Greek Fire
A secret kept so well that it was kept from us forever.
- EXISTED
- c. AD 672 onward
- WHERE
- The Byzantine Empire
- LOST
- Lost by the later Middle Ages
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- A state secret known to too few; it died with its keepers
Greek fire was the secret weapon that saved the Byzantine Empire more than once, a liquid that could be sprayed from siphons aboard ships and that burned even upon water, clinging and unquenchable, scattering whole enemy fleets in flame. Its first use is credited to the 670s, when it broke an Arab siege of Constantinople, and for centuries it made the Byzantine navy feared across the Mediterranean.
Its composition was among the most closely held secrets in history. The knowledge was restricted to the emperors and the single family charged with making it, and never committed to open writing, lest it fall into enemy hands. The precaution worked too well: when the line of keepers was finally broken, the formula was lost completely. Modern scholars can only guess at its ingredients, a thing destroyed not by fire but by silence.
The formula was guarded so jealously, entrusted to a single family and a handful of officials, that it was never written plainly down. When the chain of keepers broke, the recipe vanished with them, and no one since has reliably reproduced it.