Units of History - Byzantine Flamethrowers and Grenadiers DOCUMENTARY

The Byzantine military was the deadly evolution of its Roman predecessor. Building upon the successful war machine of antiquity, they now bolstered it with new units of heavy infantry, cataphracts, and the elite mercenary corps with which to dominate the battlefields of the medieval world. However, few today are aware of just how far aggressively they pushed the bounds of innovation. Today, we will explore the history of their most experimental units which verge on the border of steampunk fantasy, the grenadier and flamethrower units of the Byzantine army. While fire has long held a reputation as a great destroyer, it can also be used as a life giver and creator. This duality and humanity's fascination with it is best exemplified by our love of fireworks, which you can learn much more about through our sponsor MagellanTV. Their series Pyro's Painting with Fire is a fascinating dive into the lives of those who seek to tame our age-old nemesis and turn it into a work of art. In it, you follow teams of pyrotechnicians across the world as they compete to put on the most dazzling and daring displays imaginable. If you're like me and you've always wondered what goes on behind the scenes of fireworks shows, then this series is just for you. Documentary videos like this are added weekly to MagellanTV, which already has a collection of over 3,000 videos to choose from among the categories of history, science, nature, space, and more. You can watch Pyro's Painting with Fire or any documentary that catches your interest by clicking the link in the description below or going to try.magellantv.com.slashinvicta to get a one-month free trial. Enjoy! As soon as humans first began to pioneer the use of fire, they would seek to turn its power against their enemies. In these early days, there was little nuance to be had. Arsonists merely lit the flames and let Mother Nature do the rest. Naturally, the results were highly uncontrolled and unpredictable. But that mattered little to the militaries of the age, whose targets were generally static fields, farms, and villages. Precision was not required as they Even when armies did mature, indiscriminate use of fire continued to be useful up until even our own time. This was a simple reflection of the fact that absolutely huge levels of destruction could be achieved with very little investment. Laying waste to the countryside would easily cripple an enemy, dealing economic damage, depriving them of resources, diverting their attention, and yielding all manner of strategic benefits. It's for this reason that everyone from the Egyptians to the Greeks, Mongols, English, and Chinese used the simple method of fire and forget. That being said, there was always a desire for some level of control. To this end, people turned to their environment seeking help. Here, experimentation quickly revealed which natural resources might most readily catch fire or be used to sustain it. Pitch, oil, resin, animal fat, and other similar compounds were excellent in this regard and would be adopted by virtually every culture of the world. Using these, one could now coat a surface with flammable material and better control the delivery of the incendiary payload. Torches were obvious first candidates, but it proved just as easy to apply the same method to projectiles, such as spears, bolts, and arrows. Fire could now be spread at a distance. This proved particularly useful in situations such as sieges, where it was not a simple matter to just walk up and burn your target. Yet, even still, flammable projectiles were not always better. Hollywood depictions would lead you to believe that such ranged fire weapons were both widely used and super effective. In reality, flammable projectiles were wildly unreliable. Delve into the details of any Hollywood production and you find that their spectacular scenes require the extensive use of modern petrochemicals and visual effects. Thus, the reality of ranged incendiaries would have been far less cinematic than we imagine. But such a disappointment mostly comes from our own preconceptions. For people in the past, even a small-scale display of fire weaponry could prove devastating both physically and psychologically. Fire, for instance, was widely deployed as an anti-elephant tactic in pitched battles and as a wall-clearing or structure-destroying tool in sieges. Here, militaries got quite inventive in their concoctions, creating quicklime and sulfur fumes which could bathe the enemy in toxic and blinding clouds in preparation for an assault. But the most relevant example for our episode would have been the device deployed by the Here, they appear to have devised the first western flamethrower to dig out the Athenians from their entrenched position. Our records indicate that it consisted of a long tube with hand-operated bellows at the back, which could be pumped to blow out air at the front. This gust of wind was in turn directed into a lit cauldron of coal, sulfur, and tar. The end result was an