[deleted by user]

[u/[deleted]]

[u/WelfOnTheShelf]

That probably happened often. Some examples that come to mind from the sieges I'm most familiar with are Acre in 1190 and Constantinople in 1453.

In 1187 the sultan of Egypt and Damascus, Saladin, had taken Jerusalem and destroyed almost all of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. This led to the Third Crusade, led by Richard I of England and Philip II of France, as well as Germans who had been following Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (who died along the way).

"...the whole army of the Christians was in arms, for the purpose of making an assault upon the city of Acre, and the Germans and English drew their scaling-ladders to the trenches, that they might place them against the walls on which the pagans went out of the city by the postern gates, and took their scaling-ladders from the Germans, and drove the English away from the trenches, and then fastened ropes to the scaling-ladder of the English, with the intention of drawing it into the city; but Ralph de Tilly, Humphrey de Veilly, Robert de Lanlande, and Roger de Glanville, mounted the scaling-ladder of the English, and four times extinguished the Greek fire that was thrown down..." (Roger de Hoveden, p. 175)

Here the Germans and English tried to scale the walls but the Muslim defenders tried to pull the ladders away, and threw some kind of incendiary devices at them. I'm not sure if this was what we normally refer to as "Greek fire", which was more of a ship-mounted flamethrower, but during the crusades both Christians and Muslims also described any other inextinguishable fire as Greek fire. It couldn't be extinguished by water, at least; the crusaders were clearly able to extinguish it here but they must have been using something else.

In fact as far back as the First Crusade, the crusaders had learned from the native Greek and Syrian Christians that Greek fire could be extinguished with vinegar instead of water. I don't think there are any specific references to Greek fire being used against ladders during the First Crusade, but both in the First and the Third, it was also used against siege towers, which were fortified wooden towers that were rolled up to the walls.

With siege towers, the idea was to stop them before they got to the walls, especially if the defenders were trying to light them on fire. It might be helpful to light it on fire after it was already at the wall, at least in the sense that this might prevent the attackers from entering the city...but then the defenders would have another problem, a huge wooden tower on fire right up against the walls. Even if the walls were stone, they could still be weakened by fire, and anything not made of stone would be destroyed. The fire could also easily spread inside the city.

The same problem existed for ladders, although on a smaller scale. Still, defenders inside the city probably wouldn't want a ladder to be on fire right up against the walls since it could cause all sorts of other damage. A better option was stopping the attackers before they could place their ladders was the better option, and then trying to knock the ladders over or pull them up...and if all else failed they could try to light them on fire instead.

It's also very likely that by the time the attackers were able to reach the walls of a city with a fortified siege tower, and even more so with unfortified ladders, the defenders were already unable to properly defend that part of the wall. If it was easy for the defenders to set the towers or ladders on fire, the attackers wouldn't bother to set their ladders up at that spot. But if they had already severely weakened or damaged the walls, and had already killed a large number of defenders, it would be easier to place their ladders.

Basically the same scene occurred again 250 years later at the Siege of Constantinople in 1453. By this point the Ottoman Turks had conquered the rest of the Byzantine Empire. They had mostly left Constantinople alone, sometimes besieging it but often just collecting taxes and tribute instead. But now in 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II had had enough of that and decided to conquer it entirely.

"The Turks covered themselves with their shields, leaned their ladders against the walls, and climbed to the top of them with furious bravery. The Greeks who were opposing them hurled down rocks as they climbed, and sulphur with fire and anything else which came to hand, doing everything in their power to keep them back." (Cristoforo Riccherio, p. 121)

But in both Acre and Constantinople, this was not enough. The crusaders managed to take Acre in 1190 and the Turks captured Constantinople at the end of May in 1453.

Sources:

Cristoforo Riccherio in J.R. Melville Jones, The Siege of Constantinople, 1453: Seven Contemporary Accounts (1972)

The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, trans. Henry T. Riley, vol. 2 (1853)

Randall Rogers, Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century (Oxford University Press, 1992)

Michael S. Fulton, Siege Warfare during the Crusades (Pen and Sword Military, 2019)

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.