Greek Fire: The Byzantine Secret Weapon

To engage the ships of Byzantine Empire was to risk the horrors of Greek fire, a medieval weapons system that empowered ships to spew forth flaming liquid on enemy ships and crew members. The secrets of Greek fire are lost to history, but historians and scientists continue to theorize its formula and deployment details. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the weapon’s history, predominant theories on its specifics and the risks and rewards of secret keeping.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Emperor Alexios ordered ships to be furnished by all the
countries under the Roman sway. He had a number built
in the capital itself, and would at intervals go round
and instruct the shipwrights how to make them, as he
knew that the Pieasons were skilled in sea warfare and
dreaded a battle with them. On the prow of each
ship he had a head fixed of a lion or
other land animal, made in brass or iron, with the

(00:22):
mouth open and then gilded over, so that their mere
aspect was terrifying, And the fire which was to be
directed against the enemy through tubes he made to pass
through the mouths of the beast, so that it seemed
as if the lions and the other similar monsters were
vomiting the fire. Then the man called Count Lamon very

(00:46):
boldly attacked the largest vessel at the stern, but got
entangled in its rudders, and as he could not free
himself easily, he would have been taken had he not,
with great presence of mind, had recourse to his machine
and poured fire upon the enemy very successfully. Then he
quickly turned his ship round and set fire on the
spot to three more of the largest barbarian ships. At

(01:09):
the same moment, a squall of wind suddenly struck the
sea and churned it up, and dashed ships together, and
almost threatened to sink some. For the ways roared at
the yard, arms creaked, and the sails were split. The
barbarians now became thoroughly alarmed, firstly because of the fire
directed upon them, for they were not accustomed to that

(01:31):
kind of machine, nor to a fire which naturally flames upwards.
Then this case was directed in whatever direction the sender desired,
often downwards or laterally. And secondly, they were very much
upset by the storm, and consequently they fled. That is
what the barbarians did. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your

(01:57):
Mind from how Stop work dot com. Hey you welcome
to stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those were the words
of eleventh and twelfth century Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena from
her book The Alexiad. And we we only tweaked it

(02:19):
slightly for performance purposes here and it was brought to
life by Annie Reese, one of the hosts of food Stuff.
Food Stuff is another podcast here in the house, stuff, works, family.
It is about all things edible and potable, that's right.
I don't I don't know that they've done anything on
Greek food or Byzantine food, but just if if you
can can't tell from that that lovely introduction, we are

(02:42):
going to be talking about the Byzantine Empire, and we're
going to be talking about a secret weapon of the
Byzantine's weapon so secret that we're not even really sure
what it consisted of in detail. Today we're talking about
Greek fire, the nuclear bomb of the Middle Ages. I mean, really,
it was ahead of its time. It was like napalm

(03:03):
in the Middle Ages. It was like a flamethrower in
the Middle Ages. Right, So we want to explore all
the ins and outs of this ancient secret super weapon.
I don't know does it qualify a super weapon. It's
kind of small scale, but it's in terms of power
and awe at the time, you could maybe consider it
a super I would think, so, I mean it was
a it was a super weapon that definitely inspired terror

(03:24):
and was extremely effective in particular situations. As is the
case with a lot of a shock and awe weaponry,
you know, it can't win it's not gonna win a
battle on its own. In the same way that you know,
a tank is pretty great, but a tank needs infantry
support if it's going to be effective. That's sort of thing, right.
So to explore the world of Greek fire, all the science,

(03:46):
all of the speculation about what it was, how it worked,
how it came to be, we've got to first give
you the setting. So what was the Byzantine Empire and
where was Byzantium? All right, so we're basically talking about
the read of the southern Balkans and Asia minor modern
day Turkey. Yeah, rought modern day Turkey and part of Greece.

(04:07):
But in the middle of the sixth century, this was
an empire that that stretched out all the way across
the North African coastal region from the Atlantic to Egypt,
along with southern parts of Spain and Italy. Uh. Now,
to give you a sort of a timeline of this
of this empire, in three twenty four, Constantine, the Emperor

(04:27):
Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire itself to Byzantium.
And of course we know Constantine was the first Roman
emperor to claim to have converted to Christianity. Yes, so
that's key. So it's you know, Roman Christian Christianity here,
the Holy Roman Empire. Now this went for this was
a successful empire for quite a spell. Here. It wasn't

(04:48):
until fourteen fifty three that Constantinople, the capital, fell to
the Ottoman Empire, and afterwards, of course became Istanbul. Yeah,
as the of the Animania songh we're illustrate for us.
So all in all, this is an empire with one
thousand nine year history. Yeah, though its borders changed a

(05:10):
lot over the centuries, and during its final years the
Byzantine Empire was reduced to a relatively minor state around
the Constantinople area. But it's strange to realize that in
some form the Roman Empire didn't actually end before the
Middle Ages. And I usually think of when did the
Roman Empire end? I think of the western Roman Empire

(05:31):
around the city of Roman, which of course you know fell,
and that that's ushers in what historians generally have thought
of as the Middle Ages in Europe, you know, around
the middle of the first millennium. But if you consider
the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire,
which it certainly did consider itself the Roman Empire. The
Roman Empire in some form lasted until the Renaissance in Europe,

(05:57):
which is a just a bizarre thing to consider. It
just doesn't mesh with my normal view of history. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's important to note. Uh. Likewise, I often
fall into the trap of sort of thinking of the
Byzantine Empire and thinking of it like sort of vaguely
as a much smaller and briefer affair than it actually
was now it's worth It's also important to note here

(06:20):
that nobody actually called it the Byzantine Empire during its time.
You only called inhabitants of Constantinople or a couple of
other areas Byzantines. Now the subjects of the emperor themselves
that they called themselves Romans, uh Constantine. The first, as
we mentioned, was the Fruit was the first Christian ruler
of the Roman Empire at least took on that mantle,
uh he, and he moved the capital to Constantinople, and

(06:42):
as such they were the Christian Roman Empire, and the
western remnants of the Roman Empire proper, you know, they
fell into barbarians successor kingdoms. So we mentioned that the
Byzantine Empire had, you know, over a thousand year history,
and during this time it was pretty much constantly at
war in some form or another. It was constantly challenged

(07:03):
by its neighbors. In the east, you had first the
Persian Empire and then various Islamic powers later on. And
to the north there were the Slavs and the Turkish Avars.
There were the Bulgars, the Hungarians, the Serbs, and finally
the Ottoman Turks. Um. I know, it seems kind of
weird that you would put them with the north, but
like that was sort of the shape of of of

(07:24):
geographically of the territory at the time. So and and
then likewise, in the West, they were constantly engaging in
these tents struggles with Greek city straight states and other
Roman remnants, often with complications from papal politics. Yeah, and
some of those complications get very complicated. Like one of
the things a lot of people don't realize about some

(07:45):
of the Crusades is that, yes, the Crusades were waged
by European Christians, often against Muslims and Jews, but they
also sometimes fought the Byzantine Christians. Yeah, I mean, there's
the whole elder in the Crusades of the essentially the
sacking of Constantinople by the Christian crusaders. Yeah, for usually

(08:07):
for complicated, petty political reasons. But you know, they survived
all this time, and one of and one of the
reasons was that they were essentially still the Roman empire
and spirit. They were well organized, they boasted strong fiscal
and military systems, again testaments to their Roman history. And
of course they had a secret weapon. There's nothing better

(08:30):
than a secret weapon there. Really, we were talking about
this earlier there. How many secret weapons can you really
think of, even in the modern age? Well, I mean
you can definitely. The modern parallel that comes to mind
is the race for the atom bomb during the World
War two era. It's it's a thing where if you
go back and read it at the time, even if you,

(08:51):
you know, don't think that the atom bomb was a
good thing for humanity to have discovered. I mean, we
probably might a lot of us agree that the world
would be better if nuclear weapons didn't exist, though some
people might argue otherwise. Some people might say that it's
a really useful deterrent against more large scale conventional war.
But it's a scary time. It's like trying to imagine

