50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  The Arabs were drawing their bows when a stream of liquid gushed from the open mouths of the gold lions and dragons. The liquid covered the Arab ships and almost immediately burst into flame. The terrified Arabs and Syrians sloshed water on the flames, but the fire burned on. What was left of the invasion fleet turned and fled. Few of them made it to the Dardanelles and back to the Mediterranean.

  The Sons of the Prophet did not give up easily. Again and again they sent fleets against the city on the Golden Horn. And again and again, their ships were burned to the waterline by the terrible weapon that came to be called Greek fire.

  No weapon in history has caused more speculation than Greek fire. The formula for it was zealously guarded for centuries, because the eastern Romans considered it a gift from God to the people of the Empire — the eastern bastion of Christianity against Islam and paganism. The Empire alone had Greek fire, but after the introduction of gunpowder the miracle weapon had gradually fallen out of use and was forgotten.

  There has been plenty of speculation about the composition of Greek fire, probably because there are widely varying descriptions of the weapon by ancient sources. Not everything that has been called Greek fire is the material that was used to destroy those Arab fleets. That, according to the generally accepted tradition, was the invention of Callinicus, a Syrian architect. In 660, Callinicus, seeing the apparently unstoppable Muslim blitzkrieg, brought his invention to Constantinople in the hopes that it could save Christianity. In describing the destruction of the Muslim fleet, the East Roman chronicler Theophanes wrote: “Then it was that Callinicus, the architect of Heliopolis in Syria, who had invented a marine fire, set light to the vessels of the Arabs and burned them utterly, together with their crews.”

  Writing some four centuries after the battle, Anna Comnena, the brilliant teenaged daughter of the eastern Roman Emperor Alexius, said, “On the head of each ship he had fixed a lion or other land animal made of brass or iron with the mouth open and gilded over, so that the mere aspect was terrifying. And the fire which was to be directed against the enemy he made to pass through the mouths of the beasts so that it seemed as if the lions…were vomiting the fire.”

  Anna’s Alexiad, a history of the career of her father, is one of our best sources for the weapons available to the east Romans and their enemies. Anna’s writings also show that the east Romans had a variety of incendiary weapons. In another place, she describes an incendiary blowgun: “Readily combustible rosin is collected from the pine and other evergreen trees and mixed with sulfur.

  Then it is introduced into reed pipes and blown with a strong continuous breath and at the other end fire is applied to it and it bursts into flame and falls like a streak of lightning on the faces of the men opposite.”

  In 900, Emperor Leo the Wise may or may not have been describing the weapon used in 672 when he spoke of “fire prepared in tubes whence it issues with a noise of thunder and a fiery smoke which burns the ship at which it is directed.”

  Later, the Crusaders reported that the Muslims attacked them with “Greek fire,” which was shot at them by mechanical siege engines. Jean of Joinville wrote that the Greek fire was in a container “as large as a barrel and a tail of fire that issued from it was as large as a large lance.” When the container landed, it exploded in a ball of fire that covered everything and everybody nearby. This weapon, which seems to have been a container of naphtha that was ignited just before firing was like a giant Molotov cocktail. It was definitely not the Greek fire Callinicus invented. Neither was the rosin-and-sulfur blowgun Anna Comnena described.

  Most authorities today believe that Callinicus’s flamethrower projected a mixture containing quicklime and some extremely inflammable liquid such as naphtha or turpentine. Quicklime becomes extremely hot when mixed with water. In Greek fire, it became hot enough to ignite the liquid with which it was packed. It was probably projected through the animal heads by some kind of pump. Being projected from a low-freeboard galley in the open sea, it would probably ignite almost as soon as it left the nozzle, and certainly when it hit the wet sides of the enemy ship. Other authorities believe that the incendiary mixture was released into another metal pipe into which sea water was being pumped. As soon as it hit the air upon leaving the animal head, it would burst into flame. As the burning substance was a liquid and lighter than water, throwing water on the flames did nothing but spread the fire. That led to a belief among hostile sailors that fire once started by Greek fire could not be extinguished. So Greek fire became a powerful psychological as well as physical weapon.

