How did armies raze walls or cities in the time before black powder (gunpowder)? Did they just use battering rams?
Stephan Györy, Zurich A‘ Raze’ (from the Latin verb ‘
ras-’, meaning ‘scraped’) implies a process that leaves nothing standing. The amount of effort involved in such an undertaking suggests it might never have happened anywhere in the literal sense. Your actual, everyday razing was only slightly less drastic: looting, burning, demolishing defences and removing, killing or enslaving the population.
History and mythology are littered with razings but, though chroniclers blithely report them occurring, the few eyewitness accounts that survive are probably exaggerated anyway. A conquered city and its population were valuable assets, so the only reason you’d destroy everything would be to prevent future opposition from its inhabitants or to terrify any potential resistance from others. The Assyrians and Mongols, for instance, heralded the horrible things that befell anyone who opposed them.
Hints of the razing procedure can be found here and there. The first-century historian Josephus, for instance, tells us that when Titus took Jerusalem in AD 70, his troops destroyed buildings and left no trees standing. However, some towers and walls were spared to show future generations the formidable defences overcome by the mighty Roman military machine. We don’t know if the demolition was carried out by Roman troops or if they got
enslaved survivors to do some of the hard work. It would be reasonable to suppose that a systematic approach would not involve battering rams but, rather, dismantling the structures piece by piece, top downwards.
Though we know little of the technical procedures used to raze a city, we know some of the symbolic ones. Myth has it that, after conquering the city of Carthage in 146 BC, the Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus sowed the soil with salt. No ancient sources support this claim, though ancient Hittite and Assyrian chronicles talk of salt being symbolically strewn over conquered towns, and of the deliberate sowing of weeds. Other traditions included drawing a plough across the land to show that what was once an urban area would henceforth be rural.
Even later, black powder was not used for demolition as often as you might think – it would be a messy, expensive and hazardous process. When Oliver Cromwell ordered the ‘slighting’ of castles and defences, they were often simply taken apart by enterprising locals, who re-used the stone and timber as building materials. The process was, in effect, privatised!