(09:11):
what would the world have been like if the Nazis
had gotten the atomic bomb first, or other scenarios along
those lines. Yeah, yeah, I think that the atomic bomb,
along with the various biological and chemical weapons are are
probably the best analogy we have. But then to think
of this in the Middle Ages, to to extrapolate similar

(09:32):
circumstances regarding state secrets and weapons systems, it's it's kind
of mind bockling right now. Greek fire is certainly much
smaller in applied scale than a large scale bomb like
an atomic weapon in the twentieth century, but it may
be no less terrifying in the way that it's represented
in legend. Oh yes, yeah, because we're talking about essentially

(09:55):
we'll get into the details here, and you already had
an example from the intro. We're talking about ships spewing
liquid fire like essentially spewing napalm onto enemy vessels, onto
the water itself, causing the water to burn and then
of course to burn ships, which are generally highly flammable
as well as the individuals aboard. You would, I would think,

(10:18):
certainly think twice about approaching one of these Byzantine vessels,
especially if it had a visible uh you know, animal
head on the front. But you can also think about
it from the from the individual sailor's perspective, like the
terror that would be inflicted on them, because if you
so you imagine a naval battle and you are approaching

(10:38):
a ship that is spewing fire, it is probably the
case that because you're a medieval sailor, you don't know
how to swim, and you might be far from shore,
and so you were facing two possible fates either burning
alive or jumping overboard and drowning. And even if you
could swim, the water is now on fire. Yeah, so
that's it's not like you have a great option either.

(11:00):
Now we know there have been all kinds of thermal
and incendiary weapons used throughout history. Fire plays a big
role in more fair going back to prehistoric times, uh,
you know, just like burning and raising villages. Like a
common way of siege tactics before siege engines were invented
would be to just set fire to crops and villages

(11:20):
surrounding a besieged castle or fortification to essentially draw them out,
to say like we're going to torch everything you have
if you don't come out to fight us. What kind
of goes back to our episode on fire. Fire is
is the basic, you know, the basic aspect of human technology.
So as long as we've had it, we've used it
for to kill each other and to keep each other alive, right,

(11:42):
And so it's it's quite clear and quite easy to
see why it's a useful tool. And more also, it
has that kind of scary element because it's not just
a directed weapon like an arrow or a sword. It
has a life of its own. You release fire into
the wild and it can sort of carry on with
its own business without completely unaided by your continued efforts.
But I want to know when's the first time we

(12:04):
saw this specific version of incendiary weaponry use What when
does Greek Fire itself first come on the scene. Well,
I'm glad you asked, Joe. It was the year six
seventy eight, and uh in Constantinople was in a kind
of a tight spot, right, And so going forward from
this point, I just want to acknowledge one of our
main sources. It is a really interesting paper back from

(12:26):
two in the journal Technology and Culture by Alex Rowland
called Secrecy, Technology and War, Greek Fire and the defensive
Byzantium six to twelve O four. So a lot of
our information going forward is going to be coming from here,
but we'll mention a few other sources also. So at
six Constantinople we're under siege. What's happening? Okay? So the

(12:46):
caliph Mawija has dispatched his fleet for the fifth consecutive time,
and he's taken the peninsula of sizy Couse and here
just south of the Byzantine capital, uh, the entire era
name forces here. They've converged with the army and they're
going to march on Constantinople and besiege it. Okay, So
we have the Arab forces moving in and Constantinople, how's

(13:10):
it going to defend itself? Well, I mean, luckily it
is a it is a very defensible city at the time,
and so they have a lot of a lot of
stuff going for them. But that this is the thing
about being besieged, is that it is a long term affair.
Usually it's about a steady strangling of the city of
the nation. Even but being a coastal city, Constantinople has

(13:32):
a lot of a lot of its power and resources
in its ability to travel the seas, right, So if
you've got a fleet coming in to attack your ability
to travel the seas, that's no good, that's right. So
they luckily Constantinople had a strong navy and pretty much
had a strong Imperial navy at least isolated to Constantinople

(13:54):
for the you know, the duration of the empire. But
what they needed the was it was a particular weapon.
They needed something that would really give them a strong advantage,
an advantage the likes of which we we we we
heard in the intro to this episode, and that's where
a particular individual comes into play. Kalinkas. Yes, the stories

(14:15):
tell us that Kalinkas was a Syrian architect and engineer
from the town known at the time as Heliopolis of Syria,
and he arrived in Constantinople as a refugee after he
had been driven out of his homeland, so he'd recently
escaped the Arab conquest of Syria. He brought his military
ideas and inventions with him to the Byzantines and essentially

(14:37):
he showed up on their doorsteps and offered them the
science of napalm. Really, what is with what it breaks
down to, how do you imagine that scene breaking down,
like he knocks on the city walls and says, I
have a flamethrower. Yeah, I mean, I guess you had.
He had to make a case for it, like, hey,
I've got some ideas. They're they're really explosive, you're gonna
love them. Or maybe there was a post saying, hey,

(15:00):
we have an opening for a you know, a weapons engineer,
a chemical engineer to help us with our weapons systems
for this upcoming siege. What does a medieval weapons pitch
meeting look like. I don't know, but I'm I guess
it's you know, it's like an audience with the king
or or dignitaries, and then you know he's probably showing

(15:20):
them some plans or something. Right, however he ended up
pitching it, it was accepted. In fact, it was even
referred to as clinicals fire, as well as Roman fire,
marine fire, liquid fire, artificial fire, and of course Greek fire.
Now it probably wasn't referred to as Greek fire at
the time by the Byzantines because they didn't even think

(15:41):
of themselves as Greeks. I think that name that Appellachian
came later from Western Europeans. Right, like Crusaders would encounter
this or something like it, and because they were going
east when they saw it, they referred to it as
Greek fire, right, and then the name that name, in
particular Greek fire, ends up being applied. I do various
things that might not have been the same Greek fire

(16:04):
weapons system, or might have been just something just you know,
remotely similar, like maybe you just involved flaming oils of
some sort. Yeah, I've got to comment on that actually. So,
according to Kelly Dvrees and Robert Douglas Smith in their
book Medieval Military Technology from University of Toronto Press in
basically there were many different types of weapons referred to

(16:25):
as Greek fire and the extant literature throughout the Middle Ages,
so there were they separated into three main categories. You've
got liquid fire pumped out through a nozzle, and then
a liquid incendiary weapon that's hurled in small ceramic grenades.
And then you've got later solid incendiaries that used explosive
so that'd be something more like gunpowder. For the purposes

(16:47):
of today's discussion, we're focusing primarily on that original Byzantine
marine fire, which is what Anna Komnina was describing it's
a liquid jet of flame that vomited out of a
nozzle on the ends of ships. And for for the
purposes of simplicity, we could also call it Kalina costs fire,
because that specifies that it's what was used in the

(17:07):
eighth century by the Byzantines in their ships, these flamethrowers
coming out the prow of the of the Byzantine warships. Now,
in the case of this initial rollout of Greek fire,
uh it turned. It was able to help turn the tide.
According to the accounts, they are able to drive back
the invaders and the remnants of the air of fleet

(17:28):
were then subsequently lost in a mighty storm. And when
the forces again attempted the investiture of Constantinople and seven seventeen,
the Byzantines again used the Greek fire, and this time
they apparently had a an improved formula, and the invaders
were driven off once again. And and this is a
kind of a key historic moment, by the way, some
historians rank it only under Charles Martel's victories over Islamic

(17:53):
invaders in southern France during the seven thirties is a
key stop point for Muslim expansion into Europe. So it's
some one of those moments in time where it's hard
to imagine a timeline forking off in an alternate direction. Yeah.
I always love those things in history, like those key
moments where I've never heard of like an alternate history

(18:14):
that explores what would have happened if things had gone
the other way. But I want to read that book.
Maybe it's out there, yeah, yeah, and maybe maybe HBO
will adapt it. It It sounds equally problematic to to have
like a modern series showing what a you know, what
a predominantly Islamic at least, you know, at least Eastern
Europe would have looked like you know, it's just it's

(18:36):
fascinating to try and try and picture how that would
have come together in an alternate timeline. But we should
focus on the technology itself, because that's the core of today.
What was Greek fire? Yeah, I mean, as you might
imagine with a wonder when weapons such as this, it
was a matter of state secret, and it's a secret
that seemingly died with the death of the Byzantine Empire

(18:59):
in the four or maybe much earlier. We'll get to
uh and to this day, chemists and historians. They continue
to devise possible recipes for it, and thoughts not only
on the the just the the liquid itself, but also
the weapons system and involved here what what what were
they cooking up? How are they dishing it out? And

(19:22):
to what degree was anyone ever able to replicate it?
Fascinating questions we will explore in depth when we come
back from this break. Thank thank alright, we're back now, Robert.
We're onto the Greek fire itself, the chemistry of the
liquid substance, the liquid flame, and the delivery system for it.

