siege machines, in the full knowledge that other terms were also used in the Middle Ages, and that the question of nomenclature remains unresolved. The counterweight trebuchet came into general use in Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century, so there is some reason to believe that the traction trebuchet was never such an important weapon in European armies as it was in Islam and China. The trade of "trebuchator," however, appears to have been well established in England by the first quarter of the thirteenth century, where we have the names of a number of engineers whose chief responsibility was the construction of trebuchets.