  Greek fire changed warfare in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, and it also changed the history of the world. If Callinicus had not invented Greek fire, Islam might have swept over Europe as it did over the Near East, north Africa, and central Asia.

  Chapter 9

  Quiet Cannons: Mechanical Artillery

  A type of siege engine the Romans called an “onager.”

  To King Archidamus of Sparta it seemed that his whole world had turned upside down. This was odd because troops had just arrived from Syracuse in Sicily to help him in one of his campaigns.

  A Sicilian officer had demonstrated an invention that the Syracusians had used successfully against Carthage. The weapon was a giant bow mounted on a wooden stock. The stock was in two pieces: The top piece slid in a groove cut in the bottom piece. The Syracusians had attached the bowstring to the slider with a catch, then pulled both slider and bowstring back with a winch (a crank or handle). The bow was obviously far too powerful for a man to draw without the aid of machinery. On the sides of the slider were pawls that clicked into ratchet notches on the bottom stock as the slider was pulled back. When the slider had clicked into the last notch, a Syracusian soldier pulled a cord that released the catch. The heavy arrow flew many times farther than any archer could have sent it. The Sicilians reloaded their weapon and shot another arrow at a shield and a corselet. The missile went entirely through all the armor.

  The Syracusian officer smiled proudly at the king, expecting praise for the ingenuity of the scientists of Syracuse and gratitude for bringing this powerful new weapon to his aid. Instead, the king was shocked.

  “By Heracles,” he said, “this is the end of man’s valor!”

  To most Greeks at that time, around 370 B.C., war was a slugging match between masses of shield-carrying, armored warriors. Valor in battle was the high-est virtue for all Greeks, especially for the Spartans. Each Spartan man devoted his whole life to only one thing: becoming the bravest, strongest, most skillful hand-to-hand fighter he could be. Now it was possible for a puny coward with one of these machines to kill the bravest and strongest soldier who ever lived.

  The Spartans were not enthusiastic about the new weapon, and most Greeks agreed with them rather than with the Syracusians. Syracuse, a colony of Corinth, was relatively young for a Greek city and even younger as a major power in the Greek world. Its destruction of the Athenian expedition sent against it during the Peloponnesian War was quite unexpected. The ancient traditions of hoplite warfare had less hold on the people of Syracuse than on those of mainland Greece.

  Moreover, Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, was a man of imagination. Dionysius aspired to lead all the Greek cities of Sicily against the powerful state of Carthage, which had established colonies on the western end of the island. He recruited designers, mathematicians, and craftsmen from all over the Greek world, offer-ing high wages with prizes for outstanding work on new weapons. For stars, there were places at his table. The leading engineers flocked to Syracuse.

  One of their inventions was the gastraphetes, a type of crossbow with a kind of half-hoop fixed at the end of the stock. To cock it, a man put the half-hoop against his stomach and the front of the weapon against a wall or tree and pushed against it. The soldier was thus able to use the strength of his legs — far more powerful than his arms — to bend the heavy bow. The gastraphetes had the same sort of slider-and-rachet arrangement as the catapult
shown to Archidamus. The next step was to build a much larger bow and cock it with a winch. The bow itself was of the ancient composite type, with a layer of sinew glued to a wooden core on the back, and a layer of horn glued to the core on the belly. When the archer drew a composite bow, the sinew was stretched and then snapped back.

  At the same time the horn was compressed and then regained its length. The wood — a very thin strip — was flexible but added little to the bow’s power.

  When the engineers had reached what seemed to be the limits of the composite bow, they began looking for a new type of spring. E.W. Marsden, who has studied all the ancient writings on mechanical artillery and built these machines by following the directions of the ancient engineers, believes they studied the elements of the composite bow — horn, wood, and sinew — and decided that sinew was the springiest element. So, they used the sinew in a new way.

  They made cords of sinew and twisted them around the ends of two poles that were opposite each other on a wooden frame. The poles pivoted in their bundles of twisted sinew. Between the ends of the poles opposite the pivots was a cord that acted as a bowstring. The action was the same as that of the machine Archidamus saw, but instead of a flexible bow there were two inflexible poles powered by skeins of twisted sinew. Sometimes there wasn’t even sinew. Someone discovered that hair — human or animal — has the same kind of springiness as sinew, so many catapults were powered by ropes of hair.

