of Mufali and his pupil Ysemain of Huli or Hiulie (probably Ala’uddin of Miafarakain and Ismael of Heri or Herat).  Kublai on their arrival gave them military rank.  They exhibited their skill before the Emperor at Tatu, and in the latter part of 1272 they reached the camp before Siang-yang, and set up their engines.  The noise made by the machines, and the crash of the shot as it broke through everything in its fall, caused great alarm in the garrison.  Fan-ch’eng was first taken by assault, and some weeks later Siang-yang surrendered.

The shot used on this occasion weighed 125 Chinese pounds (if catties, then equal to about 166 lbs. avoird.), and penetrated 7 or 8 feet into the earth.

Rashiduddin also mentions the siege of Siangyang, as we learn from D’Ohsson.  He states that as there were in China none of the Manjaniks or Mangonels called Kumgha the Kaan caused a certain engineer to be sent from Damascus or Balbek, and the three sons of this person, Abubakr, Ibrahim, and Mahomed, with their workmen, constructed seven great Manjaniks which were employed against SAYANFU, a frontier fortress and bulwark of Manzi.

We thus see that three different notices of the siege of Siang-yang, Chinese, Persian, and Venetian, all concur as to the employment of foreign engineers from the West, but all differ as to the individuals.

We have seen that one of the MSS. makes Polo assert that till this event the Mongols and Chinese were totally ignorant of mangonels and trebuchets.  This, however, is quite untrue; and it is not very easy to reconcile even the statement, implied in all versions of the story, that mangonels of considerable power were unknown in the far East, with other circumstances related in Mongol history.

The Persian History called Tabakat-i-Nasiri speaks of Aikah Nowin the Manjaniki Khas or Engineer-in-Chief to Chinghiz Khan, and his corps of ten thousand Manjanikis or Mangonellers.  The Chinese histories used by Gaubil also speak of these artillery battalions of Chinghiz.  At the siege of Kai-fung fu near the Hwang-Ho, the latest capital of the Kin Emperors, in 1232, the Mongol General, Subutai, threw from his engines great quarters of millstones which smashed the battlements and watch-towers on the ramparts, and even the great timbers of houses in the city.  In 1236 we find the Chinese garrison of Chinchau (I-chin-hien on the Great Kiang near the Great Canal) repelling the Mongol attack, partly by means of their stone shot.  When Hulaku was about to march against Persia (1253), his brother, the Great Kaan Mangku, sent to Cathay to fetch thence 1000 families of mangonellers, naphtha-shooters, and arblasteers.  Some of the crossbows used by these latter had a range, we are told, of 2500 paces!  European history bears some similar evidence.  One of the Tartar characteristics reported by a fugitive Russian Archbishop, in Matt.  Paris (p. 570 under 1244), is:  “Machinas habent multiplices, recte et fortiter jacientes”