Early Moorish or Arab Artillery, 1250-1600

Unhappy using the same commercial spearmen to serve as artillery crew, here are some newly converted gunners. The heavy bombard forms part of my Hafsid (Tripoli and Tunis) army but will, no doubt, support other states too. Additional gunners have been raised for the Almohad-Marinid army, and Corsair raiders. There is still some debate as to the earliest reference to Arabs using bombards but some historians have given Seville in 1248. MGB

Medieval Siege Equipment

I have made it a plan to reduce my extensive accumulation of model materials (aka rubbish), having also found my collection of miniatures severely deficient in siegecraft, I have put the following together. I don't use balsa as I find it too soft and light in weight, I prefer harder woods, stiff card, and bamboo cane. With charity shop visits etc, I doubt the items cost more than £5 including paint and wood glue. The damaged stockade was actually made from the off-cuts and leftovers from the others (no wastage here!) Many sieges were enacted on towns and cities that possessed fairly low walls, so many siege towers were probably quite humble in size. While I intend to construct a larger model, this will still add another threat to any garrison. I know these items will enhance my games, hope you find them of interest. (Have included a few figures to help with scale.)

As a footnote to the above. The stockade sections were constructed mainly for my Balkan and Russian games but there are occasional references to the Moorish and Reconquista states using wooden stockades to supplement town and castle defences! Not so strange when we remember that many surviving castles in Spain were built over 8-11th century fortifications that typically included wood stockades, not that dissimilar to northern Europe.