The term "artillery" for many is associated with guns, howitzers, mortars, etc. However, people created field and siege weapons long before gunpowder appeared. The words "ballista" and "catapult" have long been heard by everyone, although most often in movies or computer games these devices are not depicted quite correctly. A lesser known machine was onager. This is an ancient Roman weapon with which stones or barrels of incendiary mixture were thrown.
The oldest of the metal parts of onager found by archaeologists date back to the 3rd century BC. e., and from the IV century, these machines appear in written sources. The most detailed descriptions of what onager is and where this machine was used was left by the ancient Roman historian Amian Marcellinus and his contemporary Vegetius. Let us consider this question in more detail.
Device device
Onagr - throwing machine, driven by a torsion bar, i.e., by the force of twisting. It consisted of several main parts:
- a powerful wooden base (frame) placed on wheels;
- lever with torsion bar made of strong and elastic fibers;
- crossbar that stopped the lever when fired;
- the gate, which cocked the lever into a fighting position.
At the heart of any throwing machine lies the force that drives the projectile. In modern artillery, this is the energy of a powder explosion, while the ancient tools were mainly torsion, that is, they used the power of fibers twisted by a bundle - cores, hair or ropes. The end of the lever was inserted inside the harness. The lever was pulled through the gate or in another way.
Operating principle
For a shot, the lever, overcoming the resistance of the torsion bar, was lowered down using a collar and fixed with a special pin. At the right moment, the knocked-out hairpin released the lever, which, under the action of the torsion, described the arc until it collided with the crossbar. At the moment of the sling strike, fixed at the end of the lever, in turn, described the arc and opened, throwing the projectile.
To mitigate the “recoil” during the shot, a straw mattress was attached to the crossbar. But even under such conditions, the car could not be parked directly on the city wall, because the vibration during the shots threatened to destroy the masonry. Onagr was placed either on a bed of turf, or on a platform of bricks.
Meaning of the word “onager”
There are at least two versions of why the car got this name:
- when fired due to a lever hitting a crossbar, the machine bounced, which made it look like a kicking onager - a donkey;
- the ancient Roman historian Amian Marcellinus wrote that during hunting for wild donkeys, animals, while running with blows of their hind legs, threw stones out of the ground, which sometimes seriously injured hunters.
Onagr is a wild donkey. Another version of the name - "scorpion" - onager was probably due to the similarity of the movement of the lever when fired with a sting of the above insect.
Combat use
Unlike trebuchet or ballista, onager is a machine that was used not for the siege of fortresses, but for their defense. Another likely use is field artillery for direct fire. The historian Vegetius wrote that every Roman legion was armed with 10 such weapons.
However, the effectiveness of onager in field use is doubtful due to the long reload time with a small firing range. When defending the fortress, when the attackers are forced to be at a distance, this is not a big problem. But if the armies met “in the open field”, it is unlikely that the calculation of such an instrument would have time to make many shots before it was eliminated.
Modern reconstruction
In modern images, the onager throwing lever is often shown as a spoon. This is actually a fiction. In the only verbal description of the machine that has survived to this day and left by Amian Marcellin, a sling is mentioned. In addition, the sling at the moment of impact on the crossbar made a sharp jerk forward, throwing out the stone and giving it additional acceleration. A spoon-shaped lever devoid of this advantage would be simply disadvantageous, and moreover, more difficult to manufacture.
For example, in the reconstruction of Ralph Payne-Galloway at the end of the 19th century, a machine with a total weight of 2 tons threw stones with a sling at 460 meters, and a “spoon” at only 330 meters. The mass of the stone was 3.6 kg. The researcher estimated that a stone in one talent (the ancient Roman measure of weight, equal to 26 kg) of his onagra metal would be 70 meters.
A powerful machine, built by students of an American school in the 70s of the XX century, threw stones weighing 9 kg by almost 150 meters, and stones by 34 kg - by 87 meters. The students also tried to throw cobblestones weighing 175 kg. He fell next to the car, but the structure itself was not affected by the shot.
Modern military men would certainly look at Roman cars with contempt. Nevertheless, to ancient people unfamiliar with gunpowder and other explosives, a machine throwing stones the size of a human head several hundred meters might seem like a very formidable weapon. Even a distance of 80-100 meters is quite sufficient to damage the troops storming the fortress wall.
Marcellinus describes the situation when the Romans during the defense of one of the fortresses destroyed the siege towers of the Persians with the help of onager. In addition, the damage that a person can do to a stone weighing 30 kilograms, flying at a decent speed, probably had a strong demoralizing effect on those who were nearby. It cannot be ruled out that onager is also a psychological weapon that city defenders used to "cool the ardor" of the storming.