«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Mongol Warfare and the Creation of the Mongol Empire m 143 n [T]he people of Bokhara were driven against the citadel ... The moat had been filled with animate and inanimate and raised up with levies [non-Mongol “arrow-fodder”] and Bokharians ... all the inhabit- ants of the town, men and women, ugly and beautiful, were driven out onto the field of the musalla . Chingiz-Khan spared their lives, but the youths and full-grown men that were fit for such service were pressed into a levy ( Èashar )for the attack on Samarqand and Dabusiya 1 . Besides arrow-fodder, the Mongols used artillery against fortifications. Some kinds they made and manned themselves: [Mongol soldiers] all have to possess ... ropes for hauling [shooting] engines of war [traction catapults] 2 . The best engines were fashioned and served by Chinese artillerists; cata- pults were the most effective. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, two types of catapult of the sort called trebuchet or mangonel in Europe, manjaniq or ‘ arradah by the Muslims, pao in China, and orbu ’ ur by the Mongols, were in use in China, and were soon adopted by the Mongols 3 . Both types had a long pole pivoting on an axle set on a scaffold; the axle divided the pole into a short and a long section; the long section terminated with a sling holding a missile, the short attached to a power-source that turned the pole on its axle and impelled the sling and its shot. The first, the older “traction” type, was powered by teams of men pulling on ropes (such as the Mongol soldiers carried) tied to the short end. 4 These were labor-intensive, none too powerful, and dangerous to deploy. A team of 250 men could propel a stone of only 90 lbs for only 33 yards; the enemy’s archers could shoot accurately and pierce armor at 50 yards. The other type, the recently invented “counterweighted” catapult, resembled the traction variety, except that a weight replaced the ropes at the short end of the pole, and gravity, not muscle, impelled the missile. A crew of only 10–15 men could 1 Juvaini, I, 105–107. 2 Plano Carpini, 33. 3 Thomas T. Allsen, “The Circulation of Military Technology in the Mongolian Empire”, Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 265–93, esp p. 267–9. See also Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China , section 30, vol. 5, part 6: Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges (Cambridge UP, 1994), 225. 4 Needham, op.cit. , 212–13, fig. 75.