Byzantine alchemy

Stephanos was a favourite at the court of the Byzantine Emperor Herakleios I, who, aside from being a great military leader, was also a man of learning and seems to have done much to encourage the intellectual life of the time. Like the later Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, Herakleios seems to have devoted so much time to the study of alchemy in his later years that affairs of state took second place to the search for the Stone. 

Although the church in the West never welcomed learning in the way that the Arabs did, or the Byzantines under the great scholar Michael Psellus (1018—c. 1078), who offered a free university education to anyone who wanted it, there was, for a brief period, a climate of enquiry that put alchemy firmly on the map in Europe. Although one may usually associate alchemy with mediaeval ignorance, explosions of interest in it tended to occur in times of flourishing intellectual enquiry. Just as Hellenistic... 

In AD 390 the library and museum at Alexandria were ransacked by Christians suspicious of non-Christian learning. Alchemy continued to be practised in the Hellenistic world, but no new discoveries were made, with the important exception of Greek fire. This was a chemical weapon, and consisted of a liquid that caught fire on contact with water. It was used to deadly effect by the Byzantines, who sprayed it towards the ships of the enemy. It was first used in AD 665 against the fleet of the Arabs, and on several subsequent occasions its use was probably the decisive factor in preventing the fall of Constantinople. 

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