On accepting these conclusions, the difficulties raised by the hypothesis of a Greek original vanish. The Spanish translator had no need to translate the alkitran of the Arabic writer, for the word was Spanish as well as Arabic. Like all westerns, he called the Byzantines Greeks, and a certain incendiary Greek fire. Neither Moslem nor Spaniard was likely to speak of the sea-fire. Moslems would be loth to recall the disasters at Cyzicus and elsewhere, when this incendiary made havoc of their ships; Spaniards knew nothing about it. Owing to the secrecy maintained by the Imperial Government, westerns knew very little about Byzantine pyrotechnics. “At the end of the eleventh century the Pisans ... suffered the effects, without understanding the cause, of the Greek fire.”[171] The Princess Anna Comnena ascribes the defeat of the Pisans in a naval battle fought in 1103, to an unknown incendiary employed by the Greeks.[172] In both cases the incendiary could only have been the sea-fire, for the Latins had been acquainted with ordinary incendiaries for a thousand years. As late as 1204, the Emperor Baldwin I., in a manifesto to all Christians, declares that the Greeks used “machines and defences to protect their capital (in this year) which no one (from the West) had ever seen before.”[173]
It is time to inquire who was Marcus Græcus. He has been fancifully identified with many of the Marci of history and fable, and M. Dutens discovered him in the second century A.D. The views of M. Dutens must be noticed here, because they have been unwarily adopted by some good writers.
There exists a Latin translation of a lost Arabic treatise on medicine, De Simplicibus, supposed by some to have been written by Masawyah of Damascus in the eleventh century,[174] while others, with M. Dutens, assign it to Yahya ibn Masawyah, who attended the Caliph Mamoun on his deathbed,[175] 833 A.D. The question before us is, does the De Simplicibus (whatever its date) contain any reference to Marcus? When mentioning the use of syrup of cyclamen, Masawyah quotes the opinions of other physicians: “The son of Serapion said (so and so) ... and a Greek (physician) says (so and so)” (dixit filius Serapionis ... et dicit Græcus).[176] On the last two words, dicit Græcus, M. Dutens builds his theory that the Greek physician was no other than Marcus: “Ce qui paroît fort probable, est que (Marcus Græcus) devoit vivre avant le médicin arabe, Mesué, qui a paru au commencement du neuvième siècle, puisque celui-ci le cite.[177] By this mode of reasoning, which is generally called “begging the question,” Marcus Græcus may be identified at will with any Greek who ever lived. M. Dutens continues: “Fabricius croit que (Marcus Græcus) est le même dont Galen parle dans un endroit de ses ouvrages, au quel cas il serait du temps requis pour appuyer mon sentiment.” It would be strange indeed to find mention of a Latin writer or book in a Bibliotheca Græca, and I have failed to verify M. Dutens’ reference. In the editions of Fabricius’ work which I have consulted he expresses no such belief, nor does he allude to Marcus Græcus. In the list Fabricius gives of ancient physicians there are several who bear the name of Marcus, but no Marcus Græcus. The last of these Marci happens to be simply called “Marcus,” and of him Fabricius says: “This Marcus, who is mentioned by Galen in his book on compounding medicines, may possibly have been one of the foregoing” (Marcus, simpliciter, Galeno in compositionibus medicamentorum κατὰ τόπους, l. iv. c. 7, quem credibile fuisse unum ex illis prioribus).[178]
The Liber Ignium was written from first to last in the period of literary forgeries and pseudographs, which produced the “Book of Hermes,” “The Domestic Chemistry of Moses,” the alchemical works of Plato and of Aristotle and of the Emperor Justinian, and so on; and we may reasonably conclude that Marcus Græcus is as unreal as the imaginary Greek original of the tract which bears his name.
Had the last editor of the Liber Ignium, who added the saltpetre receipts, any knowledge of an explosive?
We need not linger over the Roman candle of No. 12, or the rocket of No. 13: had their charges been explosive there would have been an end of the candle and rocket, and of the men who fired them. The cracker of No. 13 was a toy intended to “go off with a bang,” without hurt to the bystanders. The case was to be as strong as possible and securely fastened at both ends with iron wires. It was to be half filled with rocket composition, a mixture which burned in a cracker-case precisely as it burned in a rocket-case—with progressive combustion. Now Roger Bacon had a similar toy, constructed with the very same object, i.e. “to go off with a bang,” the case of which was “merely a bit of paper.” Why was there this marked difference, then, between the two cases? Because the noise was produced in the one by the explosion of the charge and in the other by the rupture of the case. Bacon’s charge (as will be shown in Chap. viii.) was gunpowder, and the required “bang” was directly produced by its explosion. Marcus’ toy was charged with an incendiary, the combustion of which did not produce a “bang” directly, but which produced one indirectly by ultimately bursting open the thick, stout case. The gases generated by its combustion “gradually developed until the case burst,”[179] just as a bladder bursts “with a bang” when over-inflated. Had Bacon’s toy been charged with an incendiary, the case, which was only a sheet of paper, would have been set on fire by the heated gases long before their pressure had reached the bursting point, and there would have been no “bang.” Had Marcus’ toy been charged with an explosive, it would have exploded destructively, and what was intended for a public diversion would have proved a common danger, owing to the thickness of the case and the iron wire coiled round it. There is nothing in the tract to show that its authors had any notion of explosives, and their silence, without any assignable motive, is strong evidence that they knew nothing about them. It is incredible that pyrotechnists who seldom omit to call attention to the effects of their incendiaries,[180] should have failed to make some allusion to explosives if they possessed them. Their silence was not owing to fear of the Church, for the decree of the Second Council of the Lateran was directed against the very mixtures which form the staple of the Liber Ignium, incendiaries.[181] The 12th and 13th recipes contain the ingredients of the future gunpowder; they form the last link in the long chain of evolution which connects the incendiaries of primitive times with gunpowder; but they were not gunpowder, because they did not explode. The chrysalis, we know, will become a butterfly if it lives; nevertheless it would be an abuse of language and a misrepresentation of fact to call it a butterfly.
The reader can now appreciate the value of the argument that the Greeks possessed an explosive between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, because Marcus Græcus describes one; and he can understand why Marcus was not summoned in Chap. iii. to give evidence for the Greeks.
A suspicion may be raised by the Arabic origin of the Liber Ignium, that the people who approached so nearly to the manufacture of gunpowder may have ultimately reached it. We pass, therefore, to a consideration of Arabic incendiaries in the following chapter.