Firebombs and cannon would have ended the siege much quicker (Image: Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex Features)
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.
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 Kelly DeVries, a specialist in medieval warfare at Loyola…
