Hello again,
here I am, translating into Spanish an interesting book about the 3rd Crusade: I've just tumbled upon the names of this two assault machines:
"cats and sows (cattos and testudines)"

I have found a description of what they are here: http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Siege-Weapons.html

I can use "testudo" in Spanish for "testudines", but really need a Spanish equivalent fos "cats" (or cattos), and this I cannot find, not in the whole wide world…  

I am sure you can help me with thos predicament, as you always do. (I wish I'll have access to more complete sources for latin and medieval words and artifacts).

Thanks again for your help.

CM

Hi again,

I'm writing this in haste without looking into it in depth ... but I don't understand why you cannot translate the names of the seige engines exactly : 'cattos' surely just means 'the cat' (at least when translated into English) and so why not simply translate it into Spanish as 'El Gato'? This is apparently what the engine was called by the guys that were actually there at the time, no?  So does it really need translation ... maybe some explanation but why should a proper name need to be translated? Medieval siege engines were very often given individual names, and were frequently named after wild, savage, beasts ... as much to inspire terror in the enemy as to encourage one's own side (I seem to remember that at the siege of Rochester by King John there was one called simply 'Lupus' ie 'the wolf').

'Testudines' surely is just from the latin 'testudo' - meaning a tortoise - and therefore it is probably intended to denote something 'armoured'. Is it perhaps the name of a battering ram or siege tower, and so something specifically designed to assault the walls very close-to, and so especially needing good 'tortoise-like' protection against the defenders missiles ... compared to say a trébuchet, which was designed to lob missiles from a safe distance?


And remember also that in Roman army terminology, a 'testudo' was the formation legionnaries adopted when assaulting a fortified position ... with their shields locked together above and on the sides... and so armoured just like a tortoise/testudo.

As I say this is written in haste and simply from memory ... but I'll be back.

Meles meles wrote:

I seem to remember that at the siege of Rochester by King John there was one called simply 'Lupus' ie 'the wolf'.

My error ... 'Warwulf' was the name of the enormous trébuchet that was the principal, and much feared, siege engine used by Edward I in 1304 during his siege of Stirling Castle in Scotland.

Rochester Castle was defeated by King John in 1216 using trebuchets and other siege engines, but most successfully by tunnelling under the walls and then setting the whole excavation alight using 'the grease of fat hogs' and thereby collapsing part of the castle's walls.

Hi Meles meles,
thanks a lot for your answer.
Yes, you may be right (to a certain extent in my view).
Napoleon famously used some huge cannons in Waterloo (I cannot remember their names), and I surely reckon the names of beasts were also common in medieval (and probably all) times for the reasons you point to. But I tend to think it's a common, not a "proper" name what's involved here —I mean a type of war device). On the other hand "cat" was "feles-felis" or "felinus" in latin, and I am not sure about "cat" being the latin middle-age corruption of that (even if "gato", "chat" and "cat" would favour that view).
On the other hand, I must make sure the word "gato" as a rendering of "catto" as a medieval weapon is correct, otherwise that might seem a funny blunder of the fanciful translator…
Finally, I think the "catto" was a sort of "mantlet", a type of protection for the troops assaulting the walls of a fortified city, a mobile device, and therefore less impressive as such as the terrible trébuchets and other traction and torsion heavy artillery devices —and that's why it was a "cat" and not a "lion" you may say… Sound enough, but I'll need confirmation).

A proper name wants sometimes to be translated, as Richard Coeur de Lion would not be "Richard" Corazón de León in Spanish, or as Akko should be Acre, and Aimeric Aimerico or Amalarico, and Salah al-Din Saladin… Some weapons, as the "Tsar", the big cannon of the Kremlin (el Zar), are translated. There are no fixed rules, but it's costumary that the Christian names of authors are (or can be) translated if they were writing before 1870, more or less, and not if they were active in a later date (for example Manuel Kant or Carlos Marx, but not Jorge Habermas or Isaías Berlin —furthermore, in latin derived languages as Spanish, names of peoples (tribes), for example, and gods (think of Egypt) are translated (gaetuli = gétulos)… All this to say that translate or not translate, that's always a question…

