Reply #9: Sort of. [View All]

[BreweryYardRat]

"I have a jackdaw's memory for useless bits of information." -Harry Turtledove

The trebuchet was popular in the mid-to-late medieval period. As a general rule, siege engines were used by just about every nationality, since manufacturing one doesn't require anything more than plans (which are hard to suppress), money, wood, sinew, some small amount of metal, and good-sized rocks (or the occasional dead cow) to fling.

It's not like modern artillery, where a certain level of manufacturing capability is required to produce anything worth bringing to the battlefield.

However, obtaining all the things necessary to build a siege engine and organizing the labor/training the engineers to shoot the thing, requires a national government, a local (city-state or provincial) government, or an extremely wealthy noble or coalition of nobles. This is why peasant revolts didn't use siege engines (at least, I can't remember any instances of that). A coalition of nobles rising up against their king or fighting other nobles might be able to pull it off, although it'd be like herding cats to get various earls, counts, barons, etc... to work together like that.