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Greek fire
Greek fire was an incendiary weapon system used by the Byzantine Empire from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. The recipe for Greek fire was a closely-guarded state secret; historians have variously speculated that it was based on saltpeter, sulfur, or quicklime, but most modern scholars agree that it was based on petroleum mixed with resins, comparable in composition to modern napalm. Byzantine sailors would toss grenades loaded with Greek fire onto enemy ships or spray it from tubes. Its ability to burn on water made it an effective and destructive naval incendiary weapon, and rival powers tried unsuccessfully to copy the material.
Usage of the term "Greek fire" has been general in English and most other languages since the Crusades. Original Byzantine sources called the substance a variety of names, such as "sea fire" (Medieval Greek: πῦρ θαλάσσιον pŷr thalássion), "Roman fire" (πῦρ ῥωμαϊκόν pŷr rhōmaïkón), "war fire" (πολεμικὸν πῦρ polemikòn pŷr), "liquid fire" (ὑγρὸν πῦρ hygròn pŷr), "sticky fire" (πῦρ κολλητικόν pŷr kollētikón), or "manufactured fire" (πῦρ σκευαστόν pŷr skeuastón).
Incendiary and flaming weapons were used in warfare for centuries before Greek fire was invented. They included sulfur-, petroleum-, and bitumen-based mixtures. Incendiary arrows and pots or small pouches containing combustible substances surrounded by caltrops or spikes, or launched by catapults, were used in the Greco-Roman world. Thucydides mentions that in the siege of Delium in 424 BC a long tube on wheels was used which blew flames forward using a large bellows. The Graeco-Roman treatise Kestoi, compiled in the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD and traditionally ascribed to Julius Africanus, records a mixture that ignited from adequate heat and intense sunlight, used in grenades or night attacks:
Automatic fire also by the following formula. This is the recipe: take equal amounts of sulphur, rock salt, ashes, thunder stone, and pyrite and pound fine in a black mortar at midday sun. Also in equal amounts of each ingredient mix together black mulberry resin and Zakynthian asphalt, the latter in a liquid form and free-flowing, resulting in a product that is sooty colored. Then add to the asphalt the tiniest amount of quicklime. But because the sun is at its zenith, one must pound it carefully and protect the face, for it will ignite suddenly. When it catches fire, one should seal it in some sort of copper receptacle; in this way you will have it available in a box, without exposing it to the sun. If you should wish to ignite enemy armaments, you will smear it on in the evening, either on the armaments or some other object, but in secret; when the sun comes up, everything will be burnt up.
In naval warfare, the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518) is recorded by chronicler John Malalas to have been advised by a philosopher from Athens called Proclus to use sulfur to burn the ships of the rebel general Vitalian.
Greek fire proper was developed in c. 672 and is ascribed by the chronicler Theophanes the Confessor to Kallinikos (Latinized Callinicus), a Jewish architect from Heliopolis, in Syria, by then overrun by the Muslim conquests:
At that time Kallinikos, an artificer from Heliopolis, fled to the Romans. He had devised a sea fire which ignited the Arab ships and burned them with all hands. Thus it was that the Romans returned with victory and discovered the sea fire.
The accuracy and exact chronology of this account is open to question: elsewhere, Theophanes reports the use of fire-carrying ships equipped with nozzles (siphōn) by the Byzantines a couple of years before the supposed arrival of Kallinikos at Constantinople. If this is not due to chronological confusion of the events of the siege, it may suggest that Kallinikos introduced an improved version of an established weapon. The historian James Partington thinks it likely that Greek fire was not the creation of any single person but "invented by chemists in Constantinople who had inherited the discoveries of the Alexandrian chemical school". The 11th-century chronicler George Kedrenos records that Kallinikos came from Heliopolis in Egypt, but most scholars reject this as an error. Kedrenos also records the story, considered implausible by modern scholars, that Kallinikos' descendants, a family called Lampros, "brilliant", kept the secret of the fire's manufacture and continued doing so to Kedrenos' time.