CM

Comic Monster, I'm not going to be any help I'm afraid.  I did a bit of poking about on the internet last night (ComicM thinks to self "I'm perfectly capable of poking about on the internet for myself, thanks").  I found that the machines were called a "chat" in French - wrong language I know.  My Spanish isn't all that great (I'm attending a class with U3A and we're up to the pluperfect).  I came across something about Simon de Montfort being killed by a stone hurled from the battlements of Toulouse (gross oversimplification of the event) while trying to attack with a "cat" but when I looked up the said warrior's death on a Spanish site the "cat" was not mentioned - nor in anything I looked at about "maquinas de guerra" though I wouldn't say my search was exhaustive and I'm sure you've probably been down those alleys yourself.  So sorry - it's going to be like my school reports on my prowess (or more exactly lack thereof) in sports "X_______ tries".

No worries, LadyinRetirement… You've really hit the problem: Spanish academic attention to medieval terms (or of letters in general) is awfully poor (as it is, by the way, in the Internet, where medieval expressions, nouns, etc… might be mixed with a hotchpotch of "medieval games", Pokemon rarities or similar… (That might explain also, sadly, the fact that many translators / commentators just skip the difficulty by not mention the problematic name.

Thanks anyway for trying it. It's probably true that the right equivalence is "gato", and I'll keep that in mind in case I can find a proof in that sense. I am sorry, I know this is more a forum of History, not really of "translating miseries", but I do not know of a great many number of lexical resources out there to have the luxury of choice…

I am really sure your Spanish fluency is already going on a quick upward learning curve…

CM

I take your point CM.

Caesar in his account of the Gallic War mentions 'testudines', and learned opinion seems to be that these were portable screens of wood covered in hides:

"The operations of the attacking party were protected by shields and defences of various kinds, such as crātēs, 'hurdles', vineae, wooden sheds covered with hides, and testudines of similar construction. These testudines must not be confused with the offensive formation above described ..." (... of soldiers advancing together with their shields locked above and at the sides).

From 'Caesar in Britain and Belgium' by J A Sleeman, Cambridge University Press, 1963.

While 'felis' is Latin for a cat, so too is 'catto' pl cattus ... I'm not a Latin scholar so don't ask me the difference between the two terms, or are they just synonyms?

Catto, pl cattus, it is certainly Old English for a cat, presumable deriving from the Latin. Old English would have still been the form of English spoken by common people at the time of the Third Crusade, albeit with a lot of regional dialect. The Norman French (the language spoken by the Angevin knights), and the Occitan/Provençale French spoken by the French contingent in the crusader's army ... both called a cat a 'cat' (it hadn't yet developed into the more modern 'chat'.

Concerning latin, I am no Cato myself (notice the pun…), and I am sure you're right. I am considering the idea of a footnote if I venture and squeeze the "cat" between the lines of the text.

Thanks a lot for your indications and precisions. They are always useful.

All the best,

CM

PS -where did the word 'sow' for testudine/tortoise come from? Is that what such a siege machine was called in Spanish?

Not at all, it's English…

Here you can read a longer excerpt from the book:

Quote :

Several different devices are mentioned: cats and sows (cattos and testudines: covered huts that could be placed against the walls to protect the men inside), battering rams (arietes), cercelia (similar to cats, but with openings from which to return counterfire), siege towers (turres or castella vehiculis), and catapults and mangonels (machinas: tension- or torsion-powered artillery pieces).

Hope this helps,

CM

Ah yes it seems to have been an English term from about the time of the Crusades (this from a website about medieval seige engines):

"The cat or sow was a wooden shed mounted on wheels. It had a wooden roof angled so that missiles would bounce off and was covered in animal hides to protect it from fire. The cat would be moved up to the castle with men inside safe from attack from the castle's walls. This machine was used when a section of the moat needed filling in so that a siege tower could be moved into position. It could also be moved right up to the castle so that the men inside could hack away at the walls in an attempt to weaken them."

... although utimately where the term comes from is not given, though I see it appears on wiki:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Castles_of_England/English_Castle_Glossary#Sow.

That's right. The hides were normally soaked in vinegar as fireproofing.

