These kinds of catapults used a fixed counterweight. Unlike the Trebuchets, which used a hinged counterweight, the Mangonel used a counterweight completely fixed to the beam, that way the movement of the center of gravity was circular. Engineers had not yet discovered the advantages of a hinged weight which would later feature on trebuchets.

This is the final result of the diorama with a terrain simulating a Middle East dry land and a saracen standard at the back. Everything hand-made from scratch.

This time a fully functional Roman Onager model. The Onager itself was made back in 2015, but I haven`t found the time to make the rest of the diorama until 2022. I completed the scene including a typical roman vallum fence, two axes, and a spear and late roman shield.

The spear and the two axes made of steel to look even more real:

And this is the final result. A muddy terrain with some cut logs.

Roman Ballista diorama made from scratch in 2013. Fully functional Ballista model.

This fault was corrected by engineers by hinging the counterweight. This counterweight could contein up to 10 tones of earth or stones. This called trebuched, could hurle hundred kilos of stones to over 200m distance with great accuracy.

Besieging a town or a castle at that time was an enormous task, so these machines needed to be huge as well. So huge and difficult to move that they could require even over 120 men for a single machine.

We could distinguis between fixed machines, such as counterweight and spring-powered machines used to break though defences, and approach machines such as tonnelons or assault towers that were used to approach the fortified walls.

Stone-throwing machine

These machines were a human traction machines. They could only throw light projectiles (10kg) to a 50m distance in a firing rate of one load per minute. That means they did little damage to a wall but a devastating effect on charges of knights in armour.

Bricole

In order to improve the performance of these stone-throwing machines, a metal counterweight system was introduced. The firing rate was increased and because of that, they were usually positioned on fortress ramparts.

Mangonel with quarryman`s wheels

This siege machines had a fixed counterweight. Due to the fact that they hadn´t discovered yet the advantages of the hinged counterweight, these machines were not properly balanced.

In order to lower the mast the machine had a winch pulled by large wheels driven by men either on the inside or on the outside.

The counterweight weighed several tones and sometimes ropes were added to speed up the movement.

Their firing rate was 2 to 3 loads an hour and their main fault came from the fact that load inside the counterweight always ended up moving and consecuently caused the damage of the structure.

Trebuchet

The trebuchet was the first siege machine featured with a hinged counterweight. Their main goal was to pound a specific part of a wall, preferably a weak part such as an arrow loop or latrine, to make an opening.

Their firing rate was quite low, one or two loads an hour, but they suposed a real arm of deterrence.

Below you can find a link to another post in my blog where you will find a trebuchet model I made some years ago.

Couillard

This was the most elaborated of all counterweight machines. Due to the fact that the load was cut by half, the handling of this siege machine was easier than the other models. Just one pole was necessary and consecuently the building process was also simplified. This pole was sometimes fixed to the ground, but most of the time it was fixed onto the wooden chasis.

Despite the fact that this machine didn´t perform as well as the trebuchet, its firing rate was five to six times greater and it didn´t require as large team to make it work. Because of all these reasons, this siege machine was able to compete with gunpowder artillery for a long time. It could reaquire just a small tem of four men to hurle 35kg stones over 180m with a firing rate of ten shots an hour.

Spring-powered machines

These siege machines had a Roman origin, and they were originaly called “catapults”. They were forgotten with tha fall of the Roman Empire and from the 11th century onwards they were replaced by the post-mounted crossbow.

the bow was made of wood, sinew and tendons until the middle of the 15th century. Later, they were replaced by forged and hardened steel bows.

two men were necessary to bend the bow, and the firing range with a 1m long 100g bolt, exceeded 300m. this ballista remained very accurate when there was no wind. One chronicler wrote of one of these arrows going through three men and a horse before lodging itself in door 300m away.

Below you can find a link to another post in my blog where you will find a Roman Ballista model I made some years ago.

Source: These information was taken from War machines in the Middle Ages by Renaud Beffeyte, a very recommended read for all those interested in siege machines.

These siege machines were dated in 12th-16th century. They usually needed specialised servers and workforce consisted in 60 to over a hundred men for all tasks. However, they had a quite low firing rate, 1 to 2 loads/hr, and they were able to launch up to 125kg stones balls to 220m distance.

My purpose this time was to combine a functional Berger guillotine with a fully handmade rest of the scene in 1/15 scale. The principal difficulty of this project was to reproduce to the tee some parts of the guillotine in such small scale, mainly the mechanism inside the capital entirely made of steel. 1/15 scale means a 270mm (10,6 inch) high guillotine.

