Except in cases in which a commander intended to use a besieged town as bait to lure an enemy army into battle, from the attacker’s standpoint the more quickly the targeted town was captured, the better. A simple rush at the walls, with no special tools except perhaps some ladders from the army’s baggage train, did not often succeed—but sometimes it did, and so it was usually attempted at the first moment possible, when it could be hoped the defenders would be ill prepared, either having just been driven back from the palisades or through the suburbs or perhaps taken by surprise and not yet having all taken up their arms and their positions.
The reasons such hasty assaults usually failed were the simple facts of physics and geometry. Town walls were normally high enough that even with a long spear, someone standing on the ground could not strike someone at the top, or vice versa. Hence to reach his goal, an attacking soldier had to climb up something, usually a ladder, though if the ramparts were unusually short, he might be able to reach their edge by standing on the shoulders of a comrade. If his ladder was a bit short, he would not only have to climb it while warding off blows from above, he would also, at some point, have to practically abandon any efforts at active defense to grasp the lip of the defenses and clamber up, at which point he would be terribly vulnerable to the weapons of the defenders. If his ladder was too long, projecting above the top of the wall, a defender could shove it back away from the wall, using the top of an axe for example,20 without even needing to expose himself, thus sending anyone on its rungs toppling backward, quite possibly to broken bones or a broken neck as well as failure.21 Even if his ladder happened to be just the right length— and sophisticated methods were sometimes used to try to ensure that it would be—at the top of it he would face a hand-to-hand fight with a man who had the advantages of steady footing, cover for the lower half and (assuming the wall was provided with merlons) one side of his body, and the greater power of blows driving downward rather than extending upward.22 A little reflection will enable anyone who has cleaned gutters or painted a house to appreciate what a difficult and frightening prospect that would be. But a soldier would have to be lucky even to have the opportunity for an unequal contest of that sort because of the other two key advantages of the defender: the ability to drop things and the enfilading fire provided by projecting towers.
Defenders did sometimes employ a variety of exotic missiles to prevent assailants from closing to hand strokes in the first place: pots of blinding or hot lime; beehives; boiling or burning oil, pitch, or Greek fire; molten glass or lead; heavy bars or javelins of solid iron; great beams, perhaps tipped with red-hot plowshares; roof timbers, marble columns, or spiked tree trunks rolled over the ramparts; carts full of stones or giant dumbbells made from millstones and launched down plank tracks.23 Even boiling water was sometimes used, though it would have been effective only at very short range, as it cools rapidly in moving through the air.24 Dramatic as these were, however, they were not nearly as common as simple stones, which were as cheap as they were effective in knocking someone off a ladder. More lethal, however, were arrows and bolts loosed from flanking towers. Arrow loops were positioned so that they could provide highly effective enfilading fire: in other words, so that shot would travel parallel to the walls. That meant that in a heavy assault the bowmen could hardly miss, because their targets were arrayed in a deep line for them, along the face of the wall. And as with thrown rocks or strong spear thrusts, even an impact that was blocked by a shield could cast a man down off a ladder—especially once he came within a spear length of the top of the wall and had to use his hands in fighting and not to grip the ladder.25
Wooden fortifications were vulnerable to hasty attacks by burning as well as by escalade. If the attackers could pile enough combustible material at the base of a stockade-type wall, they could start a fire that would drive off the defenders and, once the flames died down, give them access to the interior. But men or wagons bringing up bundles of dry sticks, hay, and so on were perhaps even more vulnerable to defensive fire than were teams running up scaling ladders. Defenders also used buckets of water to put out fires at the base of their walls or inside them. Hence this sort of attack was neither as easy nor as often successful as one might expect.26
To fight off a prolonged assault required vast quantities of all sorts of missiles, and often noncombatants carried these up to the men on the ramparts, at considerable risk. John Barbour, for example, describes how at the siege of Berwick in 1319, “on that day when all there were most [heavily] attacked and the shot too was thickest, women with child and small children gathered up arrows in armfuls, carrying them to those who were on the wall, and not one who was there was killed nor yet wounded; that was more a miracle of God Almighty [than man’s doing, for] I can attribute it to nothing else.”27 In addition to ammunition, women, priests, and children frequently exposed themselves to danger in carrying food and drink to the fighters on the walls. Not infrequently, women took an even more active role. In Muntaner’s defense of Gallipoli, for example, “our women defended the barbican, with stones and pieces of rock which I had placed on the wall, in so masterly a manner, it was marvellous.”28
Although each individual attacking soldier attempting to scale the wall had a large chance of failing and suffering injuries or death, he also had some chance of succeeding, especially if he had skilled bowmen providing covering fire from the ground, giving him at least a chance of making it to the top of the ladder just as the man guarding that section of the ramparts took an arrow in the face or ducked to avoid doing so. And if one or two men-at-arms made it onto the inner wall-walk, there was a good chance that they would be able to expand that small hole in the defenders’ line into a full breach, especially if they caused a panic. Hence even if the vast majority of individual soldiers in a hasty assault failed, and the large majority of hasty assaults failed overall, they could be successful. It was this logic that led commanders to order such assaults; soldiers were willing, often eager, to conduct them, partly because if a man had the good luck to be the one to successfully mount the wall, he could expect great rewards and honor, but also partly because the attempt itself, even if it failed, offered a good opportunity for a man to distinguish himself and build or uphold a reputation.
World History