(19:42):
So what do modern scholars think about Greek fire and
and what do we know about Greek fire from these
medieval descriptions that we can use to try to figure
out how it worked. Yes, let's get into the main
properties of Greek fire. Though before we do that, I
do want to point out one point that Rowland makes
in his his paper, and that's the historian Theophanes wrote

(20:06):
that the Bysantine, the Bysantine emperor, already had a fire
ship program in the works two years before the arrival
of Kalin cost So it remains a mystery exactly what
the nature of the prior system weapons system was and
how he improved upon it with presumably with his formula. Yeah,
that is one interpretation I've read that some modern historians

(20:27):
look at this and say, okay, Kalina Coss if you
assume he was a real person and he did show
up to help with the Greek fire system, that what
he actually did was not invent Greek fire or bring
them Greek fire, but that he improved upon their recipe.
That they already had some kind of chemical incendiary weapon
that could be lit and and tossed out over enemies,

(20:48):
but that he made it much more powerful. And what
are the key characteristics that are often reported about this
powerful version of Greek fire or Kalina Coast fire. Okay,
so they're they're basic four of these properties. First of all,
we've already alluded to this. It burns in water. Some
say it some say it was ignited by water, but

(21:08):
this is almost certainly a myth. It's also said that
only vinegar, sand or urine could extinguish it. Now in
the next key characteristic, it was a liquid. It was
something that was vomited forth from one of these animal
heads or a siphon number three at sea, it was
shot from tubes, or siphons and very rarely used on land. Okay,

(21:30):
so it mainly came out of the prow of a ship, right, yeah,
this and it's something that would be you know, squirted
or blasted out of um an aperture. And then finally,
and this is this one is really interesting and will
come into some of the theories that we're going to discuss.
There was smoke and a booming sound as it vomited
forth from the tube. And this is about as detailed

(21:52):
as our understanding of the properties get Like, most of
the theories that we're looking at are going to be
speculating based on these characteristics. Now, all but the use
of tubes, you can find in prior incendiary weapons used
by other people, such as various historical accounts of just
flaming oils being used. Fireworks existed in the region as

(22:13):
early as the fourth century, and those could have created
smoke and noise. But still there are a lot of
questions regarding you know what, what exactly is going on here. Well,
let's chase those questions, man, all right, let's do it. Okay, So,
what are some potential ingredients that have been hypothesized by
modern scholars that would have been constituents of the Greek

(22:33):
fire recipe. We know that it was probably more than
just one thing. Right now, one thing that has been
suggested by modern scholars is the idea of quicklime. Quicklime
is the common name for calcium oxide or C A O,
and this is something that can be produced from lime
bearing things found in nature, such as seashells or in limestone.

(22:57):
You can do like a heat reduction of these things
to produce quicklime. So it is something that was known
to the ancient world. Now, the supporting evidence for the
idea that quicklime was involved in the Greek fire recipe
was that, of course the production of calcium oxide was
technologically feasible at the time it could have been done.
In fact, people have been making quicklime for a long time,

(23:20):
and it had even been used as a chemical weapon
by the Romans hundreds of years before. But if you
believe the part of the story that says Greek fire
ignited on contact with water, quicklime could help you get
there because calcium oxide produces a strong exothermic reaction on
contact with water, meaning when you get it wet, it

(23:43):
releases heat, and you can see videos of this. They're
they're like demonstration videos on YouTube where someone will get
a container of quicklime and they'll just pour some water
on it and immediately start smoking and getting hot. Sometimes
they'll even melt the container that it's sitting in. Now,
it's not flames my to do, so that's part of
the counter evidence. Of course, quicklime itself doesn't produce fire,

(24:05):
but a heat producing chemical reaction, so the quicklime couldn't
be the only ingredient. Also some counter evidence is that
Roland points out the Greek fire was reported to have
burned on the decks of ships, not just in the water,
and if quicklime was the ignition catalyst, it would need
to be heated by coming into contact with water, so

(24:25):
that might weigh against the quick quicklime idea. But perhaps
you could imagine a recipe in which quicklime is combined
with another fuel or mixture of fuels, and when the
Greek fire preparation comes into contact with water, the water
reacts with the quicklime triggers the exothermic reaction, so it
suddenly heats it up, which increases the temperature of the

(24:47):
mixture past the ignition point of the fuel, causing it
to catch fire. See this, This makes a certain amount
of sense because it you're you're envisioning something that's not
a primitive lengthrower so much as a chemical concoction. It's
going to spray safely or semi safely away from the warship,

(25:08):
and then it's going to hit the water near the
enemy ship and they're ignite. Right. But as we've said,
there are some complications. They're One of the things is
just that a lot of modern scholars think that the
burns on contact with water part is a myth. I
think there's more credence given to the idea that it
could land on top of the water and continue burning

(25:29):
while it's wet like, while it's in the water, But
the idea that it would only ignite when it was
touched by water, I think fewer people except that part
of the story. Also, as Roland points out, and as
I said a minute ago, it lands on the deck
of the ship and the ship's burning. So in order
for that to work, if it's triggered by quicklime, if

(25:49):
that's what's raising the temperature of the mixture to the
ignition point of the fuel, that probably wouldn't happen on
the deck of a ship unless the deck of the
ship is always wet, which maybe it is, I don't know,
and not get too far ahead of us. But then
that also makes me remember that there's there's some allusions
to the idea that one could defend against Greek fire
by having like soaked items like soaked tarps and whatnot

(26:11):
on your ship. So that would that would not seem
to work if this was indeed the quick line, right,
and that would make the quicklime based version a really
devilish weapon. Like you thought you could put it out
with water, or you thought you could put up some
damp rags to help protect yourself, but in fact, that
would just make it even hotter, I mean, and really

(26:32):
one of the key aspects of the weapon, uh that's
actually mentioned in the opening narration here today is that
it made fire behave in a way that that people
were not expecting. Be it you know, fire that's coming
at you laterally or if this is actually a you know,
a true interpretation, then uh, you know fire that is

(26:54):
springing up from the water without a visible spark. Yeah,
it's scary to imagine. All right, Well, okay, that's quicklime.
What's what's our next potential candidate here? Okay? Roland also
mentions that some scholars have debated the inclusion of calcium
phosphied in the in the Greek fire mixture. So, calcium
phosphide is a chemical compound is C A three P

(27:17):
two and it's a salt stable in the form of
a crystal powder, commonly used as an ingredient in rat poison.
So how does it kill rats? Well, when calcium phosphide
comes into contact with water or acids, it reacts to
release phosphine gas pH three. Now we've talked about phosphine

(27:38):
gas before we mentioned it. I think phosphine gas was
one of the proposed solutions to the question of what's
causing will of the whist phenomenon. Yeah, So one of
the reasons is that phosphine gas is highly toxic, highly flammable,
and that it can spontaneously form explosive and ignite eating

