We may rest assured, then, that the words Ferishta wrote in his account of the battle near Peshawur, 1008, were naphtha and arrow, not musket and cannon.
Far from possessing muskets in the ninth century, there is no evidence to show that the Arabs had firearms, that is, arms charged with an explosive, during the whole of the Crusade period, 1097-1291. So strange and deadly an agent of destruction as gunpowder could not possibly have been employed in the field without the full knowledge of both parties; yet no historian, Christian or Moslem, alludes to an explosive of any kind, while all of them carefully record the use of incendiaries. The Arab accounts of these campaigns will be found collected together in M. Reinaud’s Extraits des Historiens Arabes relatifs aux guerres des Croisades, Paris, 1829; the Christian accounts are scattered in various volumes; but they teach us no more than we have learnt already in the two preceding chapters about incendiaries and Greek fire: “les projectiles incendiaires ont pu rester à peu près les mêmes pendant toutes ces Croisades.”[208]
At the siege of Nice, first Crusade, we read of the Saracens throwing balls of pitch, oil and fat against the machines of the Christians.[209] Fire-arrows bearing pitch, wax, sulphur, and tow were discharged from the walls of Jerusalem during the siege in the same Crusade.[210]
During the second Crusade we find the Arabs making use of similar incendiaries,[211] mixtures practically identical with that of Æneas Tacticus, cir. 350 B.C., given in Table II. Shell full of burning naphtha were used at the siege of Acre, 1189-91, in the third Crusade;[212] and Richard of England, on his voyage thither, sank a ship which an eye-witness had seen laded at Beyrut with ballista, bows, arrows, and lances, and a large supply of Greek fire secured in bottles (ignem Græcum abundanter in phialis),[213] a phrase which reminds us of the 18th recipe of the Liber Ignium of Marcus Græcus: “put the mixture in a glass bottle” (hoc in vase vitreo ponatur). For the sixth Crusade, we have the invaluable Histoire du Roy Saint Loys of Joinville, who describes the terror excited by the incendiaries of the Moslems, believed by all to be the work of the Powers of Darkness. “Quant le bon chevalier Messire Gaultier mon compagnon vit ce feu, il s’escrie et nous dist: Seigneurs, nous sommes perduz á jamais sans nul remède. Car s’ilz bruslent nos chaz chateilz, nous sommes ars et bruslez; et si nous laissons nos gardes, nous sommes ahontez.... Et toutes les fois que nostre bon Roy saint Loys oyoit qu’ils nous gettoient ainsi ce feu, il se jettoit à terre, et tendoit ses mains la face levée au ciel, et crioit à haulte voix à nostre Seigneur, et disoit en pleurant à grans larmes: Beausire Dieu Jesuchrist, garde moy et tout magent,” &c.[214] Yet the incendiaries which created all this panic appear to have wounded but few and to have killed nobody!
Although no evidence is forthcoming to show that explosives were used in Palestine during the Crusade period, there is good evidence, it has been said, to prove that gunpowder was used by the Arabs in Spain during the thirteenth century.
