ns_, 1833, p. 12.)

The _number_ of such engines employed was sometimes very great. We have
seen that St. Lewis captured 24 at once, and these had been employed in
the field. Villehardouin says that the fleet which went from Venice to the
attack of Constantinople carried more than 300 perriers and mangonels,
besides quantities of other engines required for a siege (ch. xxxviii). At
the siege of Acre in 1291, just referred to, the Saracens, according to
Makrizi, set 92 engines in battery against the city, whilst Abulfaraj says
300, and a Frank account, of great and small, 666. The larger ones are
said to have shot stones of "a kantar and even more." (_Makrizi_, III.
125; _Reinaud, Chroniques Arabes, etc._, p. 570; _De Excidio Urbis
Acconis_, in _Marlene and Durand_, V. 769.)

How heavy a _mangonade_ was sometimes kept up may be understood from the
account of the operations on the Nile, already alluded to. The King was
trying to run a dam across a branch of the river, and had protected the
head of his work by "cat-castles" or towers of timber, occupied by
archers, and these again supported by trebuchets, etc., in battery. "And,"
says Jean Pierre Sarrasin, the King's Chamberlain, "when the Saracens saw
what was going on, they planted a great number of engines against ours,
and to destroy our towers and our causeway they shot such vast quantities
of stones, great and small, that all men stood amazed. They slung stones,
and discharged arrows, and shot quarrels from winch-arblasts, and pelted
us with Turkish darts and Greek fire, and kept up such a harassment of
every kind against our engines and our men working at the causeway, that
it was horrid either to see or to hear. Stones, darts, arrows, quarrels,
and Greek fire came down on them like rain."

The Emperor Napoleon observes that the direct or grazing fire of the great
arblasts may be compared to that of guns in more modern war, whilst the
mangonels represent mortar-fire. And this vertical fire was by no means
contemptible, at least against buildings of ordinary construction. At the
sieges of Thin l'Eveque in 1340, and Auberoche in 1344, already cited,
Froissart says the French cast stones in, night and day, so as in a few
days to demolish all the roofs of the towers, and none within durst
venture out of the vaulted basement.

The Emperor's experiments showed that these machines were capable of
surprisingly accurate direction. And the mediaeval histories present some