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As long as man has been alive, there has been war.

…and that’s okay with us.

You see, while war is hell and is responsible for things like death, sadness and loss of life, people tend to forget the GOOD things that war brings out in us.

And by good things we mean “really creative destruction”.

Whenever you have a conflict, you’ll have people who want to WIN that conflict by any means necessary. They’ll devise tactics, plan strategies, and invent machines of war that are designed to both shock and awe their enemies. Yet few of these weapons stand the test of time like those that were born in the dark ages. The ages before gunpowder and lasers and bullets.

The ages in which weapons were just frigging AWESOME.

“Four Medieval Weapons That Still Kick Ye Olde Ass”

The Catapult

When you say the word “Catapult”, everyone gets the same image in their head:

And after that image passes, (We’re really not sure why that happens to everyone, but we’re looking into it as we're convinced that it can’t be a good thing.) you start to reflect on exactly what a catapult is: a giant spoon that can fling a boulder a quarter mile.

And while this image is pretty close to the personification of awesomeness, it lacks one tiny little fact that cements the device’s place in the Kick Ass Hall of Fame…

Boulders weren’t always the main source of ammo.

Think about it. Rocks are frigging heavy, and unless you bring your own with you, you can’t always count on them laying around in fields waiting to be chucked at some dude’s castle. And even if you DO manage to find them, they’re always half buried, shaped weird, and a LOT bigger than they look when you go to pull them up. Your army spends the whole day digging in the dirt, which wastes precious time and gives the castle you’re attacking a chance to set up defenses.

So what did they use for ammunition? Well aside from oil soaked bales of hay, small rocks, jagged metal pieces, and the occasional dumbass that they tricked into “checking the bucket” for giggles, it was very common practice to use a type of psychological warfare that we like to call…

Dead f***ing cows.

Sure, you’re in a castle that’s under siege and you’re expecting the worst. Boulders, flaming balls of pitch, even buckets of metal blades and rocks raining down upon you.

It doesn’t matter. You’re ready.

You know how these things go, and that war is hell, and eventually they’re going to run out of shit to huck at your castle. You’ve seen men crushed, burned, and stabbed repeatedly and all it has done is strengthen your resolve to wait them out.

And then someone is hit with a dead f***ing cow.

If you see a buddy get taken out with a boulder – it’s devastating. He’s crushed, pulped, and killed in the heat of battle. You probably do that slow motion scream of “nooooo” that they do in war movies before pulling your sword and charging headlong into battle, emboldened by his sudden and violent death. But if that same buddy is hit with a dead and rotting cow?

You’re probably going home.

I mean you liked him and all, and you really stand behind your beliefs and convictions – but those f***ers are throwing COWS at people. How is that even remotely right? You stepped into battle to cut off arms and to stab people in the face in honorable combat; that’s what you signed up for. But no one said ANYTHING about being found a week later with your feet sticking out from under Ol’ Bessie like the wicked witch of the goddamn East.

Which just proves how brilliant of a tactic this is.

If it was me? My catapults wouldn’t shoot anything BUT cows. I’d fire the first dumbass who even tried hefting a boulder into that thing. ANYBODY could fire a rock or a burning bale of oil soaked hay…..but me?

Rotting cows are that personal touch that says "Hey, I might be trying to kill you so that I can rape your horses and ride off on your women, but I *care*."

Hell. I’d probably branch out into even weirder shit, just to win the battle even faster. If you think a dead cow is creepier than hell - wait until night, find the nearest grave yard and start launching their family back into the castle. NOTHING takes the fight out of a man like coming face to face with grandma at 140mph after she’s been dead for a year or two.

The Trebuchet

The problem with the catapult was that it had limited range. Sure, it could send a dead cow flying into your enemy’s castle, but if they saw it coming, they would rush right out and stop you – and I promise…

…they wised up to that shit QUICKLY.

It doesn’t take many exploding death cows to smarten people up.

Which brings us to the Trebuchet, which is actually a French word for “We Surrender”. (This is actually okay to say, because like the Eskimos having 402 words for snow, the French have over 9,000 words, phrases, and generalized hand gestures for “please don’t kick our cheese eating asses”.)

The Trebuchet is a long distance siege weapon, which means that you don’t even have to be in the same zip code as the people you are attacking. You just loaded it up, fired, and then went back to dying of the plague or tilling fields, or whatever it is you did for fun back before they had video games and porn.
A month later, when everyone was done fighting, the conflict was over, and everyone was beginning to heal both mentally and physically…

…the boulders fired from the Trebuchet would leave their planetary orbit, come screaming to the earth and smash into the castle you originally fired at over 30 days ago. This of course would piss everyone off and the entire cycle of war would start back up again, which is exactly what the inventor of the Trebuchet, Pierre La Douchebag intended in the first place.

This is why, to this day, it is okay to hate the French.

The Battering Ram

The Battering Ram is about as simplistic as medieval weapons come.

There were no pulleys or levers. No reloading or setting slings. You didn’t need to calculate vectors and trajectories – all you needed was a bunch of really big angry guys and a tree.

That’s it.

THAT is your weapon.

Just a bunch of huge, insane, muscle bound guys with names like Nord the Bloody running towards your castle with a tree. And while it sounds stupid, easily thwarted, or just plain silly – there is no doubt in my mind that the psychological effects this had on the people actually being attacked were devastating.

“Dude. DUDE! Look! Are they charging the f***ing castle with a TREE?”

“Jesus Christ. Who the f*** are we FIGHTING?”

The Ballista

If I am the descendant of any man in history, I pray that somewhere in my blood I carry the same genetic code as the guy who created the Ballista. Because that dude is my goddamn HERO.

Here is a guy who looked at the crossbow in his hand, and knew that while it was cool, it just wasn’t cool ENOUGH. He probably turned it over, studied it, stroked his beard lightly in thought (because all real men have beards) and said to himself:

“Ya know…I can make this shit BIGGER.”

And then he f***ing DID.

And I’ll bet you anything that the entire time he was designing it, he was giggling his ass off. When he completed it, he probably went door-to-door trying to start fights and instigate a war just so that he could have a reason to use it. When the chance to sign up for battle came, his name was probably at the top of the list, in bold, underlined twice.

Ten bucks says that he didn’t even duck when people came after him with their normal sized crossbows. He just looked at them and chuckled to himself before pulling the big red sheet off of his Ballista and winking playfully at the attacking soldiers and their “cute” little weapons.

The Ballista was the first ever man made device that induced penis envy moments before death. Oh sure, you could fill a guy full of arrows and crossbow bolts – and he would die. Yet he’d feel good about his death and would probably go down in a blaze of glory and praying to his Gods…

But a Ballista bolt through the chest?

That didn’t inspire noble deaths and poems – that shit was the definition of overkill. It was a medieval “pwning” and EVERYONE around you knew it. It wasn’t a guy just shooting you in order to win a fight, or killing you in the name of his cause…

It was a guy impaling you through the chest.

With his penis.

And if you die like that, there is no chair waiting for you in Valhalla.

There is just another Ballista on the other side, operated by a bunch of dead dudes who are trying not to giggle so that they don’t alarm you when you open the doors. Because they REALLY want to see your face right before they pull the trigger.

And I can’t blame them, because I know that it would be funny...

-Coyote