FIRE, NATURE OF. See HEAT.
Greek Fire, a kind of artificial or factitious fire, which is said to have been used with wonderful effect in the wars of the Christians and Saracens in the seventh century. Its ingredients are not known, the composition of it having been kept a profound secret; nor do the accounts that have come down to us admit of anything but conjecture as to its nature. From the descriptions of its effects, however, it seems probable that the principal ingredient was naphtha, with the addition of nitre, and perhaps sulphur. The use of naphtha, from its great inflammability, and the difficulty of quenching its flame, may account for the havoc and dismay which the Greek fire is said to have occasioned, and may have given rise to the stories of its burning with greater violence in water than in air, though a sufficient admixture of nitre, by the oxygen it gives out in combustion, might render such a composition for a time almost unextinguishable even by water. We are told too that it was employed with equal effect by sea and land, in battles or in sieges. "In two sieges," says Gibbon, "the deliverance of Constantinople may be chiefly ascribed to the novelty, the terrors,
and the real efficacy of the Greek fire. The important Fire-Balls, secret of compounding and directing this artificial flame was imparted by Callinicus, a native of Heliopolis in Syria, who deserted from the service of the caliph to that of the emperor. It was either poured from the rampart in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls of stone and iron, or darted with arrows and javelins, twisted round with flax and tow which had imbibed the inflammable oil; sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, and was most commonly blown through long tubes of copper, which were planted on the prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire. This important art was preserved at Constantinople as the palladium of the state: the galleys and artillery might occasionally be lent to the allies of Rome, but the composition of the Greek fire was concealed with the most jealous scruple. The secret was confined above 400 years to the Romans of the East. It was at length either discovered or stolen by the Mohammedans; and in the holy wars of Syria and Egypt they retorted an invention, contrived against themselves, on the heads of the Christians. The feu Gregois, as it is styled by the more early of the French writers, "came flying through the air," says Joinville, "like a winged long-tailed dragon, about the thickness of a hogshead, with the report of thunder and the velocity of lightning; and the darkness of the night was dispelled by this deadly illumination. The use of the Greek fire was continued to the middle of the fourteenth century, when the scientific or casual compound of nitre, sulphur, and charcoal, effected a new revolution in the art of war and the history of mankind."
It should be observed, that in all probability many different inventions have been described under the general name of Greek fire. Although the invention has usually been ascribed to Callinicus of Heliopolis, in the reign of Constantine Pogonatus, A.D. 668, it seems highly probable that naphtha (which abounds in many parts of the ancient Persian kingdom, in India, and on the shores of the Caspian) had been applied to the purposes of warfare at a much earlier period by the Oriental nations. This subject has been ably discussed by Dr Macculloch in the Quarterly Journal of Science, 8c. vol. xiv.