Medieval Siege Weapons (2)

The medieval Islamic world provides abundant and detailed information. Descriptions of manjaniqs being like sexually excited stallion horses or camels probably refers to the upward swing of the sling or the way a stallion camel lets his tongue loll out.

Nicknames such as ‘The Bride’ and ‘The Long Haired One’ reflect the numerous pulling ropes attached to the other end of the beam. Accounts of a siege of Mecca during a civil war in 692 include a description of how such a manjaniq was used. Here the ‘shooter’ tucked up his long robes, picked up a rock, placed it in the sling and then ordered the team of rope-men to pull. Later information indicates that the ‘shooter’ did not release his hold on the sling immediately but judged his moment against the tension of the ‘pullers’.

As a result an experienced ‘shooter’ with a disciplined team of ‘pullers’ could achieve astonishing accuracy especially when, as we know from written and archaeological evidence, the missiles were shaped to a specific weight.

Al-Baladhuri’s account of the Arab siege of Daybul in what is now southern Pakistan in 712 describes how the Muslim commander, Muhammad Ibn al-Qasim, had a manjaniq called ‘The Bride’, which was operated by 500 men – probably an exaggeration. As al-Baladhuri wrote:

‘There was at Daybul a lofty budd [temple or perhaps even a statue of the Buddha] surmounted by a long pole and on this pole was a red flag which unfurled over the city.’ During the course of regular correspondence between Ibn al-Qasim and Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf, commander of Islamic forces in the east, Hajjaj advised that Ibn al-Qasim should:

Fix the manjaniq and shorten its foot and place it in the east [of the budd]. You will then call the manjaniq-master and tell him to aim at the flag-staff … So he brought down the flag-staff and it was broken.3

This remarkable shot so demoralised the garrison that the city soon fell. Numerous other mentions of the manjaniq in Islamic sources of the 7th–11th centuries show that the weapon was used against defenders on a wall, parapets, buildings inside a fortification and against ships attempting to break a blockade. By the mid-11th century the manjaniq was so common that it was used as a way of describing something else, as when Nasir-i Khusraw said that a khashab or lighthouse north of Basra, which helped ships navigate through the vast marshes of southern Iraq, was made of four large timbers ‘like a manjaniq’.