The first, I believe, to start the theory that the Spanish Arabs possessed gunpowder at this early period was Michael Casiri, a Maronite, who was librarian of the Escorial and published his Bibliotheca Arabico Hispana Escurialensis in 1760-70; and his method of supporting his theory when translating the MS. of Shehab ben Fadhl, which he dates at 1249, was the simple one of translating barud by pulvis nitratus, the recognised Latin phrase for gunpowder.[215] Had he translated barud by saltpetre no difficulty could have arisen, since an Arab alchemist, Abd Allah, states that saltpetre was so called in the West during the second quarter of the thirteenth century.[216] There would be nothing surprising, therefore, in finding saltpetre mixtures employed in Spain at this period; but saltpetre mixtures, such as the last three given in Table II., are not necessarily explosive. Not only is Casiri’s translation of barud unwarrantable, but he probably dates his MS. a century too early. M. Reinaud, a safe guide, believes that the MS. is Al-Omari’s, and dates 1349,[217] eighteen years after the siege of Cividale where the Germans used cannon,[218] and three years after Cressy where we certainly had guns.[219]
Casiri’s methods are well illustrated by his translation of an Arabic passage relating to the siege of Baza, 1325, by Ismael ben Nasr, King of Granada. The literal translation of the passage is as follows: “He (the King) marched through the enemy’s country to the town of Baza, which he invested and attacked. By means of a great machine provided with naphtha (made up in) hot (burning) balls, he struck the arch of an inaccessible tower.”[220] According to Casiri the passage reads: “Shifting his camp, he besieged with a large army the town of Baza, where, by applying fire, he discharged (explosit) with much noise a great machine, provided with naphtha and a ball, into a fortified tower.”[221] He introduces, it will be observed, an explosion (explosit) into a passage which neither mentions nor suggests one. The application of fire has no place in the original, and suggests the ignition of an explosive charge. He changes the meaning of the original by gratuitously inserting an and between naphtha and ball, which were one and the same thing. He leaves us to infer that the charge was naphtha, though it was not explosive and could not project a ball. He speaks of the explosion being accompanied by a loud noise, of which there is nothing in the original. The incendiary balls are mentioned in another Arabic account of this siege, translated by Conde in his Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en Espagna, p. 593: “The Arabs attacked the city night and day with machines and engines which threw balls of fire with a loud noise” (combatio la ciudad de dia y noche con maquinas é ingenios que lanzaban globos de fuego con grandes truenos).
In this passage the discharge of the incendiary balls is said to have been accompanied by “thunderings,” and at the siege of Niébla, 1257, we are again told that the Moors “launched stones and darts from machines, and missiles of thunder with fire” (lanzaban piedras y dardos con maguinas, y tiros de trueno con fuego).[222] From this innocent metaphor, trueno con fuego, the Emperor Leo’s “thunder with smoke,” has been wrenched the meaning that the Arabs possessed a train of artillery. “Il n’y a rien à cela que de vraisemblable,” says the Emperor Napoleon III.[223] Nothing, I venture to think, can be more unlikely. The Arab writer is dealing with machines which, he says in his own way, discharged stones and darts, and also igneous missiles which burned with much noise. Another Arab, already quoted (p. 4), gives a freer rein to his fancy: the projectiles “roar like thunder; they flame like a furnace; they reduce everything to ashes.” In plain words, they are incendiaries. The writer makes no allusion to the effect of their momentum or shock; he impresses on us the effect of their essential quality—their incendiary power, exaggerating the noise made by their combustion. Joinville writes in a similar style of Greek fire: “La manière du feu grégeois estoit telle ... Il faisoit tel bruit à venir qu’il sembloit que ce fust fouldre qui cheust du ciel ... et gettoit si grant clarté qu’il faisoit aussi cler dedans nostre ost comme le jour, tant y avoit grant flamme de feu.”[224] Unless we make due allowance for the luxuriant Oriental imagination, we may despair of ever being able to reach the meaning of the Eastern writers. One of them wants to explain that the ditch of a fort was deep and wide, and he tells us it was “broad as the ocean and fathomless.”[225] Wishing to state that on the arrival of the army on its banks, the Nerbudda, which happened to be in flood, subsided quickly, another writer says: “You might say that it (the river) was a remnant of the universal deluge. As the miraculous power of the saintly Sultan accompanied the Army, all the whirlpools and depths became of themselves immediately dry on the arrival of the Army, and the Musulmans passed over with ease.”[226] A similar indulgence in metaphor, although not so unbridled, is found in European writers. For instance, Vegetius likens the projectile hurled by an onager to a thunderbolt;[227] and the Princess Anna Comnena compares the fiery particles blown by the breath through a popgun, or spitfire, to lightning.[228]
It is hardly necessary to examine the accounts given by Conde of the siege of Tarifa, 1340, and by Casiri of the siege of Algesiras, 1342, since both sieges took place some years after that of Cividale, 1331. The reader will find the two accounts ably analysed in Reinaud and Favé, pp. 70-74.