eruption of flaming material which leapt out several meters in front of it. The device succeeded in clearing the wooden wall of defenders and was reportedly later used against stone walls which were said to have cracked under the intense heat. With this initial proof of concept having been validated, it would now be adopted by other forces. Yet this was a glacial process due to the fact that the highly customized delivery device prevented its widespread adoption in the face of simpler and arguably just as effective alternatives. Soon, however, the military interest in flamethrowers would be rekindled by the development of new incendiary fluids in search of dedicated delivery systems. The earliest of these was naphtha, which appears to have been a natural petroleum product extracted from key locations across the Near East. In his later travels, for instance, Marco Polo describes one source on the border of Armenia. To the north lies a fountain of oil, which discharges so great a quantity as to furnish the loading for many camels. The use made of it is not for the purpose of food, but as an ingredient for the cure of distempers in men and cattle, as well as other complaints, and it is also good for burning. In the neighboring country, no other is used in their lamps, and people come from distant parts to procure it. This naphtha was a sort of catch-all term applied by the people of antiquity and the Middle Ages to describe a range of naturally derived incendiary products. Militaries which could get their hands on these rare resources quickly used it in their armies. The Eastern Parthians and later Sassanids, for instance, appeared to have begun using naphtha in sieges and even pitched battles. At first, they simply poured it out on their targets, but quickly devised ways to contain it in basic containers, which could be launched at a distance and hopefully ignite upon impact. Apparently, the Romans of the 3rd century AD had become aware of this new technology, with the author Julius Africanus recording the following incendiary recipe. Take equal amounts of sulfur, rock salt, ashes, thunderstone, and pyrite, and pound fine in a black mortar at midday sun. Also, in equal amounts of each ingredient mix together black mulberry resin and zirconthian asphalt, the latter in a liquid form and free-flowing, resulting in a product that is sooty colored. Then add to the asphalt the tiniest amount of quicklime, but because the sun is at its zenith, one must pound it carefully and protect the face, for it will ignite suddenly. When it catches fire, one should seal it in some sort of copper receptacle. In this way, you will have it available in a box, without exposing it to the sun. If you should wish to ignite enemy armaments, you will smear it on in the evening, either on the armaments or some other object, but in secret. When the sun comes up, everything will be burnt up. However, due to the rarity, high cost, and unwieldiness of such weapons, they still remained quite uncommon. Eventually, though, further experimentation yielded better results. This evolution seems to have eventually produced the so-called Greek fire. Originally developed in the Near East, one tradition claims that its inventor was the 7th-century Syrian chemist by the name of Kallinikos. Supposedly, he had first proven its efficacy against Arab ships and brought the technology to the Byzantines just as the Eastern forces began to overrun Anatolia. The timing was fortuitous, as the emperors of Constantinople were in desperate need of some new X-factor to regain the edge in their war against the Arabs. Such was the importance of this event that later sources claimed it was evidence of divine intervention, with embellishments claiming an angel had actually been the one to deliver the weapon to the Christian forces for use against their pagan enemies. Whatever the truth of its origins, once in Byzantine possession, Greek fire became a highly classified weapon. Extreme measures were put in place to preserve its secret art of production, though some sources leave clues as to its possible composition. To this day, we are left in the dark about its exact nature. Thus, within top-secret laboratories and military facilities, the Byzantines began to perfect its application for both land and naval warfare. We will have an entire video dedicated to the branch of this technology, which eventually gave rise to the infamous fireships. For this episode, though, we will follow the branch of Greek fire, which was adopted by Byzantine land forces. The first of these were the grenadiers. The basic idea here was not entirely new, as various units of hand-thrown explosives had already been deployed across the East for centuries at this point. However, Greek fire seems to have allowed the projectiles to become even more potent than its predecessors. This had to do with the description of the liquid as an intense, long-burning substance, capable of torching everything it came in contact with. There was also the factor of quantity in that the state adoption of Greek fire