(28:00):
mixtures with the air. So when exposed to the air,
it can just sometimes start up a flame on its own.
You don't even need to ignite it. Now back to
the rat poison. What happens when the rat eats it?
Will the rat eats the calcium phosphide or any other
metal phosphides, other metal phosphides are sometimes used as rat poison,
and then the act of digesting the chemical releases the

(28:21):
killer phosphine gas inside the rodent's body. Calcium phosphide has
also been used for ignition properties in things like maritime flares. Uh,
so what are the what's the supporting evidence that this
could have been an ingredient. Well, it reacts with water
to produce heat, kind of like quicklime. Right, So a
byproduct of the reaction is phosphine gas, which is highly

(28:43):
flammable potential fuel, and this could explain stories of Greek
fire being ignited by water or burning on water, and
phosphine gas can spontaneously form explosive mixtures like I just mentioned.
So this could be really nasty, horrible stuff to be
shooting out at a ship in an naval battle. You'd
be not only shooting out stuff that can spontaneously ignite

(29:04):
and react with water in a way that ignites, but
also it would be producing poison gas. All right, Well,
that that sounds like a terrifying weapon. Uh. What's the
counter evidence? Well, basically it's that people have tried this
in experiments and it doesn't seem to match the way
it's described Roland points out in his paper that twentieth

(29:25):
century experiments with preparations containing calcium phosphied didn't exactly match
what was being described in the ancient sources. So a
lot of modern scholars think it's kind of unlikely that
this was one of the ingredients. All Right, So we've
talked about quickliine, we've talked about calcium phosphied. What's our
next candidate, how about saltpeter. This is one of the

(29:46):
big debates in the history of kim is this is
this is this the area of ultimate controversy in the
twentieth century what was in Greek fire? But there have
been debates, actually, and one of the big debates, and
this is a apparently was their salt peter in it
or not? And there are pro saltpeter scholars and anti
saltpeter scholars, And it looks to me like in recent

(30:07):
decades the anti saltpeter camp has sort of one out. Well.
One of the key reasons here, of course, is that
if saltpeter was used in Greek fire, this would make
Greek fire arguably the first gunpowder weapon, beating the ninth
century Chinese discovery of its property. So there's a really
a lot of you know, cultural pride, uh swept up

(30:28):
in this. Who was the first? Who are the first
people to figure out how to kill people with saltpeter? First, Well,
let's explore the saltpeter and see if we can puncture
that pride. Now, saltpeter is the name for actually a
group of nitrogen based compounds, primarily potassium nitrate or k
n O three. Now, potassium nitrate is again assault that

(30:48):
has many different uses in all kinds of technological fields.
It's in food preparation. It used to be used all
the time as a preservative and cured meats. You can
still sometimes see it used in food, but it's a
little common these days. It's also been used for various
medical purposes, including both to suppress and enhance the libido.
I'm not convinced that it would actually do either one

(31:11):
of those. I haven't seen any evidence, but you know,
people thought a lot of things, did a lot of things.
How I can imagine is somebody like leaving a trail
of gunpowder to their libido and then like setting it off.
But it also saltpeter was also the primary ingredient in
black powder, which was the original gunpowder. Now we have

(31:31):
to specify black powder original gunpowder because modern bullet cartridges
tend to use a different ignition material. But the original
gunpowder it manages to shoot bullets out of guns because
when you set it on fire, it burns very rapidly
and creates lots of rapidly expanding gases, which, as they expand,

(31:51):
push the projectile out the barrel of the gun very fast.
So the traditional mixture for black powder was saltpeter fort
in percent charcoal and eleven sulfur. Here's something you might
have wondered before. If the gunpowder is packed down under
a musket ball, or it's inside an enclosed rifle cartridge,

(32:11):
how does it burn? I mean, don't fires need to
be exposed to oxygen in order to burn. And that's
where the saltpeter comes in. That's that's the role of
the K and O three. The charcoal and the sulfur
in the gunpowder are the fuel that burns, and the
saltpeter is an oxidizer, providing the oxygen atoms that allow
the ignition reaction to happen without the gunpowder being exposed

(32:34):
to open air. Now, this argument for Saltpeter's inclusion in
the Greek fire formula. This was argued by French chemist
Pierre Eugene Marcelline or p. E. M. Bertolo, who lived
seven to seven. Now, Bertolo was a really interesting guy,
and I'm sorry to take us on a tangent, but

(32:54):
I'd hate it if I didn't point out this interesting
idea on the technological terror and war from Bertolos perspe active.
We covered him in an episode of tech Stuff that
I guest hosted with Jonathan Strickland. Tech Stuff if you
don't listen as another podcast here in the House, Stuff
Works Family hosted by Jonathan Strickland, and it was an
episode I went on there to do with him that
I've been wanting to do for a while about five

(33:14):
ways people predicted that technology could end all wars spoiler alert.
None of them worked. But Bertolow was one of these guys,
and the short story on how he predicted it was
that Bertolow predicted that by the year two thousand, engineers
would create synthetic materials indistinguishable from organic matter, and this

(33:34):
would be things like meats, vegetables, alcohol, tobacco, and he
basically saw the whole world as this big solvable chemistry problem.
This is wonderful because it actually ties in with, of course,
the Star Trek utopian vision, where up to a machine
and you, you know, type in steak and you get
your steak. Yeah, exactly. So he saw this sort of

(33:58):
world of chemical abundance, a post scarcity world. And he
also imagined that we could make food so nutritious and
pure that it would alter our moral nature. In other words, like,
through the power of chemical engineering, we would make ourselves
better people. And I just want to do a quick
quote from an interview of his from McClure's magazine published

(34:18):
in eight uh and Bertolo says, in this interview, man
should grow in sweetness and nobility because he will have
done with war, with existence based upon the slaughter of beasts. Perhaps,
and this is only a dream. Remember, synthetic chemistry, or
something we might call spiritual chemistry, will develop means to

(34:39):
as profoundly alter men's moral nature as material chemistry will
change the conditions of his environment. I love that. Now,
that's kind of funny. In the context of exploring the
ancient chemical problem of how to make a mixture that
best burns people in their ships. Well, but I mean
we come back down to the nature of technology again, right, fire,

(35:00):
as soon as we learned how to master it, we
used to keep ourselves warm and to cook food, but
also to to terrorize each other. And in chemistry, I
mean you look at especially in the advances made by
German chemists. Uh, you know, at the you know, the
dawn of the twentieth century. Um. You see, um, you
see the sort of the butting heads of the chemistry

(35:21):
of life and the chemistry of death. You know, we're
learning how to manipulate chemical properties to better crow crops,
where we're figuring out how to treat illnesses. So we're
accidentally inventing M D M A uh. And at the
same time we're creating horrific chemical weapons to utilize against
each other. Totally, and so it's clear that Bertolo had

(35:45):
his mind on not just chemistry at the you know,
molecule level, but chemistry at the societal level. What chemistry
meant for humankind. And so one of the things he
was thinking about was chemistry and war. And so he
turned his mind to this problem of what was in
Greek fire, and he argued, yes, salt peter was an
ingredient supporting evidence for Saltpeter would be. One thing is

(36:08):
that in the descriptions, the Greek fire shoots out of
the nozzles on the front of the ships as if explosively, right, Yes,
and there was also reportedly a boom and a smoke,
great smoking effect, So you know, others would argue whether
some sort of a hydraulic system that's responsible for this,
But you could also imagine, I mean, we were told

(36:29):
there was a booming, noise, we're told there was smoke,
so it it leads you to believe that there's some
sort of explosive reaction taking place here. Yes, But on
the other hand, what what's the counter evidence that says no, no,
no Saltpeter in the Greek fire. Well, one of the
things would be, as you alluded to, you know, you
might have been able to produce that that lateral trajectory

(36:49):
if you just had highly pressurized liquids. So if maybe
the ships were constructed in such a way that they
were able to build up the pressure in the storage
tanks and have valves that would suddenly allow it to
shoot out, you could get a lot of pressure coming
out of even medieval tubes. Another piece of counter evidence.
Where would the salt peter come from? I think the

