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Ballistas were known in Ancient Rome, but in the Middle ages they used Trebuchets, which had more simple construction and was more effective.

Trebuchet opened a new age for artillery weapons, because it was capable of actually /destroying/ city walls. Ballistas could only throw a rock weighing 1 talent (26 kg or 57 lb). That was enough
- to cause a crush in inner galleries;
- tear out tower corners;
- and destroy merlons, behind which archers’ hid
but not enough for the wall itself.

Moreover, ballistas had two torsions, which had to be justified, and being made of purely organic material, preparing them for a battle was not an easy task. They also had a bow, that hit the frame hard on release, wearing down the machine quickly. The vibration of these devices was so strong, that a new type of ballista invented in the Rome received a name ‘onager’, because it bucked as a wild onager mule.

Though even then ballistas had terrible power. A historian of 1st century Josephus Flavius writes about a siege of one city by Romans, that he has witnessed: ‘One of the men who stood on the wall, got his head torn off with a rock. And the skull was thrown off on a distance of three stadia from the corpse. On the sunrise a pregnant woman, who just left her house, was caught by a rock, that torn out her child from the womb and threw off on a half of stadia (≈90 m or ≈300 ft) – so great was the power of ballistas’.
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