  The first catapults shot arrows (most of them long, heavy arrows that looked more like javelins) but others were made to shoot stones. These usually had a double bowstring with a pouch between the two cords to hold the stone.

  It took the original Greek cities, such as Sparta and Athens, a while to really warm up to mechanical artillery, but the engines were adopted in a big way by King Philip II of Macedon. Like Dionysius, Philip scoured the Greek world for engineers and craftsmen. If the cord-powered torsion catapult was not invented in Macedon, it was first used by Macedon on a large scale. In the middle ages, catapults were mainly siege engines, but Philip and his son, Alexander the Great, used them as field artillery, too. At one point in his march through central Asia, Alexander found himself blocked by the hither-to invincible Scythian horse archers who were on the other side of the Jaxartes River.

  Alexander lined up all his artillery on his side of the river and, according to the historian Arrian, “the machines kept firing salvos at the Scythians riding along the bank, some of whom were wounded by the missiles and one, stricken right through his shield and breastplate, who fell from his horse. Thereupon, terrified by the range of the missiles and because a noted warrior had fallen, they retired from the bank a little.” And Alexander’s army crossed the river.

  The ancient field artillery obviously had a psychological effect even stronger than the physical effects it was capable of causing. The history of warfare is full of psychological weapons (weapons that induce a disproportionate fear).

  Among them are the cavalry lance, the bayonet, the submachine gun, and the dive bomber.

  Mechanical artillery was always useful in sieges. The arrow-shooting catapults made it possible to shoot defenders off a city wall from well beyond the range of their bows. Stone-throwing machines could knock down inferior stone walls or could shoot over the walls to demolish houses and other buildings inside.

  The engineers continued to improve their machines’ accuracy and durability. The Romans used small catapults, called carroballistae, mounted on wheels with the skeins of cord enclosed in metal cylinders to protect them from moisture. The Romans also invented a new stone-thrower called an onager, which had a single upright arm mounted in an enormous skein of cord. The top of the arm was either shaped like a scoop to hold the stone or the stone was placed in a rope sling at the top of the pole. Roman artillery, like that of Philip and Alexander, was used for both sieges and field battles. Every century in the army (the smallest unit) of the Roman Empire had an artillery piece.

  The dark ages that followed the fall of Rome created a temporary hiatus in the development of mechanical artillery in western Europe. Later, when warfare was dominated by armored knights, the powers that be had no incentive to develop field artillery that could mow down mailed horsemen. Sieges were another matter, though. The catapult and the onager were revived and played a prominent part in attempts to capture castles. During the Crusades, the Muslims used their mechanical artillery to throw barrels of flaming naphtha at the Crusaders. The Christian warrior soon adopted this fiery weapon.

  The Middle Ages also saw the adoption of a new siege engine in Western Europe. It was called a trebuchet. It was a pivoted beam, heavily weighted on the short end. The long end was tipped with a sling, into which a missile was placed.

  The long end was hauled down and loaded. When it was released, the weighted short end fell, and the long end swung up and shot the missile at the enemy stronghold. The trebuchet was probably copied from the Chinese huo-pa’o, which had been adopted by the Mongols and carried west by them.

  The trebuchet’s power was limited only by its size. In the Middle Ages, some trebuchets were used to throw dead horses into a besieged city to spread disease. Modern experimenters have built trebuchets capable of throwing an automobile several hundred yards. Around the turn of the last century, Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey built smaller versions of some mechanical artillery. He found that an onager equipped with a sling could throw an eight-pound shot almost 500 yards, and that a catapult with two arms powered by twisted cord, he found, would shoot a 5 or 6 pound spear 500 yards. The same catapult, equipped to shoot stones, would shoot a 1-pound shot 350 yards. Payne-Gallwey did not attempt to make a trebuchet, but he noted that the French Emperor Napoleon III built one with a 33-foot beam and a counterpoise of 10,000 pounds. Napoleon’s trebuchet shot a 50-pound cannon ball 200 yards, but, Payne-Gallwey wrote, that it was “so lightly constructed that its full power could not be safely applied.”

