flaming arrows

[winterbadger]

The appalling quotes re: Gladiator I stumbled across trying to affirmjohn_arundel's disgust with the frequent use of fire arrows in movies. Actually, the more I look, the more justification there seems to be for their presence. Not necessarily common as antipersonnel weapons, but as siege weapons thay seem to have been frequently used in the ancient world, in Dark Ages and medieval Europe, Asia, and on the American frontier.

The Assyrians prove pyromaniacs (or at least pyro-expert)

Naval warfare sees its share of fire arrows and flame pots
The Romans use fire arrows against the walls of Panormos, Sicily, during the First Punic War

Arab raiders shoot flaming arrows at Italian monks in 881

Medieval siege engines are covered in wet hides to protect them from fire arrows

The wooden walls of the bailey of an early castle at Warwick burned by fire arrows

The Colossus of Rhodes included water tanks for putting out arrow-started fies

Roman fort in Britain built to withstand flaming arrows

Houses in Bruges are set on fire by arrows shot by the defensders of its citadel in 1127

The First Crusade sets the walls of Jerusalem alight with fire arrows shot into straw used to reinforce the walls
(ballista bolts are also used to set on fire the towers of the city defenses, and "carcasses" (hulks of burning straw) and naptha bombs--a favourite in Arab and Byzantine armies--are used agaisnt the city)

The citizens of Norwich-in a 1272 dispute with its monks--burn the roof off the cathedral using fire arrows

Finds on the Mary Rose included leather gauntlets used to protect archers from teh flaming arrows they fired

Henry ("Light Horse Harry") Lee and Mel Gibson's darling Francis Marion use fire arrows against the British garrison of Fort Motte
(who's burning what down with who in it, Mel?)

Whch is to say nothing of the Asian and Native American use of the things, nor Paul's refernce to them in his letter to the ?Ephesians? (if I see one more page referring to that I may scream.

Comments

[john-arundel.livejournal.com]

Fire arrows against ships and some fortifications (fortifications that you want to use afterwards) - I'll buy - but Ive never seen any evidence for use against troops. I believe that it was far from common - or it would be mentioned in source literature more often - especially in the hunderd years war suff Im familier with. All that aside - My heartburn is that it seems (to me) to be a hallmark of poor research or none. Films are always looking for ways to make anchient and medieval warfare look like modern warfare (Gladiator and Braveheart are good examples of this). 'Could have and Would have - or did - are two different things. Anyway - shrug - their just movies with no mandate to educate, just entertain.

[winterbadger]

(Gladiator and Braveheart are good examples of this). 'Could have and Would have - or did - are two different things. Anyway - shrug - their just movies with no mandate to educate, just entertain.

What pains me so much as a historian about this is that the directors very definitely intend their films to educate as well as to entertain (see both Gibson's and Scott's comments about their films). But at the same time, they go into them with this "the truth is more important than history" attitude (a quote from the scriptwriter for Braveheart). As GM Fraser (among others) has pointed out on more than one occasion, there are so many stories that are as exciting and filled with violence, passion, intrigue, and adventure *right in the pages of history* than in any Hollywood scriptwriter's or director's imagination.

[john-arundel.livejournal.com]

uh, that should be fortification you DONT want to use afterwards...

[winterbadger]

...and while I appreciate the point you made the other day about this, the record, especially during the latter half of the HYW, seems suggest that generals were going to a "beat the damn walls down and get the bastards out of there, and we'll worry about holding it ourselves later" approach. Once cannon started coming into use in the 15th century, both city walls and smaller fortresses constructed to stand up to bettering by torsion and counterweight engines and to mining began to be sitting ducks (hence the creation of the low-profile glacis-and-ravelin fortresses of the 16th to 19th centuries).

As for the fire arrows, if you're not seeing a lot of references, I think you're running into the "so common we don't remark on it" problem. Pretty much every commentary on medieval siege engines I've run across suggests they had covering designed to protect against fire arrows, whihc suggests they expected to encounter them regularly. And the portions of the defenses that arrows would be the most use against--the hoardings that most casual tourists don't realize were added to castle walls during sieges--were easily replaceable and often only temporary to begin with. None of the incidents that I ran across (other then the Rev War one! ;-) suggested that the use of fire arrows in those instances were considered unusual, out of the ordinary, shocking, or as Baldric would say, "a clever plan." :-)

BTW, I trust you appreciated my failure to mention my firm belief that the part of "The Messenger" you hated most was the fact that it was all about French victories over the English ;-)

BBTW, one of the few narrative bits that TM gets wrong (apart from the whole childhood sequence I discussed with puabi) is that Glasdale was killed at Les Tourelles; he didn't survive to abuse Joan in captivity. But that's another one of those director's "we'll just fold these two characters into one so as to save on actors' salaries" moves, IMO.

BBBTW, another version that looks like it maybe the best modern film on Joan is (no surprise) a French film called simply "Jeanne la Pucelle"; I'll see if Netflix has it... We could have an afternoon of HYW gaming one of these days, followed by dinner and French propoganda a movie. :-)

[deza.livejournal.com]

What iriitated me in that film was the German Shepherd Dog.GSDs as a breed were created by Max von Stephanitz and first recognized in 1800. IIRC, this is just a few years after the setting for Gladiator.

[winterbadger]

was it explicitly a GSD? (or, as they were called when my mother was a girl, "German Police Dogs"; apparently this got changed after ww2 ;-) I just took it to be a big wolfy-type dog (not that I didn't find that a bit out of place--even given the Pompeii "cave canem" mosaic, I don't think of teh Romans as being very doggy people.

And, for all it's faults, Gladiator was pretty good at getting the history, the politics, and the general feel right, I thought. It was basically a remake of an old Rank Film extravaganza called "The Fall of the Roman Empire" which, despite having Sophia Loren, James Mason, and Obi Wan Ke Alec Guinness in it, was truly apalling.

[deza.livejournal.com]

Look closely at the dog. They used a GSD in the film.

Don't even get me started on period horses. I go on for days. ;)

[winterbadger]

I think I was laughing too hard at the background vocals of the German warriors (lifted from the movie Zulu) to notice the dog closely. :-)