ensured its mass production. As evidence of this, archaeologists have found the remains of many ceramic grenades, which would have been filled with the substance. From our written records, we can also confirm their use. For instance, in the 10th century, Preceptor Militaria of Nikephoros II Phokas, the emperor dedicated a whole section to the use of land-based fire weapons. Here, he suggests that Byzantine battalions should carry with them incendiary grenades to be used in a variety of tactical situations. Their use in sieges should be quite self-evident. However, his description of their use in pitched battles is more interesting. Here, Nikephoros, for example, mentions how grenades could be launched in volleys to break up and demoralize enemy troops before charges. Such seemingly modern tactics are incredible to imagine in a medieval battlefield and seem plucked right out of some what-if fan fiction. Yet, here it is, written before us in surviving texts from the period. That being said, we should restrain our imaginations somewhat, as it seems that the use of these grenadier-type units was incredibly rare. Along those lines, it will be worth mentioning an even more rare brother of the Byzantine grenadier, the Byzantine flamethrower. This unit has far less evidence surrounding it in the sense that we have no archaeological remains of the supposed flamethrower and precious few descriptions of what it actually was. That being said, we do know that they existed from both written and artistic references, which we can now review. For example, in the same Preceptor Militaria of Nikephoros, which described the use of grenadiers, he also mentions the use of portable Greek fire projecting devices, known as keromangana. Scholars debate just how portable these really were, with some arguing they were more akin to the ship-based siphons we have better evidence for aboard the Byzantine fireships. However, this illustration by Hero of Byzantium in his 10th century text, the Poliocetica, clearly depicts a soldier using some kind of hand-held device. Such illustrations are very exciting and make the imagination run wild. However, we must express some restraint, as these sorts of illustrations could often be prone to the misinformation or exaggeration of the artist. The shortfall of this image becomes evident when we try to deconstruct the actual mechanisms of what looks like a flame-spewing hairdryer. Researchers have attempted to draw up potential schematics, with some teams actually managing to test various theoretical recreations. If we follow their lead and take the illustration literally, this portable flamethrower was probably built like a modern squirt gun. It would have had some reservoir for holding the liquid with a pumping action which allowed it to be forced out through a narrow tube. As for ignition, it may have lit upon impact or through contact with heat as with the earlier incendiary devices, but it may also have been ignited by a flame at the barrel's outlet. A critical eye will doubt just how reliable or safe such a device would be. Even under the best of circumstances, we should imagine it as only being useful in short bursts at relatively close distances. Unfortunately, it seems that we shall never know its exact incarnation and thus are left with a spectrum of steampunk-looking interpretations of dubious authenticity. But whatever its true form, it does look like this device did indeed make its way onto Byzantine battlefields. For example, these appear to be the kerosifera, which gets mentioned by Leo VI in his passages on siege warfare from the famous Tactica of the early 10th century. Here is an excerpt from one of these passages, quote, If the enemy construct machines, prepare in advance pine torches and tow and pitch, and kerosifera, and divide the troops into more sections and assign some to the task of fighting and others to the burning machines. And if this is done with God's help, the spirits of the enemy will be broken and they will despair of taking the city. But those within will take heart and become more courageous. Besides this tease, details are incredibly sparse, and so we are left in the dark about their specific uses in battle. As such, there will be little more we can say regarding the organization, training, tactics, or service history of these fascinating units of history. Whatever impact they had on the battlefield has been lost to the ages, and we will simply never know how much of our modern trajectory was impacted by these first units of grenadiers and flamethrowers. Nonetheless, we hope you've enjoyed this foray into the more experimental spectrum of ancient warfare. Stay tuned for more episodes as we cover the Byzantine fireships and other types of ancient chemical warfare. What units of history would you like us to cover next? A huge thanks to the patrons for funding the channel, and to the researchers, writers, and artists for making this episode possible. Be sure to like and subscribe for more content, and check out these other related videos. See you in the next one!