Counterweight trebuchet

Timeline

1. c. 1200–1250Levant and Sicily · SicilyCounterweight trebuchet technology may have reached Western Europe via the Islamic world and Byzantium; in the early 13th century French and English engineers, building on Crusade experience, improved the pivot, counterweight box and throwing arm proportions, achieving ranges of over three hundred meters.
2. c. 1341–1350castle siege lines of northern France · PicardyIn the 1340s both English and French deployed large counterweight trebuchets (trebuchet) in sieges of castles such as Calais and Avranches, using ton-scale counterweights to hurl 300-kilogram stones against walls; hired engineers and carpenters assembled them with the army, making them standard equipment of early Hundred Years' War siege warfare.
3. c. 1400–1500southwestern France · AquitaineIn the 15th century bronze and iron cannon surpassed trebuchets in range and destructive power; counterweight trebuchets were still used when ammunition was scarce or incendiaries needed to be hurled, but after the last large-scale sieges such as Constantinople they gradually left the front-line siege ranks.