The final result of my Berger guillotine diorama:

Before explaining the whole and long creation process of this diorama there you go some pictures of the final result

I hope you enjoyed seeing the final result. If you are now interested in knowing the process that took me to finally complete this scene keep reading.

The manufacturing process of the Berger Guillotine

The guillotine showed on left picture is not my guillotine model but it is quite usefull to make familiar with the name of each element before digging into the manufacturing process.

The guilotine starts with a base made of two runners and one crossbar. Over this base two risers. The mouton with the blade will then slide along these two risers.

The prisoner lays down over an articulated seesaw and his neck keeps inside a two halves lunette.

After being executed, the head is kept inside a metallic recipient and the body inside a wicker basket.

there is also another element called Paravent or screen whose purpose is to prevent the executioner from getting dirty with the blood when the blade cuts the head, but in my case I decided not to inlude this element because it would block the visibility of the head and the recipient for the head.

finally, in the upper area of the guillotine, the capital, with a pulley for the rope and the mechanism to release the mouton.

The capital of the Berger guillotine:

I decided to start with the capital and the release mechanism inside it. This was probably the hardest part to make. All the mechanism was made of steel, so you can have an idea of the complexity:

The door for the capital:

This door was made of brass with a handmade hinge.

The pulley wheel :

Finally the pulley wheel to complete the capital.

Risers:

The risers are made of the layers joined together with through screws. The grooves the mouton will slide along, aere covered with brass and joined to the wood with several tiny bolts.

The spring system:

These springs cushion the mouton at the bottom of the grooves. I made these springs using steel wire and a drill.

The Trigger :

This is the system to trigger the mechanism of the capital depicted before:

The rope to raise the mouton:

The base:

T-shaped Reinforcing legs:

The assembly of the risers and reinforcing legs to the base:

The reinforcing legs are joined to the base with assembly screws. This screws rather than being screwed directly to the wood, some threaded bushings are installed so as the screws could be screwed into them and not get loose eventually.

The assembly of the capital to the two risers:

A threaded rods to fix ech riser to the capital with nuts.

The half-moon:

The half-moon or lunette is made of two halves. One side is covered with metal.

The tee and the seesaw:

This element joins the seesaw to the lower half-moon.

The table fully articulated by a hinge:

The table o seesaw moves along a groove attached by a hinge

The side ramp to throw the body after being beheaded:

The mouton with its steel blade:

I made the mouton of the Berger guillotine model entirely of metal, formed by a central frame where the rollers are housed. A thick sheet metal with a cut-off for the blade was screwed to one side, which was fixed with three through screws. In the upper part of the mouton there is the spike that allows to block to the claw, as well as the hook for the rope. 

The basket:

The basket used to keep the prisoner´s body on these berger guillotines was usually made of wicker, but it was not posible to use this material in such small scale, so I decided to use hemp thread. Finally the inside of the basket is covered with metal and each corner joined with tiny brackets.

The lid for the bascket:

The recipient for the head:

This bucket was usually made of zinc, but in my case I used brass for this model.

The assembly process of the Berger guillotine model:

Once all the parts were finished, I show you the assembly step by step:

Hand-modeled figures:

I wanted to include some figures to the diorama to make it even more exclusive. These are the three figures modelled specifically for this scene prior to be painted:

The executioner:

I decided to represent Anatole Deibler French executioner in his late age. As the lead french executioner he participated in the execution of 395 criminals during his 54-year career. During his 40 years as lead executioner he was responsible for 299 beheadings. Here you go some pictures of him and one of his executions:

The criminal:

And finally a dog and two rats figthing for a piece of meat to complete the scene:

The scaffold:

First of all, I would like to make the point that The Berger guillotine didn´t need the leveled surface of a scaffold, but I wanted to include this element to make the scene more spectacular.

After over 750 nails here it is the scaffold where the guillotine and the figures will be placed:

The ground and the base:

These are some first steps of the ground and some material used to build the base:

Previous guillotines models, such as the Schmidt guillotine model, were quite basic devices that, among other things, suffered from a problem that was never solved: The impact of the mouton or driver against the base of the risers.

The mouton slid along the risers, and the simply impact against the end of the grooves ended up breaking or damaging some parts of the machine, no matter how much the executioners tryed to cushion the collision by adding cloths or leather into the grooves.

