Greek Fire: The Secret Weapon that Saved Christendom in the Seventh Century

        Hundreds of hulking wooden slave-driven galleys appear on the horizon.  Tens of thousands of oars move in unison and drive the fleet steadily into the Bosporus Strait.  The line of warships seems endless.

It is the year 672 and the Arab fleet of the Umayyad Caliphate has come to the Sea of Marmara to besiege, destroy and ultimately conquer the Christian city of Constantinope--the largest and wealthiest city in all of Christendom.

Islam is a new faith and it is spreading like wildfire.  The Umayyad clan has consolidated all of the middle east and Asia Minor under the banner of Islam, and now with unchecked proselytizing zeal, they are seeking to move the faith of the Prophet Mohammed westward into eastern Europe and beyond.

All that stands in their way is the ancient Roman city of Byzantium--renamed Constantinope in the 4th century after the Emperor Constantine who officially made the Roman Empire Catholic and then divided it into an eastern and a western half, before moving the administrative capital of his Christian Empire from Rome itself to the newly christened city of Constantinople.

Now, for the past three plus centuries, while Rome itself and the rest of western Europe has fallen into the depths of the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Empire (as historians would later call it) has thrived.  The Byzantines remained the unrivaled standard bearers of both Classical Roman culture and orthodox Christianity until the 7th century when the growing Islamic Caliphate threatened to eradicate it from the face of the earth.

During the pivotal year of 672 massive muslim armies have been encamped around the Byzantine capital for months--waiting for their unprecedently large fleet to sail into the Sea of Marmara and then up the Bosporus Strait to completely blockade Constantinople.  

If the encirclement becomes complete the Umayyads will be able to bombard and then starve the city into submission.  If the grand muslim fleet can gain control of the Bosporus Strait, the narrow waterway that separates Europe from Asia Minor, then it will be only a matter of time before the crescent moon of Islam waves triumphant over the cultural capital of Christendom.

Constantine IV is the emperor of the Byzantine Empire in 672.  He has seen the large Arab armies that are amassing on his borders and he has prepared the legendary indomitable walls of Constantinople accordingly.  These thick city walls will prove impregnable for nearly eight hundred years and only finally be breached by Islamic armies in the 15th century after the invention of gunpowder and the use of large siege cannons.

But that time remains in the distant future and what most worries Constantine IV at the moment is the state of his navy.  The Byzantine navy is much smaller, both in the number of ships and in the size of those ships, than its Umayyad counterpart.

The Byzantine’s rely on sleek fast moving sailing vessels called dromons from the Greek word for runner.  Though much more maneuverable than the enormous warships of the Arab navy, the speed and agility of the Byzantine dromons will be of no consequence in the narrow waters of the Bosporus, where in close quarters combat the Byzantine navy is sure to be crushed by the sheer size and number of the largest fleet ever yet assembled to invade Europe.

However, on the eve of battle with the great Islamic fleet Constantine has one deadly trick up his sleeve that his Umayyad adversaries know nothing about--Greek Fire.

The sleek dromons line the shores along the Bosporus and wait for the large Arab ships to fill the waterway.  The Umayyad oarsmen continue to guide their ships, lining each one up bow to stern, end to end, until Arab warships nearly fill the strait completely.

When it seems as if not another Arab ship can even fit into the waterway the Byzantine dromons sail close enough to almost touch the Caliphate’s warships.  Then the Christians unleash their secret weapon.

Streams of flame shoot out from the decks of the Byzantine dromons and engulf the wooden galleys of the Caliphate in walls of flame.

A cacophony of heartrending screams and wails rises up above the din of battle from the decks of the Arab ships as men leap overboard while still on fire and descend into the water like human torches.  Within minutes hundreds of charred bodies are floating in the Bosporus and littering the waterway like blackened logs.

Liquid fire relentlessly spews from the Byzantine ships.  Each dromon has dozens of siphons, pressurized hoses not unlike enormous fireplace bellows, that shoot out a mixture which instantaneously ignites into flame when it comes in contact with water.

This mixture, and the ancient flamethrowers that it creates, are what is known as Greek Fire.  Greek Fire is such an effective and terrifying weapon that no invading fleet will ever succeed in cutting off the city of Constantinople by water.  

Prior to the Arab siege of Constantiople in 672, Byzantine leaders quickly realized how formidable and numerically superior their Islamic foes actually were in comparison to their own forces.  For that reason Emperor Constantine IV orders Christian alchemists and engineers to develop some sort of technologically advanced weapon that can even the scales in the event of an invasion by the Umayyad Caliphate.  What these alchemists and engineers devise is the weapon that we know today as Greek Fire.

The composition of Greek Fire is such a closely guarded state secret by the Byzantines that even to this very day no one is precisely sure exactly what it was.

Most historians and scientists agree that Greek Fire probably ignited when it came into contact with water and that it was most likely a combination of two substances, naphtha and quicklime.  Naphtha is a type of flammable oil that is derived from the dry distillation of petroleum, coal or in some cases shale.  Quicklime is a powder, a chemical compound called calcium oxide, that is created by heating limestone to an extremely high temperature.

  During World War One German engineers were able to develop the first modern flamethrowers in 1916 by distilling petroleum into a flammable jellylike liquid when combined with water, but the Byzantine’s most probably used coal or even shale instead to create their early Medieval version of the flamethrower.

The Byzantines probably used pressurized water, coal-based naphtha and quicklime in combination to incinerate the muslim fleet of the Umayyad Caliphate and save their city from certain annihilation.  

Although we cannot be sure exactly what Greek Fire actually was, we can be sure of the terrifying effect it must have had on the early medieval soldiers and sailors who had to face it.  To the sailors of the Umayyad Caliphate’s navy in the year 672 it must have seemed as if the gates of hell had opened up right before their eyes as they came upon the fire-breathing Byzantine dromons.  The Arab siege of Constantinople will continue, off and on, for another six long years, but never again will it be prosecuted with such vigor as it was before the navy of the Umayyad Caliphate had its first run in with Greek Fire.

Unfortunately, the only western reference to the use or composition of Greek Fire during the Arab siege of the 7th century comes to us from a chronicler named Theophanes the Confessor, although many Arab chroniclers of the time do make reference to the weapon, proving what an enormous psychological impact Greek Fire must have had on those who came up against it at the time.

For hundreds of years Arab armies and navies would seek to besiege, destroy and ultimately conquer the christian city of Constantinople and for hundreds of years they would all fail thanks in large part to this secret weapon.  Only with the invention and proliferation of gunpowder in the west after the year 1200, would Greek Fire lose its place as the most feared weapon of mass destruction of its time.

  And though today, we can’t be certain of the exact nature of Greek Fire, we can all be certain of one thing.  Whatever it actually was--Greek Fire was the secret weapon that saved Christendom in the 7th century.