So far so good as to understand what those things were. Still there's a lack of an equivalence in Spanish —there must be one, as there are Spanish medievalists out there. The problem is to find that term. For the moment I've solved the point saying that they were similar to "plúteos" (or mantlets, as I said). I can't see any clue from the etymology of the word itself, and to fantasize that it's connection with "disseminate" (as a sort of shield made to reject missiles thrown at it) may lead us somewhere is just that —wishful thinking.

I really appreciate your efforts. It's anyway everyday life for a translator… In a perfect world, all the equivalences between at least the three or four more spoken languages in the world (forget chinese for that matter, please…) would have been digitalized and uploaded for everyone to check them… But we have got soccer instead… (Just kidding…)

You mention 'disseminate' but I read 'sow' as meaning in English a female pig ... a pregnant one but about to give birth to all its little piglets/soldiers.

I was thinking of the figurative sense of "sow" as a verb.

Disseminate or introduce (something undesirable)
‘the new policy has sown confusion and doubt’


https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sow

If it made a low creaking and groaning noise as it advanced (or the lads within it made the noise as they manoeuvered it) then it may have been originally a "sough" (the word persisted longest in Scotland where it came to be applied to the sound of particularly monotonous and boring preachers). Indistinguishable in pronunciation from a "sow", but the latter would have been the interpretation most squaddies of the day (hailing from fine agricultural stock) might have automatically assumed it meant.

Though of course it also could be down to the lines of soldiers on each side of its central support, like suckling piglets.

The "cat" seems to have been a different animal entirely in siege warfare, a ramped structure manouevred by people within it but with a sturdy roof over which soldiers could then run and attack rampart defenders from closer range, with a sharp "claw" that attached itself to the rampart - hence the nickname.

Yes, I think it works much better, especially to the mind of a common medieval soldier, as the noun - ie as a big, fat grunting pig.

Out on a tangent, but still, an armoured fighting vehicle in the Danish army of some 50 years ago - somewhat before my time - were still being mothballed in case of mobilisation and was probably of US parentage, was called a Water Vole, probably because of its amphibious abilities.

My intention in putting this up, probably to the irritation of CM - sorry, is that such names may be recycled for all I know.

There's a bit about "Cats" and the smaller version the "Weasel" on this link;

Siege Warfare    adverts on the site.

The Cat

A Cat was a wooden structure built (or moved) up to a defensive wall. From surviving documents it seems that an arm could manipulated to claw away at the castle wall - hence the name.
Cats could be large multi-purpose structures, perhaps with a trebuchet on top and sappers operating from the protected interior.
Cats were much feared and if they possibly could, castle defenders would try to destroy them by mounting sorties, by using stone throwing engines, or by setting fire to them.
Like all wooden siege engines they would be routinely covered in the skins of freshly slaughtered animals and regularly dowsed with water to keep them fireproof.
Simon de Montfort used a cat at the Siege of Beaucaire in 1216, but unsuccessfully. According to the Canso it had "no more effect than an enchanter's dream". It was "a spider's web and a sheer waste of material".
Perhaps the most famous cat was one Simon built two years later, attempting to besiege the City of Toulouse in 1217-18. It was while protecting his cat from counter attack by the citizens of Toulouse that Simon de Montfort was struck on the head by a massive stone projectile from a trebuchet on the city walls, and killed instantly.
 

The Weasel

A weasel was a similar sort of structure to a cat, but smaller and lighter. It seems to have been more manoeuvrable and used a spike rather than a paw to attack castle walls.
It may have taken its name from its business end looking like a weasel's nose, or perhaps its long thin body, or both.
A weasel was used by the forces of Raymondet, the future Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, at Beaucaire in 1216 according to the The Song of the Crusade (Canso de la crozada). As Simon de Montfort was conducting a Council of War, a beggar burst in, shouting that he had seen a weasel. The weasel was already against the citadel wall and ready to drive a spike into it. The defenders were quick to react. The chief engineer hurled a pot of molten pitch at it, hitting it in exactly the right spot and it



Going by this, the Tortoise was the protective roof over a battering ram;

Weapons & Warfare

"The wall could also be breached by battering ram, usually directed at the relatively weak door. Because this would expose the attackers to crossbow fire, as well as stones or boiling water dropped from the allure, a roofed structure on wheels, called a tortoise, was sometimes built to defend them. (Koch 1978: 49)"