Callinicos of Heliopolis

(fl. ca. AD. 673)chemistry.

Callinicos (“handsome winner”),

an architect, is credited with having invented or perfected “Greekfire.” According to most authorities, he was a native of Heliopolis (Baalbek) in Syria. Georgius Cedrenus, a Greek monk of the eleventh century, reported in his Σύνοψιs ‘ιστορίων (Compendium historiarum) that Callinicos came from Heliopolis in Egypt, and this view is also taken by Gibbon (ch. 52). It is probable that he was a Jewish refugee who was forced to flee to Constantinople.

Greek fire, a terrifying new weapon, apparently was first used successfully at the battle of Cyzicus (ca. a.d. 673), in which the Byzantines under Emperor Constantine IV defeated the attacking Saracens. The most detailed and authoritative statement, although brief, on the life and activities of Callinicos is that of Theophanes, a Greek monk who wrote about A. D. 815. In his Xρονογραφία (Chronographia) he states: “At this time the architect Callinicos of Heliopolis in Syria fled to the Romans and invented the sea fire, which set on fire the boats of the Arabs and burned them completely. And in this way the Romans turned them back in victory, and this the sea fire procured.”

A number of incendiary materials had been used on a limited scale in warfare before the seventh century, and the invention of Callinicos was probably a secret ingredient added to the chemical mixtures already available. This liquid or semiliquid was propelled from the siphons, or flame projectors, with which the Greek ships were fitted even before the use of Greek fire. The actual ingredients probably consisted of sulfur, pitch, petroleum, and some unknown substances. Purified saltpeter was not known in the West until the early thirteenth century and most likely was not an ingredient of the Greek fire of Callinicos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brief Byzantine references to Callinicos are found in Theophanes, Chronographia, I. Classen, ed., 2 vols., in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, G. B. Niebuhr, ed. (Bonn, 1839–1841), I, 540–542; II, 178; and Cedrenus, Compendium historiarum, I. Bekker, ed., 2 vols., in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1838–1839), 1, 765. These and other references are fully discussed in J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (New York, 1960), pp. 12–14, 30–32; Maurice Mercier, Le feugrégeois. Les feux de guerre depuis l’antiquité. La poudreà canon (Paris, 1952), pp. 11–15; and Ludovic Lalanne, Recherches sur le feu grégeois et sur l’introduction de la poudre à canon en Europe, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1845), pp. 15–17. See also George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, I (Baltimore, 1927), 494–495; and Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, II (New York, 1924), 46–47.

Karl H. Dannenfeldt