This comprehensive and highly illustrated, in colour and black and white, history of siege warfare and siege weapons, also contains a how-to guide for re-creating medieval siege weapons. Before the days of tanks and machine guns, there were scaling ladders, battering rams, siege towers, throwing machines, bores and daggers and weapons such as these symbolize power, protection, control and defiance. This book allows readers actually to re-create their own Medieval weapons with clear step-by-step instructions. Military history buffs can find siege weapons of Ancient Egypt, Judea, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome as well as those of the Gauls and Tueton, the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim World and Medieval Europe, all described in incredible detail accompanied by illustrations and photographs. The author offers new ways to reconstruct various siege weapons that are based on his analyses of the works of ancient and medieval authors including Vitruvius, Vegetius, Apollodorus, Athenaeus, Heron, Biton, Philon and many others. With chapters covering the history of siege warfare, siege weapons, different strategems and methods of attack and defence, readers will not only walk away with ideas of how to re-create siege weapons, they will also take with them a better understanding of history from ancient times through the end of the fifteenth century AD.