It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder. The design of a trebuchet allows it to launch projectiles of greater weights and further distances than that of a traditional catapult. There are two main types of trebuchet.
The first is the traction trebuchet , or mangonel , which uses manpower to swing the arm. It first appeared in China by the 4th century BC. It spread westward, possibly by the Avars , and was adopted by the Byzantines , Persians , Arabs , and other neighboring peoples by the sixth to seventh centuries AD. The later, and often larger and more powerful, 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 was carried back to China by the Mongols in the 13th century. The numerous forms of the word that appeared during the 13th century , including trabocco , tribok , tribuclietta , and trubechetum , have obscured the origin of the term. The English word trebuchet is first mentioned in the 14th century 13th century in Anglo-Latin as "medieval stone-throwing engine of war".
The earliest appearance of the term "trebuchet" in French dates to the late 12th century and the first attestations of trebuchet as a siege weapon are from around the year Trabucha is found a decade later with predariae at the siege of Castelnuovo Bocca d'Adda in an account by Iohannes Codagnellus. It is unclear, however, whether these referred to counterweight trebuchets. Codagnellus did not specify a specific type of engine with the term and even implied that they were "fairly light in subsequent references".
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 that is often conflated in contemporary sources with the mangonel , which was used as a generic term for any medieval stone throwing artillery.
