Byzantine: Battle with Flames and Sword

Byzantine: Battle with Flames and Sword
Carefully holding catapults containing their ‘secret missiles’, the Byzantine troops advanced on the enemy fortress.

Once within the firing distance, the catapults hurled the missiles – clay pots filled with an incendiary liquid called Greek fire – over the battlements at the opposing forces.

The pots exploded on impact, sending out tongues of flames which scorched the faces and hands of the victims and sometimes buried them alive.

Time and again Byzantine troops captured enemy strongholds by using the fore, and they also empowered it to defend their own forts and cities.

‘It should be turned against any tower that may be advanced against the wall of a besieged town’, proclaimed Emperor Constantine VII in the in the 10th century.

Effective as it was, the mysterious and volatile Greek fire was apt to explode when being carried over rough ground, injuring if not killing those transporting it.

After a time, the army stopped using it, but it was then adopted as the Byzantine navy’s most feared weapon.

It caught fire spontaneously when wet, and the more water that was thrown on the flames the more fiercely they burned: they continued burning even n the sea.
Byzantine: Battle with Flames and Sword