Pirates: On Stranger(er) Tides

[Archbio]

Originally Posted by synk

However it was easy to enjoy it more than the third movie, but I am not sure if that's a road worth going down in this thread.

Well, as a point of comparison, a pirate movie centered around a big naval battle in which there's no big naval battle is probably not very useful, being so low on any scale.

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Originally Posted by SMPB

I'm going to be nice and just give you clue-an article written in 1977 before a good deal of arab primary sources were published/made available is pretty much worthless on this topic as is an article dealing with mostly European accounts which were pretty much all made up and hearsay. According to those accounts Muslim armies were populated by wizards and I'm reasonably sure that is not the case.

Yes, I'm sure that John Haldon, professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University wrote articles taking European sources about Byzantine History at face value to the point that he could have reported ludicrous things such as wizards as facts. Because is was 1977, and there were Giants in those days.

The other section of Wikipedia I've cited (the one that says that Muslim navies eventually adapted to the weapon, implying it took some time and creditting it with some effectiveness,) on the other hand, is pulled from a different work: Pryor, John H.; Jeffreys, Elizabeth M. (2006), The Age of the ??????: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500–1204, Brill Academic.

Here's an article from 1992, Secrecy, Technology and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204, that also appears to credit naval siege breaking effect to Greek Fire, same as the other article.

Now, I'm sure that there's some primary sources that were made available for the first time about Byzantine/Muslim wars between 1992 and now. So I'm just going to say that I'm not going to take your word for it that among those there happens to be material that establishes "Greek Fire was a pathetic weapon" as incontrovertible fact, contradicting every bit of work expressing a different view before that.