The Greek word from which derived above Arabs is mechanikos, mechanical, industrious, creator of machines. The almajaneque was indeed a war machine medieval throwing stones of up to half a ton, the trabuquete used in the siege to cities or forts before the use of gunpowder. In the mid-14th century in the siege of the city of Caffa in the Crimea peninsula to the North of the Black Sea, the Mongols also launched contaminated bodies of bubonic plague against the Genoese. Then spread to Byzantium, Genoa, Sicily, and so began the great debacle.
