The Battle of Xiangyang

The Battle of Xiangyang mpics.

This is the account of this battle in one footnote,
5 year sieges, 1000s boats defeat Sung, with the aid of Turks & other conscripts, in 1279,
These attacks kill an entire 1million city, & defeated blockade running by the Chinese.uk/

The Battle of Xiangyang was a 6 year battle consisting of skirmishes, ground assault, & the siege of the twin fortified cities of Fancheng & Xiangyang in modern-day Hubei, China, starting in AD 1268. Lü Wenhuan, commander-in-chief of the Southern Song Dynasty, surrendered to Kublai Khan in 1273.
The conventional use of Mongolian cavalry was restricted by the woody terrain & numerous military outposts of the Southern Song Dynasty. Chinese firearms & cannons were employed by the Mongols in the victorious siege of Fancheng after capturing the outposts & defeating relieving Chinese forces from Sichuan & Yuezhou. Especially effective proved the use of the counterweight trebuchet by the Mongols, which had been previously unknown in China.
The city was vital for the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song because of its location. The city guarded the waterways of Southern China because the Han River was a major tributary into the Yangtze River. Once the city fell, the Mongols obtained easy access into important Southern cities in China & the Southern Song collapsed shortly.
The use of the counterweight trebuchet by the Mongol invaders proved to be decisive in forcing the surrenders of Fancheng & Xiangyang in 1273. Within a few days after the Mongols took up the bombardment of Fancheng by the counterweight trebuchet in March 1273, the city had been ripe for attack & successfully assaulted. Shortly afterwards, the Chinese commander of Xiangyang, realising that the city could not withstand a similar attack, accepted the Mongol surrender terms.
The counterweight trebuchet was a relatively new type of ballistic siege engine which was much more powerful than the earlier traction trebuchets, which had existed in China for centuries. The origin of the counterweight trebuchet is obscure, but it appears to have been invented somewhere in the Mediterranean basin in the twelfth century. Many possible inventors have been hypothesized, including Emperor Alexios I Komnenos of Byzantium & the Muslim engineers of Saladin.
The counterweight trebuchet was introduced into China by the Mongols during the sieges of Fancheng & Xiangyang. Since the Mongols employed Muslim engineers for the designing of the counterweight trebuchets, they were designated in Chinese historiography as the "Muslim" trebuchet (hui-hui pao).
Regarding the exact nature of the trebuchets used by the Mongol armies, recent research by Paul E. Chevedden indicates that the hui-hui pao was actually a European design, a double-counterweight engine that Cheveddens argues had been introduced to the Levant by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1210-1250) only shortly before. The Muslim historian Rashid al-Din (1247?-1318), in his universal history, refers to the Mongol trebuchets used at the Song cities as "Frankish" or "European" trebuchets (manjaniq ifranji or manjaniq firanji):

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Before that there had not been any large Frankish catapult in Cathay [i.e. China], but Talib, a catapult-maker from this land, had gone to Baalbek & Damascus, & his sons Abubakr, Ibrahim, & Muhammad, & his employees made seven large catapults & set out to conquer the city [Sayan Fu or Hsiang-yang fu = modern Xiangfan].
The Chinese scholar Zheng Sixiao (1206-83) indicates that, "in the case of the largest ones, the wooden framework stood above a hole in the ground" (quoted in Needham & Yates, Science & Civilisation in China, 5:6:221). Chevedden considers this to be clearly a description of the double-counterweight bricola, since he maintains that was the only counterweight piece of artillery that had a framework capable of being mounted in a hole in the ground & was commonly set up in this fashion. Thus, the fall of the Song cities was testimony to the wide diffusion of military technology which the Mongol conquests brought along.
Another version is given by Marco Polo in his book Il Milione where he claims having been responsible for teaching the Mongols how to build & use catapults during the siege of Xiangyang. However, the real names of the Muslim engineers, as given in Muslim sources, were Talib & his sons Abubakr, Ibrahim, & Muhammad. Moreover, the siege had already ended before Marco Polo's arrival in China.
Chinese sources give the names of 2 Muslim engineers by the names of Ala-ud-Din & Isma'il who were sent to the Mongol court to help design & deploy the new counterweight trebuchet designs to help break the stalemate with the stubbornly resisting Song dynasty.
In the wuxia novel The Return of the Condor Heroes by Jinyong, a battle at Xiangyang is the climax of the story, with the protagonists such as Yang Guo & Guo Jing participating in the defence of the city,

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