(37:10):
thinking on this now is that it's not impossible that
these people could have used saltpeter, but there's no direct
evidence that they had it. Also, the British chemist and
historian J. R. Partington, who lived from eighteen eighty six
to nineteen sixty five, argued against the theory that saltpeter
was part of Greek fire. And Partington argued in a

(37:31):
book called A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder in
nineteen sixty the Greek fire was made from distilled and
natural petroleum. Will get there in just a second, uh,
For that would would have been found on the beds
of the northern shores of the Black Sea. And that
what it was done was what we were just describing.
It's pumped at high pressure over a flame like a

(37:52):
modern flamethrower. Now he suggests that a primary ingredient is
this distilled natural petroleum. And this is a common consensus,
I would say, of scholars should look at Greek fire today.
So what's this stuff? All? Right? So there's there's a
word that is used for this stuff, but I understand it.
It's also one of these problematic terms that is kind

(38:13):
of broadly applied, right, and that is naptha. Right. So
it appears that various flammable liquids throughout the ages have
been called naptha at different times and places. But in
this case we're probably talking about crude oil in some form,
some filtered form, right, That's right. One of the books
that I was looking after this is The Fall of
Constantinople by Nicole Haldon and Turnbull uh and the authors.

(38:38):
They write that Greek fire was likely distilled petroleum, perhaps
with a resin added like some sort of a tree
sat like a pine resin pine resin, and this would
have been adding to thicketed, thicken it up and prolong
it's burning on the surface of the water. Now the
author Halden the middle and there is John Holden of
Princeton University, and he's written, uh, some solo papers as

(39:00):
well on Greek fire, you know. He he suspects that, yeah,
that it was petroleum based liquid modified to increase its potency.
He thinks that there key ingredients were highly flammable light
crude oil. Uh. This would be the naphtha and that
pine resin, which not only would have made it to
burn more on the surface of the water, but it
would have been sticky. It would have made the mixture

(39:21):
burned hotter and longer. In general, I've actually read that
one of the names, one of the contemporaneous names for
Greek fire was sticky fire God. You know that gets
That reminds me a lot of the accounts of the
use of actual flamethrowers. I think I've gone on this
this tirade before on the podcast, but I feel like
we we watch aliens, we watch the thing, We watch

(39:42):
shows with flamethrowers in them, and yeah, those look pretty
terrifying on their own, but we don't really have of
a true picture of the horrifying nature of say a
World War two air of flamethrower. We're shooting this jelly
to flaming death on people, right, I mean, we see
it used most off and these days, I think in
science fiction where it's used against like aliens and monsters.

(40:04):
I mean, you got to realize that a flamethrower is
a horrifying terror weapon. Yeah, that it is definitely a
terror weapon. It is. Uh So if you want, if
you want more on that, just look into any accounts,
any testimony of its usage, say in the Pacific theater
in World War two, and you will you will be
totally sickened. It's a it's a devastating weapon. Alright. So

(40:25):
we've discussed quicklime, We've discussed calcium phosphied, We've discussed salt peter,
We've discussed naptha, we've discussed pine resin. All of these
have been hypothesized at various times in places as ingredients
in Greek fire. Is that it? Or is there any
other hypothesized ingredients? Well, I also ran across bit human. Well,

(40:47):
so this was the world's first petroleum product. It's a sticky, black,
viscous substance and you we probably know it better as asphalt,
but it was highly prized in the ancient world, and
it was for the longest it was primarily a Mesopotamian monopoly.
The stuff substance saw use in various endeavors, boat cocking, art, cosmetics,

(41:08):
and physicians in the region eventually used it to treat
a number of ailments and these would have Eventually, these
forms of treatment would eventually spread to Europe. And uh
I was reading about this, this one in particular, as
a candidate for Greek fire in the journal of maths suspectrometry,
and this was a study of a particular ancient vass
from fifth century BC containing a sample of bitumen. Uh.

(41:34):
By the way, ancient Egyptians used this as a preservative
for their mummies. And the word mummy even comes from
the Persian word for for wax mumia, which was used
to describe but human. Okay, so we've got all these
hypothesized ingredients. So in what way is it most likely
they came together? Well, we already mentioned that Roland has

(41:55):
something to say about that. He concludes in agreement with
the scholar he names uh a chr. Ellis Davidson, that
naptha was almost definitely the primary fuel, that pine resin
was possibly used as a thickener, that quicklime may have
been added to help it burn in or on water,
but this is not viewed as necessary, and that saltpeter

(42:16):
may have been added to give it explosive properties, but
this is also not viewed as necessary. I found another
paper on this. It was in the Biotechnology Journal from
the year two thousand and six by procop at All
called Enzymes Fight Chemical Weapons, and the authors here say
that they think the Greek fire was probably a combination
of resin sulfur, naptha, quicklime, and saltpeter. And of course

(42:41):
we have to remember that even in even in these
earlier accounts, UH supposedly the the the Greek fire itself,
the formula for it improved between the first and the
second major usage. So it's possible that Kalina costs improved
upon the formula, that it was tweaked by others. And
and as will explore in the After a Break here,

(43:03):
there's also the nature of the secret here. What happens
when you keep a secret so well that that it
never leaks outside of your kingdom, it doesn't survive your empire.
What does it say about the nature of the secret,
how you kept it, and how that might backfire on
you when you need to retrieve that secret later. And

(43:27):
we're back, all right, Robert. Let's say that I have
captured the recipe for Greek fire. I'm I'm an opposing
general of some other army, and I know exactly what
chemicals to mix in what proportions to make Greek fire?
Am I now as powerful as the Byzantine fire fleet? No?

(43:49):
You're not. And because this is interesting, you can you
can if you have a perfect mixture, the identical mixture.
Let's say I have a bucket of it. Yeah, you
have a bucket of it. Great, what are you gonna
do with that bucket? Uh? Do you have a ship?
I'm gonna maybe like throw it really hard? No system?
Do you have any of the end you have the
skill to use it? Right? So from from the descriptions

(44:11):
we know of ancient history, it's not just the recipe
of the of the Greek fire that really matters. And
how it's deployed as a weapon in battle, that's right,
I mean one can have cannot help but be reminded
of all the various news reports going on now about
North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. We see the
various steps in the thresholds that are being discussed. Right, Like,

(44:35):
it's it's one thing to be able to produce a
an atomic bomb, but then can you can you miniaturize
it right and fitted into a warhead? Are you capable
of creating uh an interconcontinental ballistic missile that can that
can exit the atmosphere, re enter and hit the target.
There they're additional um systems that have to be in

(44:56):
place to fully utilize that weapon. And their skills. It
have to be in place to be able to use
it effectively against your enemy. Yeah, when you think about
developments and weapons technology, and I do want to be clear,
we're not trying to glorify weapons technology today or say like,
look how beautiful it is all the destruction we can do.
But as one important aspect of the development of science

(45:16):
and technology, I think it's worth exploring. As you look
at how weapons have developed in the last century or so,
a lot of what has happened, with the exception of
of course nuclear weapons and things like that, has not
been so much changes in what you can blow up
on like the incendiary or the chemical compounds there, but
it's been in the delivery systems, right and uh. For instance,

(45:39):
the historians Holden and Burn have argued that that, yeah,
this was going with what we've said, we definitely had
a liquid uh substance here uh and uh, and it
was more of a scientific victory of preheating and pressurizing
the liquid below deck, they argued. So this would mean
that the delivery system is as important, or if not
more important then and the true Greek fire and you know,

(46:02):
the formula for the stuff, so you know it's not
just the Kalina costs fire. It's the Kalina cost weapon, right,
the whole I mean, the weapon system and also like
the tree. It's kind of like a fighter jet. Right.
You can have the fighter jet, you can have like
an F fourteen Tomcat, but you gotta have somebody to
that's also capable of piloting that thing as well. So
you have you have essentially you have the ammunition, you

(46:24):
have the system, and then you have the skills required
to use it in battle. Now, of course, Uh, this
this weapon system as a technology. Uh, it was again
a state secret and this is this is actually Roland's
key area of focus in his article the Keeping of
This Secret and and what does it? What does it
do for your technology when the technology itself is secret? Yeah.

