The original Greek fire was an invention used as a weapon of the Eastern Roman Emperors. It is also said to have been invented by a Syrian engineer, one Callinicus, a refugee from Maalbek, in the seventh century. The Byzantines of Constantinople originally used it. But they never used the term Greek fire because they claimed to be Romans, and never called themselves Greeks. It was like an insult to them because in their times to be Greek was to have a bad reputation.
The Greek fire was first time used in the war of seven years. In which the Arabs established a naval base on the peninsula of Kyzikos. This was on the second attack of a battle stared by Theophanes. On the third attack of the same battle, Greek fire was used again against the Arabs.
The "liquid fire" was hurled on the ships of their enemies from siphons and burst into flames on contact. As it was reputed to be inextinguishable and burned even on water, it caused panic and dread. Its introduction into warfare of its time was comparable in its demoralizing to the introduction of nuclear weapons in our time. Both Arab and Greek sources agree that it surpassed all incendiary weapons in destruction. .
It is also possible that Greek fire was really invented by the chemist in Constantinople who had acquired the discoveries of the Alexandrian chemical school. An Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, said that the recipe for Greek fire had been revealed by an angel to Constantine the Great, and that the earliest chemists called their science "the divine art." .
Anna Komnena (b.1083), the gifted but vain daughter of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, gives the composition of an incendiary material: "This fire made by the following arts. From the pines and the certain such evergreen trees inflammable resin is collected. This is rubbed with sulfur and put into tubes of reed, and is blowing by men using it with violent and continuos breath.
