page_title: Trebuchet
section_title: Terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Trebuchet / Terminology
context_page_description: A trebuchet is a type of catapult that uses a long arm to throw a projectile. It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder.
  There are two main types of trebuchets. The first is the traction trebuchet, or mangonel, which uses manpower to swing the arm. It first appeared in China in the 4th century BC. Carried westward by the Avars, the technology was adopted by the Byzantines in the late 6th century AD and by their neighbors in the following centuries.
  The later, and often larger, counterweight trebuchet, also known as the counterpoise trebuchet, uses a counterweight to swing the arm. It appeared in both Christian and Muslim lands around the Mediterranean in the 12th century, and made its way back to China via Mongol conquests in the 13th century.
context_section_description: Traction trebuchet and counterweight trebuchet are modern terms (retronyms), not used by contemporary users of the weapons. The term traction trebuchet was created mainly to distinguish this type of weapon from the onager, a torsion powered catapult which is often conflated in contemporary sources with the mangonel, which was used as a generic term for any medieval stone throwing artillery. Both the traction and counterweight trebuchets have been called mangonel at one point or another. Confusion between the onager, mangonel, trebuchet and other catapult types in contemporary terminology has led some historians today to use the more precise traction trebuchet instead, with counterweight trebuchet used to distinguish what was before called simply a trebuchet. Some modern historians use mangonel to mean exclusively traction trebuchets, some call traction trebuchets traction mangonels, and counterweight trebuchets counterweight mangonels.
  The mangonel is called al-manjaniq in Arabic. In China the traction trebuchet was called the pao (砲) while the counterweight trebuchet was called the huihuipao (Muslim trebuchet).
caption: The onager was a torsion powered weapon used in Europe from the fourth until the sixth century AD
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