Apart from this problem, the upper half of the lunette or half-moon in these previous guillotines was hand-operated, meaning the executioner had to hold the upper half while his assistants pushed the prisoner forward until the head was inside the hole. Besides, the expansion of the wood in rainy seasons or excessive humidity conditions could also produce more than one problem, blocking some parts and consequently delaying the whole execution process.

Schmidt guillotine was not easy to assemble and disassemble, taking quite a long time to leave it fully operational, and considering that once the Revolution was over it was no longer necessary to leave the machines permanently installed on their respective gallows, being only necessary to be instaled when someone sentenced to death by ordinary justice had to be executed. This problem and the fact that at that time in the French judicial system the prisioner was not informed of the date of its execution just until an hour before it, made necessary to have a machine that could be assembled and disassembled really quickly. In fact, it was quite normal to see guillotines ready to be used in the very door of the prison until November 1870, from that date on, the executions on gallows in public squares were abolished, among other things because they became parties where people from all over France came to enjoy that bloody event.

The metropolitan territory was divided into four zones, each one with its own executioner and three assistants. When any sentence had to be carried out, the disassembled machine was transferred to the city where the prisoner needed to be executed. The guillotine was assembled during the early morning of the execution day, while a large contingent of gendarmes was in charge of keeping the curious away.

When the fatal time for the prisoner finally arrived, he was taken out from prison by some gendarmes and in just a matter of less than two minutes the execution process was over, the body transferred to the morgue and the guillotine quickly disassembled and returned to Paris or the judicial district of origin.

For all these reasons, it was clearly necessary to have a much more easily removable, safer to handle and more robust guillotine that did not require the smooth and leveled surface of a gallows for its installation. And precisely the guillotine model created in 1868 by Alphonse-Léon Berger satisfied these requirements. Monsieur Berger had been working as an executioner in Corsica since 1863, combining this activity with some other works as a carpenter.

Berger was born in Perpignan on February 15, 1841, son of Pierre-Martin Berger, Perpignan executioner. In 1867 he married Virginie Desmorest, daughter of the executioner of Carpentras. When Virginie died in 1875 he remarried Olympe-Marie Roch, the daughter of another executioner, in this case Nicolas Roch.

All this just shows that at that time in France there were authentic dynasties of executioners, families whose members “inherited” the status as an executioner generation after generation.

Berger, who was related to Roch, expected to become the number 1 executioner in France, because his father-in-law, had served as Jean-François Heidenreich’s assistant until his death in 1871, who was designated “Monsieur de Paris “, the chief executioner of the metropolitan France. That´s why, Roch was designated as his successor.

When Roch was finally appointed new chief executioner, two new assistants were assigned to him: Alphonse Berger and Louis Deibler, whose father Josef Deibler, came from a large executioners family too. As you may guess, Berger and Deibler had a tough dispute to become Roch´s successor, who at that time was already 63 years old. Berger assumed that being his son-in-law, the position as a chief executioner was his.  However, Roch suffered a sudden death in December 1878 and Louis Deibler named as chief executioner, taking Berger by completely surprise who had to make do with being just his first assistant.

Relations between both of them went from bad to worse. Deibler avoided calling Berger for any execution during the next 20 years, calling instead his son Anatole so he could start learning the profession.

Berger died on June 6, 1906, when he was 65. Deibler carried on being the executioner’s chief and after him his son, the famous Anatole, took his legacy and Berger was left with the only the glory of having created the guillotine that remained until the death penalty abolition in France.

Coming back to the execution process, and after receiving spiritual aid if that was his wish, the prisoner was cut off the collar of his white shirt until his shoulders were visible. A drink of rum and a cigarette was offered to him, and afterwards he was escorted by two guards, the prison director, a representative of the court, the prosecutor’s office and the defense attorney, etc. A few meters from the gate of the prison the executioner, his main assistant and two secondary assistants were already waiting for him.

By the time the prisoner came out of the prison the guillotine was ready with the half-moon open. In just a matter of second, and taking the advantage of the shock produced by the sight of the guillotine, the criminal was quickly carried and positioned horizontally by the executioner’s assistants who. When the head was placed in the right position, the main assistant grabbed it by the hair or, if it did not have it or had it very short, by the ears. After that, the executioner pressed the button that released the upper half-moon and practically at the same time, the lever of the mechanism that retained the blade was activated, leaving the blade fall at a speed of around 4 meters per second.

