Flame-throwing lances and fiery arrows: all in a day’s work for a medieval armourer. But what was the secret of their inflammatory art?
A BLIZZARD of flaming arrows blazes through the air. Upon impact, the arrows send out great jets of fire, setting light to everything nearby. For the inhabitants of Oran, under siege by the Spanish in 1404, it is a terrifying attack, causing immense destruction. “The noise and cries which came from the town were very great by reason of the havoc that was wrought,” wrote one observer in what is now Algeria’s second city.
The Middle Ages were a significant time for armourers in the Middle East and Europe. Gunpowder, invented by the Chinese in the first millennium, arrived here in the latter half of the 13th century, and the first gunpowder weapons to hit the battlefield in this part of the world were incendiary devices such as fire arrows. Projectile weapons – guns and cannons – took a little longer to catch on, and were not in common use until the 1350s.
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That much we know, but in general it is no easy task to trace the development of gunpowder weapons in Europe and the impact they made. That siege of Oran, for instance: were those arrows really so effective, or was the story concocted as a piece of early Spanish PR? Medieval chroniclers, the war reporters of their day, are rarely to be trusted. “They wrote what they were told to,” says , a specialist in medieval warfare at Loyola University, Maryland. Even serious accounts may have been distorted by translators.
The only way to know for sure is to test the weapons first-hand – just what the , of which DeVries is a member, have been doing for the past 10 years. The group carry out much of their work at the Danish Medieval Centre, a folk museum in Nykøbing. Here they recreate and try out each weapon in turn to find out what worked, and how well.
For all its destructive potential, gunpowder sounds simple enough to make. It has just three key ingredients – charcoal, saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and sulphur. The team’s first task was to get hold of them, medieval-style.
Charcoal was easy – it would have been in ready supply throughout Europe. Sulphur was said to have been mined in volcanic areas, so the team braved the Námafjall region of Iceland, with its boiling mud pools and steaming gas vents. By collecting rock samples, melting them in a metal bucket with a small amount of cooking oil and scooping out the impurities, the team obtained sulphur of roughly 50 per cent purity. This suggested that sulphur supplies were not a hurdle for medieval warfare.
Saltpetre proved more problematic. The team’s early attempts at manufacturing it the medieval way, from fermented animal dung, produced results that were only a few per cent potassium nitrate. It turns out the pH of the dung is very important to the process (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 5 November 2005, p 33), and it was unclear how anyone would have succeeded in medieval times without equipment to measure the pH.
Eventually, the team got a tip-off about a factory in the Agra district of India that was still making saltpetre for fertiliser using the traditional method. Like the medieval manufacturers, it uses animal dung as the raw material. The workers spray it with water to dissolve out the potassium nitrate, which filters through a porous floor. They then concentrate the solution by boiling it in a pan more than 3 metres across. “It was stunning,” says Robert Smith, an independent researcher based in Leeds, UK, and a member of the gunpowder group. “The process was recognisably the same as those described in the 16th century.” Judging the age and composition of the dung proved to be enough to control the pH and obtain potassium nitrate of high purity – 80 to 90 per cent, which is almost as good as can be achieved with modern industrial methods.
Having tested and confirmed that traditional methods could produce good gunpowder, the team were ready to recreate weapons with it. A couple of years ago they tried their hand at fire lances, a kind of medieval flame-thrower. Making one involves stuffing an incendiary mixture of saltpetre and sawdust down a hollow tube, according to the 16th-century Italian metallurgist . Unfortunately, he doesn’t say how much of each ingredient to use, so the team had to make some daring guesses. They started cautiously, as anyone playing with fire should – and found their first attempt wouldn’t even burn. A mixture containing 25 per cent sawdust eventually did the trick, shooting a red-hot flame that burned for 30 seconds.
were next on the list. As far as the team knew, no one had tried to make this weapon for the best part of 400 years. Would they work in the way the records described?
Johannes Bengedans, a military engineer in the pay of Christopher III, who ruled Denmark in the 1440s, seemed the most authoritative source. His were straightforward enough: “Take 5 pound good saltpetre and apply 2 pounds of sulphur. Add 1 pound finely crushed coal… Mix it all with alcohol.” You then had to tie a linen bag of the mixture around the arrow, insert a cotton fuse and coat the bag with pitch. In 2009, the group made nine fire arrows in this way and shot them at a timber target. “They lumbered rather than flew through the air,” says Smith. “But when they hit the target the effect was dramatic. A very intense flame shot out of the front of the arrow with a whooshing sound, and it burned for 5 to 10 seconds.” This isn’t enough to set a timber building alight, but a more combustible material, such as a thatched roof, hay and animal bedding, would have been easily set on fire. “It would have been terrifying to have been anywhere near one of them,” says Smith.
Admittedly the longer-range shots, at 40 metres, were a bit more hit and miss, the arrows wobbling and occasionally veering off course altogether. But they would have been an effective weapon all the same, says DeVries. For one thing, they would have forced besieged cities to use their precious supplies of water to put out the flames. And medieval warmongers were no strangers to the tactic of shock and awe. “What you have to remember about sieges in the Middle Ages is that the aim was capitulation,” says DeVries. “You’ve got to terrorise people. Fire will cause terror.” Fire arrows weren’t decisive in the 1404 siege of Oran, however – the Spanish would not occupy the city for another 100 years.
“The aim of sieges in the Middle Ages was capitulation. You’ve got to terrorise people”
One big question stands out in all of this. Why didn’t guns and cannons – arguably the most effective gunpowder weapons – catch on as soon as they were invented? In the mid-13th century the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon wrote about using gunpowder to launch a projectile. Yet it was another 75 years or so before firearms were used in warfare, either in Europe or in China.
Some suggest that hitches in saltpetre production caused the delay. As the team discovered for themselves, making saltpetre is a tricky business; perhaps Europeans hadn’t mastered the technique by the 13th century. “If I was a smart scientist in medieval times,” says DeVries, “I would concentrate my efforts on making saltpetre. You could make a bunch of money.”
Alternatively, it might have been down to the potentially lethal unreliability of early guns and cannons, given the rudimentary technology of the time. “My guess is that you had to wait for metallurgy to catch up,” says DeVries. “If you tried to make a gun with a barrel made of wood you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it.”
If any fiascos did occur when these weapons were tried out, there are no records to tell the tale. It’s one of several areas ripe for investigation as the team enter their second decade of research.
