The Battering-ram, according to Richard of Devizes, was employed by Cœur-de-Lion at the siege of Messina: "In the meantime, the king with his troops approached the gates of the city, which he instantly forced by the application of the Battering-ram, and entering within, took possession of every part, even to Tancred's palace and the lodgings of the French around their king's quarters, which he spared out of respect to the king."
Among the stone-throwing machines, the Mangona and the Mangonella are discriminated as casting, the former large, the latter smaller stones. The monk Abbo has already, in his account of the siege of Paris in 886, mentioned the
"Mangana---- Saxa quibus jaciunt _ingentia_."
Guillaume le Breton, in the _Philippidos_, tells us:--
"Interea grossos Petraria mittit ab intus Assidue lapides, Mangonellusque _minores_."
Among the effects recorded of these great projectiles, we may cite the account of Otto of Frisinga, who tells us that when the Emperor Frederic attacked Tortona in 1155, a stone was cast from one of the periers of such magnitude, that, falling before the door of the cathedral, where three of the principal citizens were in deliberation on the best means of defending the city, it killed them all[251].
The term _mangonneaux_ is sometimes applied to the stones or other missiles discharged by the instrument. From the name _mangona_ our word _gun_ appears to be derived: a supposition that seems strengthened by the fact that the earliest "gonnes," like the mangonæ, were employed to cast stones.
The terrors of the balistæ were occasionally aggravated by their being made the instruments of a special vengeance. Thus Malmesbury informs us that, at the siege of Antioch in 1097, the Turks, irritated by losses sustained from the besieging Crusaders, "wreaked their indignation on the Syrian and Armenian inhabitants of the city; throwing, by means of their balistæ and petraries, the heads of those whom they had slain into the camp of the Franks, that by such means they might lacerate their feelings." A somewhat similar incident is reported by Froissart in his account of the siege of Thun l'Evêque in 1327[252]; so that these cruelties do not appear to be mere tales of credulous pilgrims, or inventions of monkish chroniclers.