Notice: An earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
Human creativity seems limitless, for both good and bad. The advances that have brought us to where we are do not hide that we have also used that talent for much less benevolent areas. Create weapons of destruction as powerful as possible It has been a constant in human history, and our talent for beating the staff seems to have been especially spectacular.
This is demonstrated by some of the most incredible ideas that helped to destroy our fellow men. Horrible weapons and systems in essence, but wonderfully ingenious in their conception. We are not even talking about the arms advances of the 20th century or the just started 21st century. We are moving back to a time when we seemed much more limited in resources, but during which ways to kill were devised of which any bloodthirsty would be proud.
A most creative middle age
In medieval times people had very bad slime. Religion dominated the creative landscape, so supporting science was problematic unless you used your wits to be able to kill the enemies of faith, whatever it was.
In that video they tell us about some striking examples. One of them places us at the beginning of the 14th century, with a King Edward I who besieged the famous castle of Stirling – yes, that of ‘Braveheart’. That fortress was holding up quite well the siege with those bumps (a kind of catapult) of standard size, but the king (or someone close to him who failed to go down in history) came up with a curious idea: build the “megafundibulum”.
The called “Warwolf” turned into something fearsome. So much so that when those defending the castle saw what they were building the royal carpenters tried to surrender. Eduardo I did not accept the surrender, of course. “Since we have built it, it will have to be tested.” What the normal bumps had not achieved was achieved by that monster of medieval mechanics, which threw stones of more than 100 kilos and caused an absurd level of destruction for the time.
Another weapon that has gone down in history is the famous “Greek fire”, which despite its name was not invented by the Greeks, but by the Byzantine Empire. That substance, which is something like a precursor of modern napalm, managed to act even in the water, and in fact was a powerful ally in sea battles, with ships that even had a kind of “flamethrower” that attacked other vessels. .
Another weapon that would go down in history was used by Saint Olga of Kiev, that Santa had little. At least for his enemies, the Drevlians, whom he slaughtered with a singular method. In one of the confrontations they ended up asking for mercy and offering a payment with honey and skins. Olga asked for three pigeons and three sparrows from each house, and upon receiving them she used them by tying a piece of sulfur and small pieces of cloth. Returning to their nests, those components managed to catch fire and suddenly the entire village was on fire at the same time.
Weapons for all tastes and situations
These examples are combined with many others that show all kinds of medieval weapons that were used to try to have competitive advantages in warfare. The morning stars they only had the poetic name, but this variation of the mace was also accompanied by swords with sword-breaking mechanisms, daggers from which two additional edges suddenly appeared, or the aforementioned foothills, from which not only stones were thrown: animal parts were thrown killed in anticipation of chemical warfare: to spread disease.
The floats with wheels from which blades protruded that destroyed the troops on foot or on horseback were not a bad invention either, as were the evolutions of the popular crossbows: the arbalests had a pulley mechanism so powerful that it was possible hit targets within half a kilometer, and their effect was such that they became famous for being ignoble weapons for being able to kill the knights who had trained all their lives for it with a single shot at an almost impossible distance.
In fact they ended up being banned in wars between Catholics and Christians at the Second Lateran Council. Of course: if you wanted to use it in the holy war against the Saracens in the crusades, you could do so with the blessing of the Church. It would be more. To heretics, neither bread nor water. Modern anti-tank and anti-personnel mines they had their medieval version in the caltrops, which ended up obstructing the advance of horse camels and even war elephants. That mechanism has persisted even today, and thistles are still used as a method of stopping vehicles at police checkpoints, for example.
Much more famous is the boiling oil that served to defend the assaults on castles, and that was much more bloody than boiling water. In those assaults the battering rams were used to knock down the gates of the castles, and something similar happened in the sea: in the siege of Antwerp of 1584-1485 of the 16th century the Dutch took advantage of the idea of an Italian named Federico Giambelli who got angry with Spain and put his ingenuity at the service of the enemy.
The result: ships that had a turret made of stones and bricks with objects that worked as shrapnel and that were also filled with gunpowder.
These mine ships they managed to kill a hundred Spanish soldiers, who had to react by building counter-docks to defend themselves against these ships. In the end the Spaniards would end up entering Antwerp and they made that famous phrase come true: they put a pike in Flanders.