ABSTRACT
The French scholar Emmanuel Guillaume Rey maintained, already in 1871, that Frankish military architecture was greatly influenced by Byzantine castles. The sources of such a change should be sought in the political unification of the Muslim world and in the development of Muslim siege techniques that forced the Franks to make use of a better system of defensive military technology. The development of both Muslim and Frankish siege warfare techniques was never properly studied, although the number of siege events-100 in less than 85 years -is indeed astonishing. During the first forty years of Frankish presence in the Levant, the Muslims refrained from using heavy artillery in their siege warfare and preferred to employ traditional methods such as direct assault, blockade, undermining of walls and a limited use of light artillery. The acquisition of new techniques enabled the Muslims to use heavier mangonels in siege warfare.
