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Specialized arrowheads for carrying incendiary material, Roman Empire, 1st-2nd century AD?
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Historical Artifacts
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Lindybeige told me this was fake, though
Don't know who that is, but looks like a history youtuber.
While incendiaries were not used at every possible opportunity, as movies and games sometimes portray, fire has a long history of military usage, including specialized means for delivery. Julius Caesar, of dictator and conqueror fame, once used heated sling bullets to set thatched roofs on fire; Spanish guerillas against Roman occupation were known to use metal javelins wrapped in flammable materials, and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTd_0FRAwOQ
In fairness, he seems to base it purely on himself saying "it's a stupid idea" and not on any historical research that he cites explicitly.
I hate watching videos, but the first few seconds show movies where fire arrows are being launched at troops, which was rare (though not completely unheard of as a terror tactic). Generally, incendiary projectiles were used for purposes wherein fire would be, uh, useful, like setting fire to buildings, camps, supplies, ships, siege weapons, or flammable environs.
Yeah. Technically he qualified it by saying he didn't think they were used "in open battle," and his reasons were probably accurate, but yes he's missing a whole category of use for which they probably were super useful.
Love this videos but somethings I just plain disagree with. Horses, in war, a dumb idea? I just feel like he's personally not got the best relationship with the species.
When did he say horses in war were dumb? Yeah, that's wrong.
Cavalry was a stupid idea
It might be he's arguing specifically against cavalry though, not horses, but I remember thinking he just sounds like he's not comfortable on horses.
Which I find odd, as he loves dancing and I feel those two are pretty similar.
A horse-drawn cart is very awkward indeed in comparison to how nimble a good rider on a horse can be. I don't remember the content of the video and am not listening to it rn
Oh Lord.
Yeah... I think this is just wrong. It think you're right that he is just making a big authoritative sounding thing based on his personal experience on horses and guessing and extrapolation and some light confirmation-bias research.
IDK, I thought this guy was legit, but maybe not.
fwiw Lloyd is very well known for mostly doing this. A lot of his content is actually relatively shallow, or has important shortcomings if not outright errors (though those tend to be rarer) that someone with more knowledge would immediately pick up on. He brings an interesting perspective where he bases things on his personal experience, which is often indirectly related to what he's talking about. Like re-enactment as a way to talk about HEMA or historical warfare. It's interesting and worthwhile, but should not be considered anywhere close to authoritative. Still, he's generally better than most HEMA-adjacent but not-actually-HEMA creators.
However, the video posted by @Dasus@lemmy.world is not quite as bad as you and @PugJesus@lemmy.world might think based on its title. For starters, he's very clear in that video that he's only talking about cavalry, not horses ridden for other reasons, and certainly not horse-drawn carts. Heck, he even specifies that he's not talking about chariots, which were the main way horses were used in battle for thousands of years.
It's actually just a clickbaity title for why the invention of the four-pommelled saddle or stirrup was necessary for cavalry (defined as people who sit on the back of a horse and fight in battles from horseback) to work.
If you want some genuinely bad horse content from Lloyd, try this one where he interviews a re-enactor and modern horse-trainer who claims mediaeval cavalry could be trained to charge into an enemy line...but they'd only do it once. Though even that isn't necessarily as bad as some critiques have made out, because the re-enactor talks about how the goal is to get the enemy line to break, and the "only do it once" claim seems to be if the infantry line holds formation. For example, this Reddit comment seems like it may debunk the claim made by the guy Lloyd is interviewing, but only really in its antipenultimate paragraph, and even then it's hard to draw conclusions on how strongly it refutes the claims in the video (Elandslaagte is described in Wikipedia as a cavalry charge that began after the Boers were already retreating, some of the other battles are described in that Reddit comment as involving the cavalry charge breaking the infantry, etc.). On balance it seems likely the claim in the video was made overly-strongly, but I think it probably isn't quite as terrible as it may seem on the face.
Yeah. I posted a video showing a pretty detailed critique of Lindybeige, I think you are correct and he's just sort of the "pub expert" on things but not qualified to be authoritative.
Oh, you did? The only links I can find from you are his fire-arrow one and a link to the !nerd_streams@ibbit.at community. Sorry if I missed something elsewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9KD3Xv7D1c&t=1349s
It was way up outside of the thread, easy to miss.
Oh right! I've actually seen that already, lol. I think it got passed around in my HEMA groups. Does seem a little unfair to lump Lloyd in with the likes of Shad and Metatron, who are both out and proud members of the "anti-woke" alt-right and bordering on Nazis, but on the whole the video does paint him quite fairly, in my view.
Yeah. And the guy does say that he's clearly the best of the bunch. I don't actually feel like we need to seize on anything that looks vaguely like misogyny and use it as a reason to beat someone over the head with until their opinions are Fully Correct, but the criticism of his history is 100% on point and pretty damning TBH.
I mean, he's "legit" in my opinion, but no-one is right all the time.
"Cavalry was a stupid idea" is a pretty big thing to be wrong about, though. Like talking about physics and asserting gravity is a myth and if you close your eyes and believe, you can free yourself from its tyranny and float. Even if they were correct in 100% of whatever else they said on physics, it's going to be hard to believe them from that point on.
Yeah. The biggest empire of the ancient world was built on basically a 100% horse archer military and they didn't seem to have too much of a problem.
I feel like it would be different if he was citing some kind of history "look at the composition of all these armies, cavalry's actually a really small part, look at these big battles where the horses were a liability and then they moved away from them after." That's history, whether or not it's right or wrong, it's based in fact. This whole thing sounds like "I ride horses and it's a mess, cavalry doesn't work, the end."
He also has a video titled "let the children smoke" and I completely agree with the video.
I haven't relistened to this now, but I'm pretty sure he's not just plain out asserting it's bullshit, just like he's not actually pro-children smoking tobacco.
Lindybeige is a self proclaimed expert who just calls things as he sees it. He's no researcher, he's no craftsman. Your better of watching Todd from Todd's workshop, he does actual experiments with medieval weaponry.
But lb is just a blabbering buffoon with an British exceptionalist worldview who loves the aroma of his own petards.
Yeah. I just removed him from !nerd_streams@ibbit.at. If you're going to be a nerd, you need to know what you're talking about.
Ty!
The way they're often used in movies by firing basic flaming arrows into groups of soldiers is often not accurate(although there are records of East Asian troops using gunpowder based rocket arrows against soldiers).
However, flaming arrows have been historically used in sieges for a long time. We have records going back 2700 years of arrows having something tied around the tip that was soaked in oil and lit on fire. Just look at the posted picture, those are real "cage" style flaming arrows
We even have actual examples of arrows from the 1400s with a saltpeter compound on it that burns under water.
Haven't watched the video from Lindybeige; but, here's a rather good video on what incendiary arrows (like the ones pictured) would have been like. We have evidence of medieval (and earlier) use of incendiary devices in warfare (QED, the arrows pictured). Though, probably nothing like what is shown in movies.