(46:48):
Roland explains this via framework originally articulated by a guy
named Derek to sell a price in the nineteen seventies,
where he he sets up science and technology as opposed
in one very key UH aspect, which is that he
calls science quote paperophilix, meaning enjoying publishing or enjoying paper,

(47:09):
whereas UH technology is largely paperophobic, meaning it wants to
stay secret. It doesn't want to be widely published and disseminated.
Science is about sharing knowledge with all of humanity. Technology
is about using science to your advantage. And for examples
of that, we can think too patents. You know, you

(47:30):
have a patent on your technology because no one you
don't want anyone else, even if they figure out how
to do it, you don't want them to make money
off of it, or the or you want to go
more historical, you can look to various guilds, trade guilds,
trade secrets, and then state secrets as well, and we
continue to see this play out today with everything from
computing technology to nuclear weapons. Now, Roland points out that

(47:55):
you know, even mythical weapons of great might were typically
secretive in nature and then it and that in the
real world, everyone from da Vinci to Samuel Colt took
steps to safeguard the details of their inventions, in which
you know, in Colts case, were certainly weapons and in
in da Vinci's case were sometimes weapons depending on what
he was concocting. But he also does acknowledge that there's

(48:18):
a countervailing viewpoint, for example, from the researcher Pamela long
Right that says that Okay, so, yes, Greek fire was
a great state secret. But actually it's kind of an
anomaly in that right, because a lot of other weapons
technology did become widely disseminated public knowledge, that Greek fire
is kind of an outlier for the Middle Ages. Yeah,

(48:39):
this this one, and that's one of the reasons it's
so intriguing. This one example of a weapon system that
was that was wrapped up in secrecy. But in what
way this keeping a technology secret also undercut your ability
to use it? Yes, this is this is where it
gets even more interesting. So for the for the for
the Formula LA, according to Rowland, they simply made and

(49:03):
bottled the stuff and sealed up jars. Okay, yeah, I
think he calls this the Coca Cola method. You just
make it at the central factory. You've got your your
central arsenal, and that's where you mix up all the
stuff and you jar it up and you send it
out and you don't let anybody else see what you're doing, right,
And you're only darring it up a centralized location, for instance,
in or around Constantinople. It's not coming in from a

(49:25):
you know, another province or anything. What are the eleven
herbs and spices. I mean they arrive pre bagged. There's
no way to know. But but of course there's more
at play here than just that nere liquid. As we've
we've related, so the technology entails matter, power, a tool
or machine, and technique. So power plus matter via machine

(49:46):
and a human operative utilizing the technique that will give
you the fire itself the basic equation of technology. Right,
So the formula here, the formula itself was the matter,
the power was the fire, the spark, the machine and
technique or largely a mystery, but you know, a lot
of the theories boiled down to you know, a system

(50:07):
of tubes and a like a heating under underneath the
deck of the ship, right, like a pressurized cauldron that
would be heating the oil or the nap the ahead
of time and keeping it under high pressure. And then
a valve that you could turn to suddenly release a
jet of it which would spray over a flame. And the
the author points out that all the information needed to

(50:29):
design such a pressurized weapon system, this would not have
been a godsend. You don't have to imagine uh klinkos
as as an alien visiting the human civilization and giving
them flame covers. No, in fact, this is highly uh.
It's something you can definitely imagine that people would have
come up with just based on Roman learning, And this

(50:50):
is something that we we should emphasize about the state
of technology and what we often refer to as the
Middle Ages, what sometimes called the Dark Ages. Now, there
has been a lot of a lot of historical thought
in the twentieth century that, you know, like Enlightenment historians
who looked back on the Medieval period and called it
all the Dark Ages, they really were sort of underestimating

(51:13):
the intellectual flourishing that went on in some places in
the Middle Ages in Europe. But at the same time,
after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire throughout much
of Europe, there was kind of a period in which
much knowledge was lost and forgotten and fewer historical records
were produced. So for for some time, for some centuries

(51:35):
in the later millennium, the later half of the first
millennium CE, you could sort of say that there was
a technological dark Age. There was less progress for a
while than there had been in the Roman period, and
a lot of what we used to know how to
do was forgotten. So it is kind of interesting that
you see this advance taking place. Then yeah, now, so
who knows if you would be able to acquire them,

(51:56):
But if you could, if you could get a copy
of here throws new Matica and Vitruvius's d architectura, you
would have, according to Roland, the basic elements you'd need
to figure out how to construct your own pressurized weapon
system for Greek fire. And he he writes the following,

(52:16):
and I read a quick quote. He says the technique
itself would have been a secret of almost as much
sophistication as the formula for without pressure gauges and safety valves,
it was surely a delicate task to heat and pressurize
a volatile liquid in dark and cramped quarters below deck
in combat without accident. God, can you imagine that? So

(52:37):
you're you're the nap the pumper in the belly of
the of the fire ship. Yes, yeah, just this just
bottled death down there, and it's going to be hopefully
you know, spit away from your ship and onto the others.
So you've just got to imagine that if they were
operating ships like this, they frequently would just become engulfed

(52:58):
in flames and kill all of the people operating them. Well,
you might think so, but there are actually no reports
of such accidents. Now that doesn't mean they didn't occur.
It could be a situation where you know, especially if
if you know, if if you're if Byzantines are writing
about their fabulous weapon system, maybe you're not going to
write about the failures. You're only going to write about
the victories. But for whatever reason, we we don't have

(53:19):
any accounts of of Greek fire vessels blowing up, of
the system backfiring. Now, I will say that that there
are accounts of other similar weapons systems backfiring, which gives us, uh,
gives us an idea that, well, this kind of thing
might have easily occurred and it just wasn't written about
or though the writings have not survived. But if we

(53:42):
look to China, of all places, uh, there's a there's
actually a detailed description of a similar weapons system that
was employed around nine hundred CE in China. So there's
a a ten forty four military work titled Woo Jing
zong Yao, and it details a brass container fitted with

(54:02):
a horizontal pump gunpowder ignition chamber and a small diameter nozzle,
and this was designed for use on you know, the
ramparts of a fortress or what it would be used
against siege weapons. But they were also apparently used in
naval battles, uh, particularly one naval battle on the young
Z River near Nanjing in between Tang and Song forces.

(54:29):
And here's the where it ties into what we're discussing here.
The Tang used it, but the wind changed and the
fires blew back on their own ships. So who knows
if this was exactly the same weapon system, if it
was inspired by it, or if it was just independently produced.
But I feel like what they're describing here taking place

(54:49):
on the young Z River could easily have occurred with
one of these vessels, right, and we might not know
about it. Now here's a question. Did anybody ever find
themselves in the scenario I described earlier where you're you're
a general facing off against the Byzantines or the Romans
as they would have called themselves, and you've captured some
of this fire in a bottle? Uh? Did did it

(55:12):
ever get turned against them? Um? It does not seem
that it did. But we do have a case. In
eight fourteen, the Bullguards captured thirty six siphons and jars
of Greek fire to go with them. So they had
you know, the at least I guess the hand because
there were two types. So they had like the ship
based siphons and then like a handheld model apparently um

(55:33):
according to some accounts. So they had the fire, they
had the technology, but apparently they didn't know how to
use it, because there's no evidence that they were able
to capitalize on it. Likewise, Marcus the Greek published a
Greek fire recipe in the twelfth century, but you didn't
see that technology spread. And also after nine hundred CE,

(55:57):
Arab forces had similar incendiary web, but they weren't able
to utilize it as the Byzantines had. So you can
easily interpret this as being a situation where Okay, you
have the the AMMO, you have the weapon, but you
just don't have the training or the you know, the
systematic approach to its use. So in other words, to
steal the secret, you'd have to steal all the components,

