Frederick Engels. Catapult
Catapult (Gr. xcn-d, against, and TTCVWOO, to hurl), an ancient military engine for throwing stones, darts, and other missiles, invented in Syracuse, in the reign of Dionysius the elder. It acted upon the principle of the bow, and consisted of wood frame-work, a part of which was elastic, and furnished with tense cords of hair or muscle. Catapults were of various sizes, being designed either for field-service or bombardments. The largest of them projected beams 6 feet long and weighing 60 lbs. to the distance of 400 paces, and Josephus gives instances of their throwing great stones to the distance of l/[4] of a mile.a The Romans employed 300 of them at the siege of Jerusalem.[314] From the time of Julius Caesar it is not distinguished by Latin authors from the ballista, which was originally used only for throwing masses of stone.
Written probably before February 18, Reproduced from The New Ameri-1858 can Cyclopaedia
Endnotes
[4] Acre was captured by Richard Coeur de Lion in 1191 during the third cru-sade (1189-92). The crusades were military colonialist expeditions by the big West European feudal lords and Italian trading cities under the religious banner of recovering Jerusalem and other "Holy Lands" from the Mohammedans. Peasants also took part in the crusades, hoping thus to be freed from feudal oppression. History knows eight main crusades (1096-99, 1147-49, 1189-92, 1202-04, 1217-21, 1228-29, 1248-54 and 1270). Not only Mohammedan states in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia but also the Christian Byzantine Empire were the objects of the crusaders' aggressive strivings. The crusaders' conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean were not lasting, and were recovered by the Mohammedans. The Knights of St. John (also Hospitallers)—members of a Catholic military order founded by the crusaders in Palestine early in the twelfth century. After the defeat at Acre in 1291 they transferred their seat to Cyprus, then, early in the fourteenth century, to Rhodes and in 1530 to Malta (from that time on it was also called the order of Malta); since the nineteenth century its seat has been in Rome.
[314] The siege of Jerusalem by the Roman general Vespasian and later, after he became Emperor, by his son Titus, took place in A.D. 68-70, during the Judaean war (A.D. 66-73) caused by the Jewish uprising against Roman domination. After the capture of the city walls the besieged inhabitants continued fighting for a long time in the Temple of Jerusalem and in the streets.