Many wished to live in a relatively peaceful world free of weapons of mass destruction, and for them the Greek fire offered a ray of hope. This liquid incendiary agent capable of burning on water was a chemical mixture that appeared in the 7th and 11th centuries and was widely used in warfare by the then mighty Byzantine Empire. However, the Byzantines were extremely secretive about the recipe for Greek fire, and eventually even they themselves forgot the recipe.
Greek fire
Without the advent of Greek fire, the history as we know it today would have been very different—the Byzantine Empire would have declined 800 years earlier—as early as 678-718 A.D., when the Arab fleet besieged Constantinople. At that time, the Byzantines called this weapon "artificial fire", "ocean fire", "liquid fire". It is not difficult to imagine what a terrible scene it would be to encounter a Greek fire attack in the war: a long flame erupted from the front of the warship, a burning rocket flew all over the sky, and the flames would attach to the enemy ships and fallen soldiers everywhere they went, even in the water.
Greek fire is the prototype in A Song of Ice and Fire
Incendiary weapons appeared long before the invention of Greek fire, but were far less lethal and applicable than Greek fire. The 9th-century chronicler Theophanes wrote that the Greek fire was invented by a Syrian refugee named Calinicus. However, due to the complexity of the basic recipe and the complexity of the production process, modern experts believe that the inventor of the Greek fire is not only one person, but a research and development team. When using Greek fire, the fire was placed in a special siphon device at the front of the warship, and its core material was heated and pressurized before it was ejected. The recipe for Greek fire was controlled by a secret team, and most of the people on the team were only familiar with a particular production process.
After seeing the power of Greek fire, many foreigners began to study its formula, but they did not succeed. A similar weapon was developed Chinese, but it required gunpowder (the Byzantines at the time did not yet know of gunpowder). Even if an enemy had intercepted a sample of Greek fire during combat, they would not have been able to reverse engineer it. Modern engineering scientists believe that the main component of Greek fire is distilled oil, which is mixed with resin or rosin as a thickener when making, and then add flammable substances such as sulfur to make weapons similar to modern napalm bombs. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII has his own account of the origin of Greek fire, stating that an angel appeared before Constantine, the first Christian emperor of the empire, revealing to him the mysteries of Greek fire and asking him not to reveal its craftsmanship and recipe to other peoples under any circumstances. Ironically, because secrecy was so well done, by the 11th century, the Byzantines themselves had forgotten the recipe for Greek fire.