  In the Hellenistic world, during the heyday of mechanical artillery, the mere existence of these machines was a potent factor in international relations. According to Dr. Serafina Cuomo, a British historian of science quoted in the New York Times, “You didn’t just have to have catapults to use them. You needed your potential enemy to know that you had them so they would not attack you in the first place.”

  10 The Big Bang: Gunpowder

  “Corned” gunpowder. The two top grains are pressed into special shapes. When gunpowder burns, the outside surface becomes smaller and gas pressure drops.

  The grain second from the top has a hole drilled into it so that as the outer surface decreases, the inner surface increases, helping the powder charge to maintain pressure in long-barreled gun.

  Kublai Khan “ruled most of the world” — from the Yellow Sea to steppes of Russia. But, a true grandson of Genghis Khan, he wanted more. He had not yet finished the conquest of southern China when, in 1274, he sent an army and a fleet to subdue Japan. The fleet was manned by Korean sailors and carried 40,000 Mongol soldiers. They were greeted by 120,000 Japanese samurai. The Mongols had the powerful central Asian composite bow, but their opponents were no mean archers. The Japanese had their unique longbow, which was a good match for the Mongol weapon. But although the Japanese outnumbered the Mongols three to one, Kublai’s men pushed the islanders back. One reason was their discipline and training. The Mongol army was organized on a decimal basis: squads of 10, companies of 100, regiments of a 1,000, and divisions of 10,000. All units responded to orders given by the beating of kettle drums and the waving of standards. And at this time, the Mongol armies were the most experienced in the world.

  Fortunately for the Japanese, a typhoon swept up the west coast of Japan and wrecked most of the Mongol fleet. The Mongol commander took what was left of his army and armada and returned to China.

  Kublai Khan did not give up easily. In 1281, he sent another expedition to Japan. This time, there were 150,000 soldiers. Again the Mongols pushed the Japanese back, but resistance w
as stiffer this time. The Japanese had built a high stone wall around the area on Kyushu where the invaders had first landed.

  That turned out to be where they landed the second time. The Japanese brought up a huge crowd of samurai warriors, but they were barely able to hold the wall.

  During the night, though, they raided the Mongol camp. They attacked the invasion fleet with small boats and managed to set fire to some of the Mongol ships. The Japanese resistance stalled the Mongols for seven weeks. The Mongol commander decided to move his fleet, and then another typhoon struck.

  Approximately 4,000 Mongol ships were sunk, and more than 30,000 Mongol troops were drowned.

  To be saved from a Mongol invasion twice by typhoons seemed to be more than a coincidence to the Japanese. The decided they had been saved by the gods, who sent the Kamikazes, the divine winds, against their enemies.

  The Kamikazes also left conclusive proof of one reason for the Mongols’ success before the storms arrived. Recent exploration of the sunken wrecks of Kublai Khan’s warships disclosed ceramic pots filled with gunpowder. Similar pots with ignited fuses had been shot from mechanical artillery against the Japanese defenders. Japanese tradition also maintains that the Mongols shot rockets at the samurai soldiers, and old Japanese paintings show defenders being attacked by exploding bombs.

  At the time of the Mongol expeditions to Japan, gunpowder was known in Europe — Roger Bacon’s famous manuscript was written in 1252 — but there’s no record of it being used. For years, it became something of a cottage industry among some Western scholars to prove that gunpowder was not invented in China, but the evidence was mostly negative — neither Marco Polo nor Giovanni di Plano Carpini mentioned seeing gunpowder in China; therefore it was not there. But the wrecked Mongol ships prove that gunpowder was in use, and a standard weapon, in the mid-13th century. And the medieval Arabs, who probably had gunpowder before the Europeans, referred to potassium nitrate, the key ingredient, as “the snow from China.” Further, evidence that gunpowder was known in Europe appears immediately after the Mongol conquerors of northern China galloped into Europe.