 Once the head was beheaded, the body was pushed into the drawer placed at the right side of the guillotine. This drawer was made of wick and covered from the inside with zinc. In the bottom of the drawer a layer of sawdust to soak up the blood.

In short, the time passed from the prisoner’s exit until the blade cut his neck and ended up in the drawer lasted less than 30 seconds. After that the guillotine was disassembled or , in case of a multiple execution, cleaned to leave it ready for the next one.

This executions were always photographed by journalists that came to these events until the government prohibited to take more photos. Despite this prohibition, people kept taking photos of the executions and many times people were payed by journalists to take these photos from their houses until the government decided to finish the public executions in 1939. This final decision was triggered by the execution of Eugen Weidmann in that same year. On the following picture it seems like just a few dozen people witnessed the execution, but beyond the frame there were more than 30,000 people who, since the night before, crowded the area to see how that criminal was executed. When the guillotine was removed, there were even people who rushed to soak handkerchiefs in the blood that was left on the floor.

From that time on, the executions were ordered to be carried out inside the prisons and fully covered with black cloths in order to prevent any picture from the nearby buildings. The secrecy reached the point that no one, except certain officials, knew the place where the guillotine was.

How did the Berger guillotine work?

  After this long introduction along the development of capital punishment in France, let’s start now explaining some of the most curious details of the Berger guillotine, helping me sometimes with some pictures taken from my personal Berger guillotine model.

The Berger guillotine was a very well-designed machine, in which construction several materials were used, such as oak wood, bronze or/and steel for those areas more liable to suffer damages or wear. It was created to be easily assembled and disassembled in less than three hours. For that purpose, all the elements were joined using assembly screws, screws that rather than being screwed directly to the wood, some threaded bushings were installed so as the screws could be screwed into them and not get loose eventually.

In this guillotine model a central crossbar was added to the base to improve its stability, because as mentioned before, the gallows disappeared, and consequently, it was necessary to ensure a good leveling of the whole guillotine.

Once the base was perfectly horizontal, the risers where installed using T-shaped  iron profiles.

The prisoner was lay down on a table o seesaw moved along a slide attached by a hinge (Pictures 1 and 2 above).

Regarding mechanisms, on the picture 4 you can see the lever that released the blade by pulling it downwards, and on picture 3 the button that that kept the upper half-moon raised.

Picture 5 shows the zinc bucket that replaced the traditional wicker basket. This bucket was more … “hygienic” than traditional wicker as it could be thoroughly washed after use. In fact it was pretty common to place a couple of buckets next to the machine so as they could clean the scene, especially when multiple executions were carried out.

In order to prevent the assistant who held the prisoner’s head from being sprinkled by blood, the screen was placed, which was foldable to facilitate its transport.

But the real complexity of this guillotine was in the mechanism of the capital, whose aim was to hold the blade. As I said, this mechanism was placed inside the upper capital and covered with a sheet metal cover. On that same capital we see the pulley whose rope was also introduced in the capital to hook the blade, which was provided with a pin that automatically fitted into the claw. To open the claw and let the blade fall, there was a thin bar that descended embedded in a groove throughout one of the two risers up to the lever that, by turning it downwards, the claw was opened and the heavy mouton with the blade released. This groove was covered by a long bronze plate screwed to the riser.

The mouton was entirely made of metal, formed by a central frame where the bronze rollers were housed that replaced the fragile tongues of the Schmidt model. A thick sheet metal with a cut-off for the blade was screwed to one side, which was fixed with three through screws. In the upper part of the mouton there was the spike that allowed to block to the claw, as well as the hook for the rope. The total weight of the mouton was between 40-50 kilos. Finally, in the lower part of the mouton there were two protrusions that worked as stops when the mouton fell, that crashed against the coil springs. These springs were fitted into two channels all along the risers that were covered with bronze metal sheets to avoid the wear.

The half-moon was covered by metal in one side and slipped through two bronze blades.

At one side of the seesaw there was panel, where the body of the prisoner fell into the basket. This side panel was fixed to the seesaw by some hinges joined by a long and thin bar that acted as a pin. This tin was bent in an L shape to facilitate its removal when disassembling the guillotine.

Picture below you can see as a summary personal Berger guillotine model fully disassembled.

Source:

For spanish readers I strongly recommend visiting the following link for further information about this guillotine and other interesting topics.

CASTRA IN LUSITANIA: LA GUILLOTINA BERGER (amodelcastillo.blogspot.com)