Ancient Life: Greek Fire

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In the early 670s A.D. the Umayyad Caliphate, centered in Damascus, sent an armada around the Anatolian coast to conquer the Byzantine capital.The Umayyad ships sailed up the Aegean, across the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosphorus, where they laid siege to Constantinople. The Arab invaders were met and turned back by the Byzantine navy, however, which unleashed a terrifying weapon invented only a few years earlier: Greek Fire.

The Byzantine sailors ignited a secret mixture of oil-based liquids and pumped them onto the Umayyad ships. They poured the liquid into cartridges, lit them and catapulted them onto the enemy’s ships. They also sprayed the briny waters with burning liquid, creating a sea of fire.

The use of Greek Fire is shown above in an illumination from a 13th- or 14th-century history of the Byzantine Empire, called the Scylitzes Manuscript, now in the National Library in Madrid, Spain. The manuscript was written by John Scylitzes, who may have worked at the imperial library at the Norman court in Sicily.

Incendiary weapons had played a role in ancient warfare at least a thousand years before the invention of Greek Fire. Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.) tells us that in 424 B.C. the Boeotians forced the Athenian army to evacuate the city of Delium by using a primitive flame-thrower: A large bellows blasted air through an iron-lined tube into a cauldron full of lighted coal, sulfur and pitch; the flames emerging from the other side of the cauldron ignited Delium’s walls, eventually allowing the Boeotians to conquer the city.

Greek Fire inspired terror in the enemies of the Byzantine Empire—so the ingredients were a closely guarded secret. The Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetus (945–963 B.C.) wrote that the security of the empire depended on keeping Greek Fire secret. Not long afterwards, however, the historian Mark the Greek leaked a recipe revealing that Greek Fire consisted of sulfur, tartar, Persian gum, pitch, dissolved nitrate, petroleum and pine resin. According to Mark, this mixture, if set aflame, could only be extinguished by sand, vinegar or urine.

To retaliate, the Islamic world developed its own secret weapon, probably in the tenth century A.D.: the fuse bomb. Small glass or pottery vessels (above), sometimes inscribed with the word “Allah,” were filled with highly combustible oil and attached to a fuse. The fuse was lit and lobbed into the enemy camp, literally returning fire.

In the early 670s A.D. the Umayyad Caliphate, centered in Damascus, sent an armada around the Anatolian coast to conquer the Byzantine capital.The Umayyad ships sailed up the Aegean, across the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosphorus, where they laid siege to Constantinople. The Arab invaders were met and turned back by the Byzantine navy, however, which unleashed a terrifying weapon invented only a few years earlier: Greek Fire. The Byzantine sailors ignited a secret mixture of oil-based liquids and pumped them onto the Umayyad ships. They poured the liquid into cartridges, lit them and catapulted them onto […]