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Greek fire
Greek fire was an incendiary weapon system used by the Byzantine Empire from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. The recipe for Greek fire was a closely-guarded state secret; historians have variously speculated that it was based on saltpeter, sulfur, or quicklime, but most modern scholars agree that it was based on petroleum mixed with resins, comparable in composition to modern napalm. Byzantine sailors would toss grenades loaded with Greek fire onto enemy ships or spray it from tubes. Its ability to burn on water made it an effective and destructive naval incendiary weapon, and rival powers tried unsuccessfully to copy the material.
Usage of the term "Greek fire" has been general in English and most other languages since the Crusades. Original Byzantine sources called the substance a variety of names, such as "sea fire" (Medieval Greek: πῦρ θαλάσσιον pŷr thalássion), "Roman fire" (πῦρ ῥωμαϊκόν pŷr rhōmaïkón), "war fire" (πολεμικὸν πῦρ polemikòn pŷr), "liquid fire" (ὑγρὸν πῦρ hygròn pŷr), "sticky fire" (πῦρ κολλητικόν pŷr kollētikón), or "manufactured fire" (πῦρ σκευαστόν pŷr skeuastón).
Incendiary and flaming weapons were used in warfare for centuries before Greek fire was invented. They included sulfur-, petroleum-, and bitumen-based mixtures. Incendiary arrows and pots or small pouches containing combustible substances surrounded by caltrops or spikes, or launched by catapults, were used in the Greco-Roman world. Thucydides mentions that in the siege of Delium in 424 BC a long tube on wheels was used which blew flames forward using a large bellows. The Graeco-Roman treatise Kestoi, compiled in the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD and traditionally ascribed to Julius Africanus, records a mixture that ignited from adequate heat and intense sunlight, used in grenades or night attacks:
Automatic fire also by the following formula. This is the recipe: take equal amounts of sulphur, rock salt, ashes, thunder stone, and pyrite and pound fine in a black mortar at midday sun. Also in equal amounts of each ingredient mix together black mulberry resin and Zakynthian asphalt, the latter in a liquid form and free-flowing, resulting in a product that is sooty colored. Then add to the asphalt the tiniest amount of quicklime. But because the sun is at its zenith, one must pound it carefully and protect the face, for it will ignite suddenly. When it catches fire, one should seal it in some sort of copper receptacle; in this way you will have it available in a box, without exposing it to the sun. If you should wish to ignite enemy armaments, you will smear it on in the evening, either on the armaments or some other object, but in secret; when the sun comes up, everything will be burnt up.
In naval warfare, the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518) is recorded by chronicler John Malalas to have been advised by a philosopher from Athens called Proclus to use sulfur to burn the ships of the rebel general Vitalian.
Greek fire proper was developed in c. 672 and is ascribed by the chronicler Theophanes the Confessor to Kallinikos (Latinized Callinicus), a Jewish architect from Heliopolis, in Syria, by then overrun by the Muslim conquests:
At that time Kallinikos, an artificer from Heliopolis, fled to the Romans. He had devised a sea fire which ignited the Arab ships and burned them with all hands. Thus it was that the Romans returned with victory and discovered the sea fire.
The accuracy and exact chronology of this account is open to question: elsewhere, Theophanes reports the use of fire-carrying ships equipped with nozzles (siphōn) by the Byzantines a couple of years before the supposed arrival of Kallinikos at Constantinople. If this is not due to chronological confusion of the events of the siege, it may suggest that Kallinikos introduced an improved version of an established weapon. The historian James Partington thinks it likely that Greek fire was not the creation of any single person but "invented by chemists in Constantinople who had inherited the discoveries of the Alexandrian chemical school". The 11th-century chronicler George Kedrenos records that Kallinikos came from Heliopolis in Egypt, but most scholars reject this as an error. Kedrenos also records the story, considered implausible by modern scholars, that Kallinikos' descendants, a family called Lampros, "brilliant", kept the secret of the fire's manufacture and continued doing so to Kedrenos' time.
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