ss the Guadalquivir, but lighted unharmed upon the rocks beyond.
Ramon de Muntaner relates how King James of Aragon, besieging Majorca in
1228, vowed vengeance against the Saracen King because he shot Christian
prisoners into the besiegers' camp with his trebuchets (pp. 223-224). We
have mentioned one kind of corruption propagated by these engines; the
historian Wassaf tells of another. When the garrison of Dehli refused to
open the gates to Alauddin Khilji after the murder of his uncle, Firuz
(1296), he loaded his mangonels with bags of gold and shot them into the
fort, a measure which put an end to the opposition.

Ibn Batuta, forty years later, describes Mahomed Tughlak as entering Dehli
accompanied by elephants carrying small _balistae_ (_ra'adai_), from which
gold and silver pieces were shot among the crowd. And the same king, when
he had given the crazy and cruel order that the population of Dehli should
evacuate the city and depart to Deogir, 900 miles distant, having found
two men skulking behind, one of whom was paralytic and the other blind,
caused the former to be shot from a mangonel. (_I.B._ III. 395, 315.)

Some old drawings represent the shaft as discharging the shot from a kind
of spoon at its extremity, without the aid of a sling (e.g. fig. 13);
but it may be doubted if this was actually used, for the sling was
essential to the efficiency of the engine. The experiments and
calculations of Dufour show that without the sling, other things remaining
the same, the range of the shot would be reduced by more than a half.

In some of these engines the counterpoise, consisting of a timber case
filled with stones, sand, or the like, was permanently fixed to the
butt-end of the shaft. This seems to have been the _Trebuchet_ proper. In
others the counterpoise hung free on a pivot from the yard; whilst a third
kind (as in fig. 17) combined both arrangements. The first kind shot most
steadily and truly; the second with more force.

Those machines, in which the force of men pulling cords took the place of
the counterpoise, could not discharge such weighty shot, but they could be
worked more rapidly, and no doubt could be made of lighter scantling. Mr.
Hewitt points out a curious resemblance between this kind of Trebuchet and
the apparatus used on the Thames to raise the cargo from the hold of a
collier.

The Emperor Napoleon deduces from certain passages in mediaeval writers
that the _Mangonel_ was similar to the