 Fantasy: August 02, 2006 Issue [#1186] |
  Fantasy
This week: Edited by: John~Ashen  
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Fantasy! It comes in all flavors and subgenres. In the realm of the imagination, boundaries become meaningless. I'll be pointing out different styles and offering advice on key elements of fantasy writing. Enjoy  --John~Ashen |
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Siege Warfare
A siege is what happens when an attacker comes to a city or castle which refuses to surrender and cannot be easily taken by a frontal assault. This is a prolonged engagement against a fixed, fortified position. The castle isn't going anywhere, and the defenders have dug in for the long haul.
The Blockade
The first thing to do in a siege is to make sure to bring enough troops. The conventional figure for laying siege is a 3-to-1 advantage over the defenders. An general estimate to overrun the enemy fortress is 10-to-1.
Once you have enough troops, you should surround the enemy position. This does more than cut off their escape routes. It chokes off their supply lines and communication to outside forces. Plus your troops will need any remaining local farms and water supplies for your own camp.
Make sure to cut off any river or sea approaches, too. You will probably be denuding the local forests while setting up your own supply lines.
The Attrition
Now that the castle is surrounded, siege is laid. Time to inflict damage on the enemy fortifications. If you damage the enemy walls enough, you can charge and try to overrun the position. Any casualties you inflict at this stage are considered a bonus side effect.
Using wood from the defenders' own forest, build your siege weapons. This takes some time and effort, but it's better than bringing these cumbersome devices all the way from your homeland.
Catapults use tension energy to hurl large rocks in low arcs. Trebuchets use gravity of a counterweight to lob boulders in high arcs. Ballistae are crossbow-like, firing massive spears. As long as you don't run out of rocks, you can sit back and hope to knock down the enemy's walls or gates. Adding oil and fire to the hurled stones is a good way to cause extra damage to the buildings inside the castle. Plus it keeps the defenders busy putting out fires instead of trying to fight back.
One rare tactic is sapping. This is basically digging a tunnel under the castle walls. You can dig farther and hope to enter the city, or you can blow up your own tunnel, causing the overhead walls to sink down into the hole.
Assuming the walls withstand bombardment, the other attrition going on is food and water supply shortages. Your army must forage from the nearby farms, forest, and sea. The defenders must make do with whatever supplies they have stored within the city. The supply situation on both sides is what usually determines when the siege comes to a decision point - surrender for the enemy, or assault or withdrawal for the attackers.
The Assault
When your supplies are low and you're desperate, or when your army has inflicted a respectable amount of damage on the enemy fortifications, it is time to begin the assault. You begin outside of the enemy's catapult range.
Your army charges with a variety of siege weapons. The most common is the battering ram. It's basically a long tree trunk with a sharpened tip. Like an arrow, you concentrate all the forward momentum and the ram's mass into one point, which hopefully will smash the enemy gate. Advanced battering rams roll on wheels and have overhead defense against arrows.
A siege ladder is levered up to the castle walls. Your troops will take enemy arrow fire while climbing it; hanging aprons between the ladder rungs helps defend against that. Siege hooks are grappling hooks that you tug to try to pull down fortifications like spear embankments or partially torn gates. Siege towers are platforms rolled right up against the enemy wall. Hopefully the platforms are built high enough that your warriors can step off it straight onto the walls. A staircase in the back lets the rest of your army follow.
The above siege weapons require stable, flat ground before they can operate. Many front-line soldiers carry wooden planks to throw down over pit traps and moats, so the followers have a smooth path to the front. Shields are also important in forming overhead shield walls, which allow large forces to approach the castle without taking too many casualties from defensive arrows.
The Breach
The ultimate goal of the assault is to breach the enemy fortifications. If you take and hold a large section of the enemy walls, your army can pour in at that beachhead. If you burn or mangle the enemy gates, your army can pour right in. Once the defenses are breached, the "high ground" defensive advantage is lost.
Street-to-street combat follows. Every moment the attackers are not pushed back out, more of the invading army enters and the more the enemy is outnumbered. They usually fall back to the town hall or palace for a last stand defense.
Dealing with the Dead
In long sieges, it is not uncommon for both sides to call cease-fires to burn or bury the battlefield dead. As if the stink weren't bad enough, everyone knows that disease will set in if the bodies are ignored. In these truce times, warriors will remark upon how crazy it is that bitter enemies can be so civil momentarily.
One notable - probably the first - instance of biological warfare occurred during the Siege of Caffa. The Mongol army catapulted disease-infected corpses into the city. Unfortunately they infected themselves in the process, and both sides were soon miserable with the plague. The Plague then spread across Europe and wiped out about a third of every living human in that generation.
Sieges in the Movies
The Lord of the Rings movies feature two nice sieges. In the Battle of Helm's Deep, orcs use a sapper to take down the wall above the sewer. In Troy, the Trojan walls are concave in formation, drawing the Greek armies into one avenue of approach under their expect bowfire.
In Timeline, tunnelers open the castle gates from the inside after a trebuchet bombardment. In The 13th Warrior, the attackers tear apart the village's wooden stake embankments with siege hooks.
You can find other sieges in The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, The Patriot, and Braveheart. I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of movies, but I don't want to include the war movies which are solely field engagements. |
Some interesting items I found:
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z.crespo  comments: It is interesting to hear about weapons of warfare. I more intrigued by the torture chambers of Medieval times. Like the Ironmaiden used by most Middle East lords. It was basically an iron cast sarcophagus in a standing positin with daggers placed strategically where the eyes, mouth, heart, bosom, pubis and knees should be. It was used to extort imformation from women or to punish a woman for adultery. Pretty gruesome, right?
Response: Indeed gruesome. Unfortunately, I think a discussion of torture and its many devices would be too graphic for this general-issue newsletter. You can find at least seven related items on this site by searching under keyword "torture" and genre "fantasy" using the search engine at the top of your screen.
I can also refer you to my favorite torture scene in fantasy: in the early pages of Mistress of the Empire by Raymond Feist, a potion maker is interrogated with his own drugs and anaesthetics. Another creative but non-fantasy interrogation is depicted in pages 388-399 of Without Remorse by Tom Clancy.
nebroc shares: Siege weapons can be very useful in stories that involve a large battle against a castle or fortification.
Trebuchet or the "war wolf" are one of my personal favourites! They have to ability to go great distances in their shot and can create very large holes in a wall!
Don’t confuse this with a mangonel, a smaller weapon in which the power for flinging the missile came from twisted ropes or animal guts.
The very first Trebuchet-like weapon built, was built by the Chinese in around 400 BC, although it was just a small, hand-held seige weapon.
The word trebuchet came into English from an Old French word, which at first meant to stumble or trip. The counterbalance on a Trebuchet was called the "swape".
So if you wish to use a really cool and effective siege weapon in your story, then consider the Trebuchet!
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