(56:17):
and that would be difficult, right, I would, because one
of the keys here was the people with knowledge of
all the components, according to Roland, were never in the
same place at the same time, right, So you had
people building it was a compartmentalization of military technology where
you'd have the people who are the pyromancers in there,
you know, in their secret dungeon making your Greek fire,

(56:38):
whoever they are. But then you've also got the people
who are building the pump system and the siphons into
the belly of these warships, and the people who are
being trained in how to operate it. And you've got
to have all these pieces come together for the weapon
to be viable. Right, So you're gonna have I guess
a key number of overseers. They are going to be
able to put all of this together. But this is

(56:59):
where we have the power of secrecy and the risk
of secrecy, because it seems that there were very few
people who had that information that knew how all these
components came together. Uh, and we're able to put it
all together now. According to legend, you had only two
families that knew the full formula of the full weapons

(57:19):
system here and and the technique for using it. And
that would have been the Emperor's family, the royal family itself,
and also a family referred to as the lamp Prose
family I've seen people speculate that the lamp Prose family
is not a real historical right. Yeah. Roland spends a
good amount of time discussing the ins and outs of

(57:41):
both of these. Basically, I guess one of the key
things to keep in mind here is just how the
golden throne worked in in in the Byzantine culture, it
worked by you getting murdered, basically, Well, it worked by
you murdering somebody else and then you getting murdered. Well
he he compares it actually to the Chinese imperial model,

(58:02):
where whoever the emperor is is the is divine, it's
the chosen of heaven, and so there's almost no such
thing as a usurper, right because once you've usurped it,
you've got it and you're okay with God. That's kind
of the you know, a quick version of it. But
there was an hereditary nature to the throne in Byzantine culture,

(58:22):
but once you took the throne, it was yours. So
there was a lot of backstabbing, a lot of a
lot of plots and intrigue, and uh that's so here's
here's a scenario. If you're planning to stage a series
of murders and take the throne. Um where on your
priorities list is Greek fire, you know, is getting us.

(58:46):
You're worried about the people in the room with you
right now? Yeah, yeah, I mean you're you're plotting to
to take the throne and kill who needs to be killed,
backstab or front staff, whoever needs to to get it. Uh,
the passing down of that the details of that weapon system,
it either might not be a priority, it might not
be possible. It's very susceptible to loss because again, very

(59:08):
few individuals, you know, in the royal family for instance,
you're going to have access to it. And if there
is a periphery family that's close to the throne that
also carries the secret, well they're just going to be
just as susceptible to back in front stabs. As you proceed,
Roland points out one situation where it's hard to imagine
how a Greek Fire protecting family, you know, a family

(59:32):
who is known to the emperor and keeps the state
secret could have survived a series of events. And that
series of events was one emperor was deposed, a new
emperor deposed him and came in. Then the original emperor
came back and retook the throne. So you're imagining, basically,
each time something like this happens, key, allies are all
eliminated because you don't want anybody, you know, trying to

(59:54):
get one over on you. So when the new emperor
deposed the original one, you imagine and they probably would
have killed all of the original emperor's uh supporting families
if the lamp cross families somehow survived this, when the
original emperor who was deposed return to power, probably would

(01:00:14):
have killed that family for supporting the usurper. Now, of course,
all of this is still theoretical, like you know, is
to the exact nature of the secret, but and and
how it was kept. But but rolling backs it all
up with the fact that Constantinople was able to keep
a governmental monopoly on silk production. Um. Silk production, of course,
relies on the the use of the silkworm. And it's

(01:00:35):
really kind of comparable in many ways because you've got
to you have to actually have the worms uh and
but then you also have to know how to tend
to them and uh and rear them and use them. Uh.
So just stealing the worms alone is not the same
as stealing the technology. Now, the best kind of secrets
come with magical curses, don't they don't they? Because like

(01:00:55):
a great tomb that you shouldn't be robbed, it will
have a curse that will lay on you if you
disturbed the tomb. And a great state secret, for a
secret weapon, should have a curse if you send this
secret to the enemy. Yeah, I mean, treason should not
only be um, you know, betrayal of of the state,
It should be betrayal of God. Right. We actually have
a wonderful quote here, and this is from this from

(01:01:18):
the writings of Emperor Constantine the seventh he would have
lived nineteen and nine fifty nine, who, addressing his son,
warned that the Greek fire was a not just a
state secret, but a holy state secret. This too was
revealed and taught by God through an Angel to the
Great and Holy Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, And concerning

(01:01:40):
this he received great charges from the same Angel. As
we are assured by the faithful witness of our fathers
and grandfathers, that it should be manufactured among the Christians
only and in the city ruled by them, and nowhere
else at all, Nor should it be sent nor taught
to any other nation whatsoever. And then he goes on

(01:02:02):
to insist quote a death most hateful and cruel awaits
anyone who breaks this secret. Yeah, there's a wonderful, illustrated
example of this given in the quote where he talks
about there was a general or some some kind of
major figure in the Byzantine Empire who sold the secret
of how to make Greek Greek fire to some enemies

(01:02:23):
of the state, and when he tried to walk into
a church next he was struck dead at the doors
of the church. There you go. I mean, it's it
seems perfectly in keeping with what we've talked about concerning
a Byzantine culture and the rulership that, yeah, you would
also just utilize myth and religion to help safeguard your
secrets as well. Now, the author of our opening monologue,

(01:02:44):
Anna Komnena, wrote about this too, right, Yes she did,
and she would have been in on the secret given
her position within the royal family, and she also apparently
provided an incomplete formula of the fire at some point
as well. Again, the nature of a well kept secret
is it's susceptible to law us and uh, and it
was eventually lost perhaps for centuries before it was confirmed

(01:03:06):
lost in twelve oh four. And indeed subsequent accounts of
Greek fire are a few far between and often doubtful. Yeah,
after that story of it being used to repel the
second invasion in the early seven hundreds, do we even
really see it used again much? I mean the original
preparation by the byzantines Um. I don't think there are

(01:03:28):
any strong cases for it now. According to that book
The Fall of Constantinople by Nicole Haldon in Turnbell, there
are there's some form of quote unquote Greek fire that
used was used twice during the final siege of Constantinople
in fourteen fifty three. This is again when they were
conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Uh. And this is where
an incoming grain ship to use it against attackers. And

(01:03:50):
then another account the fire was erected onto the siege engine.
But then again, as we've established, lots of things started
to be called Greek fire after the cons scept came
into vogue. So as for how the secret was kept
for that long, well, we've we already talked about like
the hereditary nature of the secret of Greek fire. We
talked about um the the often murderous ends to to

(01:04:15):
various individuals and positions of power and the Byzantine Empire.
We mentioned the Lampros family and how their doubts there now.
Rowland also discusses the possibility that the Lampros might have
merely served for some time in an official capacity, something comparable,
say to the military official who carries the nuclear football
for the US president. You know, they might just be

(01:04:37):
like a designated secret keeper, guardian of the Greek Fire,
or something to that effect, right, And he says that
this is possible, but it's difficult to evaluate further. We
just don't know enough about Byzantine bureaucracy. We we have
no idea who this theoretical firemaster would have been, you know,
like we we don't have any taught, any records of
such a title, and if they existed, they must have

(01:04:59):
been called something el else. There are various official positions
that have been brought up that that could have, you know,
arguably been secret keepers of the fire. But either the
position didn't have close access to the emperor, which would
be key, or the powers of the office were deluded
over time in a way that wouldn't seem to fit
an office that was in charge of the secret weapon.

(01:05:21):
And we already mentioned how allies of the emperor very
often got eliminated when the next emperor deposed him and
came in again. We do know that the weapon was lost,
and it just becomes more of a question of when
it was lost and how it was lost. So we
know that the Byzantine Navy suffered numerous key defeats in
the centuries to follow defeats which they failed to use

(01:05:44):
their legendary wonder weapon, uh, you know, to defend themselves. Yeah,
And this is another point Roland sort of gets on,
is that it may have been a problem with the
secrecy that if you're so concerned about keeping the secret
of how your weapon works that you are reluctant to
deploy it, like if you're reluctant to hand it over
to satellite allies. I mean, that's the thing that if

(01:06:06):
you're running an empire, you've got your locals who work
directly under you. You're the emperor, your your local people
work directly under you. But then you've got all kinds
of people working for you who are farther away, and
by virtue of being farther away, you don't know if
you can trust them quite as much. And so say
you hand over some fire breathing you know, Greek fire

(01:06:29):
ships to them, how do you know that they're not
going to eventually turn that technology against you? So maybe
you shouldn't arm them with your strongest weapons. Maybe you
should only keep those close to home where you've got
to uh, you know, a firm hand on the control
of them, and you can keep the secret to yourself.
But that just limits the way in which you can
actually deploy this powerful weapon. And another argument here is, okay,

(01:06:51):
you have your your special secret weapon. You're it's a
but it's a shock weapon, it's a surprise weapon. And
the thing about that that sort of weapon is that
it's it's most effective when it's first deployed. So you
know what happens when you try and pull that trick
again and again. Your enemies begin to learn, they begin
to be able to they begin to take precautions. Maybe

(01:07:14):
they you know, there are some accounts of being able
to drake the ship in in like wet cloth to
help protect it. Now whether that worked or not, who knows.
The other idea being that this was more or less
a close combat scenario. Weapon, you know, you're not gonna
be able to launch it at great distances, so then
your enemies may be realized. Okay, well they have Greek fire.

(01:07:36):
We need to figure out how to combat them from
afar and annihilate them from afar. Keep there and keep
our distance in a way that they're unable to deploy
their wonder weapon. Yeah. I mean, it might be a
horrifying weapon up close, but what if it can only
shoot about twenty feet? Yeah, because really it was made
for galley warfare, this close combat among these these vessels. Now,

(01:07:56):
it's also possible that as the Arab threat decline into
the eighth century, and no other naval power threatened Byzantium
until really until the Italian City states in the twelfth century,
that they simply stopped producing specialized fire vessels if they
didn't need them. Yeah, I mean, because it's another key
thing is that these are these are very specialized weapons.

(01:08:17):
It's if you think to any like strategy video game
where you're building units for your army, like, this is
not a unit you would just spam the heck out off,
because it's it's ultimately very specialized. You could build a
thousand of them, and you'll lose the WARLD like that,
because the war is not being exclusively fought for this
theater of battle. Yeah, and that that's also I mean
talking about the difference between naval and land powers. I mean,

(01:08:40):
a lot of the threats you might be facing would
be from the land, and this is it's now. People
did talk about land based uses for Greek Fire, but
it's a lot less common. It's primarily in this ship
based method. And that's one reason that I sort of
favor the pressurized cauldron and pump method as supposed to

(01:09:00):
saying that they're well, there might have been saltpeter in
it or some other kind of explosive incendiary oxidizer to
get that power pushing it out. I think that the
fact that we primarily see it being used in ships
is a good indication that they had to have a
large apparatus of pumps and hydraulics in place in order
to pressurize it to get it to shoot the way

(01:09:21):
they wanted. Yeah, I think that there's there's definitely a
strong case or that, and uh and and and of
course the cost is another huge factor here too. So
if this is a specialized shock weapon, that is also
expensive to produce, because even it's been argued that the
fuel itself was fairly inexpensive. Still, the pressurized system we're

(01:09:43):
talking about and the training for those individuals, it becomes
a very costly weapon. And so does it make sense
to have a bunch of fireships just on hand if
you don't need them, you know, and and end up,
you know, you end up not needing them for say
a century or more. So, looking at this whole discup,
I should I'm trying to figure out what the main
takeaway about the interplay between secrecy and technology is. Well,

(01:10:09):
I mean, I think there are a couple of key points.
I mean, one is just that a secret of technology
is more than just uh some you know, a patent
on a sheet of paper necessarily more than just a formula. Uh.
It's it's it's a lot more complicated than that. And
to steal technology is is a is a grander endeavor
uh than simply you know, taking a few photographs of

(01:10:30):
a top secret document. It's funny how in this uh,
this peperophobic versus paperophilic conception of technology versus science, you
can almost look at the same thing and call it
a paperophobic technology or a paperophilic piece of science. I
think about fire itself in the Greek myth. You know,
so you have Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. Is

(01:10:54):
the fire their science or is it technology? I mean
as a tool. Usually we think to think of technology
as a thing and a tool in science is an
abstract process. But isn't it? Is it an example of
sharing scientific knowledge or technological knowledge? Um? I mean maybe
it's that the gods think about fire as a technology,
a state secret to be protected to keep out of

(01:11:16):
the hands of these humans, and Prometheus re envisioned it,
uh to to take it out of the technological realm
and say this is science. This is basic knowledge that
can be applied to all things, and it should be
shared to all people. Yeah. And I think the other
aspect here is, even if we strip away the military
aspects in the in the state security aspects of Greek fire,

(01:11:37):
it's such a specialized technology that doesn't have a lot
of uses outside of this particular uh, you know, field
of battle. Like it's not it's hard to I cannot
instantly think of an example of another application for Greek
fire as an advanced technology. Is a specialized technology what's
a peaceful use for a flamethrower? There's there's not one.

(01:11:59):
And let even if you go to burning Man, you're
not seeing a true flamethrower. You know, you're seeing a
pyro techniqus you know exchange, You're seeing uh, you know,
fire a shot into the sky, but it's not like
jelly gasoline, um, you know, squirted onto people. I mean,
maybe it does make me think there are some things
that are not worth sharing because there is no conceivable

(01:12:23):
positive use for them. But then again, maybe that's just
my lack of imagination. Maybe somebody out there, if you're
listening right now and you can think of a way
that a flamethrower could be used in a totally peaceful
way that harms no one and helps people live better
lives or uh, you know, builds a better not a
better mousetrap that's a killing machine. Also, well builds a
better something very sweet and wonderful. Let us know. I

(01:12:46):
want to know what that is. What do you do
with a flamethrower? That's all happy times? It reminds me
of a some e card from years back, where it
was I think it was from a medieval woodcut of
or it was made to look like one of an
individual standing next to some ridiculous looking wheeled contraption, and
he had kind of a sad look on his face,
and the text just read I invent awful things. And

(01:13:07):
that's kind of what we're talking about with Greek fire. Yes,
it's it's very advanced, it's very sophisticated, it's super secret,
but it's really an awful invention. Well, this has been interesting, Robert, Yeah, yeah,
this has been a lot of fun. Uh so, and
and hopefully it's it's stirs some interesting thoughts out there,
you know, whether you're into the history of military technology

(01:13:27):
or not. Um, you know, just about the kind of
going off on our our previous episode about secrets and
the keeping of secrets, you know, it ties into that
and and also just the nature of technology. I'm glad
I learned that saltpeter can be used for ammunition, for sausage,
or for sexual impotence. Yes, yes, fire up that libido,
or don't actually attempt to fire up your libido with saltpeter,

(01:13:51):
or at least don't blame it on us when things
go awry. All right, Hey, we thank you for listening
in and uh while you're waiting on the next episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind to come out, why
don't you head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's we will
find all of the podcast episodes. You'll find some videos.
You'll find blog posts and links out to our various

(01:14:11):
social media accounts such as Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook,
where we now have a Facebook group for your more
detailed discussions. We call it Stuff to Blow your Mind
Discussion Module. If you haven't done so already, go there
asked to join. You will be admitted and then you
can engage in some longer form discussions with other fans

(01:14:33):
and Stuff to Blow Your Mind and occasionally the host themselves.
And if you want to get in touch with us
directly as always, you can do that the old fashioned
way by emailing us and blow the mind at how
stuff Works dot com For more on this and thousands

(01:14:57):
of other topics. Does it how stuff Works dot Com?
Every lame the biggest. First start about