What a Thirteenth-Century Con Artist Knows about Medieval Warfare (Patreon)

Last week I gave this paper at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, during a De Re Militari session on military technology. I hope you enjoy it ~ Peter

So my tale here today is about one of the most interesting works from the Middle Ages that I have ever come across. I first read The Book of Charlatans a couple of years ago, and have been looking for a reason to talk about it. While it may seem an odd choice for a session on medieval military history, I promise amuse and entertain you, if not offer you a couple things on warfare.

So what is this book? More formerly known as The Book Containing a Selection Concerning the Exposure of Secrets, The Book of Charlatans was written around the mid-13th century. Its purported aim was to warn readers of the tricks, deceptions and crimes that could be committed against them. 

Crime and criminals were often an important topic in the medieval Middle East, both in literature and in fact. From the Thousand and One Nights to Mamluk-era chroniclers, you can read about the troubles caused by petty thieves or large gangs. The Banu Sasan were a particularly notorious group of thieves and con artists over the centuries who seemed to be in all sorts of criminal ventures. 

So The Book of Chartalans is a kind of guide to various crimes, from simple cons to burglary. You can read the scams of Islamic preachers, Christian monks, astrologers, dentists, eye doctors, pharmacists, notaries, jewellers, money changers, women and so on. You get fairly detailed accounts too - such as how alleged holy men had ways to protect themselves from fire, a recipe for fake olive oil, or the man who passed off an ape as a prince from India in need of cash. 

The text goes into even some more interesting territory when it discusses buried treasure hoards and how to access it. Maybe Indiana Jones was a documentary, for The Book of Charlatans reveals several booby traps - the room that fills with sand or water, the artificial snake that shoots out fire, or the statue that comes to life and swings a sword at you. The book also tells you how to get past these traps.

So The Book of Charlatans is kind of a warning to readers, but also a guide to how to do these tricks. For instance, I now know how to break into your house using a turtle and a candle. 

Let’s take a look at the author of The Book of Charlatans, who goes by the name Jamal al-Din ‘abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari. He is from a suburb of Damascus. This is the only surviving work by him, but apparently he wrote a couple of other similar books. Since he refers to events between 1216 and 1248, one can surmise he lived around that time. 

Now I say in my title that we are learning from a con-artist, and it does seem al-Jawbari was one - or at the very least lived a good part of his life hanging around them. His text reveals he was well-travelled - having been in Morocco, Yemen, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, India, even taking part in a hunt for buried treasure in Egypt. But we don’t know how he made a living.  

Al-Jawbari also claims to be very well read - he names 23 books that he has read, plus the works from 34 other authors, including Aristotle and Plato. He would tell us more about his studies, but says he doesn’t want to bore us. 

So maybe al-Jawbari is this super scholar, but maybe not. But if you go by what he writes, he does know quite a lot of tricks and scams, and sometimes claims to have made them himself. 

Another thing to point out is that the tone of the book isn’t quite a damnation of the bad guys. Al-Jawbari does condemn a lot of the practices here, and usually each section ends off with the catchphrase warning his readers to “Wise up to these things!” But many times he also subtly admires these tricks.

This is all to say that while I love The Book of Charlatans - I wonder a bit where I am being conned. Do I read it as a work of a genius scholar who studied this for decades, or the work of a literate criminal reminiscing about his past, or someone who really knows how to make a fake true-crime tale. WhateverThe Book of Charlatans is, it is fascinating and I highly recommend it.

Now, this is supposed to be about medieval military history, so I think it is time for me to bring my tale to this purpose. Chapter 8 of this work is an “Expose of the Tricks of Those Who Practice War and Bear Arms. It’s one of the shorter sections of The Book of Charlatans, but there a few things it can tell us.

It begins: “War admits of everything that has to do with deception, cunning; and subterfuge; anything of that sort is allowed. If someone is trying to take my life, I have the right to put one over him using whatever means I have at my disposal, from two perspectives: First, to save my life from his attack; second, because I want to be the victor.”

Al-Jawbari adds a few more lines justifying deception in war, and then starts into his various tricks, the first two I found very interesting. They are both on the use of liquids for swords or other bladed weapons. Recipe Number 1 is fairly simple: get onions, pound them into juice, then dissolve it in high-grade alum. Quench your blade in the liquid.and according to our author, “weapons so treated deliver highly effective blows, cause severe wounds, and generally perform to great effect.”

The second recipe is a bit more complex - it involves oleander, basil and colocynth oil, which is boiled down. In meantime you heat up your weapon, and then slowly quench in this liquid. As al-Jawbari writes, “This done, it will cut through anything that engages it or stands in its way.”

Now, I’m not an Arabic reader, so I am relying on the translation done by Humphrey Davies. I did, however, make sure to check with a friend and Arabic historian of the period and he confirmed that the ingredients listed here are correct. So it leaves us with the question, what are these liquids doing to the weapons?

Our first recipe seems clear - onions are quite acidic, so having it part of the blade-cutting-wound just gives it that extra sting. Alum’s role may be as a preservative, to help keep the onion juice from evaporating off the blade.

With the second recipe I am stumped - all three ingredients, oleander, basil and colocynth oil were fairly common in the medieval Arabic world, and use widely in medicines. I went to an online chemistry forum to ask about what these ingredients could do if combined, but I didn't get much help. It was noted that colocynth oil was quite a deadly poison too, so that could play a part. However, al-Jawbari seems to indicate that it makes the blade physically sharper or stronger.

I’d love to get your thoughts on this - perhaps someone wants to do a bit of experimental archaeology?

(In the Q&A portion afterwards, it was suggested that the process of heating and cooling blades in liquids would be able to improve the metal's hardness or sharpness).

There are four more sections to this chapter. The next quickly notes how useful Damascene steel is, especially when quenched in the second recipe. It’s followed by a short section on how a wheel-powered crossbow can shoot four hundred arrows - they “come out in a single unerring shower, and not one of them misses.”

There is then a description of a shield with a hidden socket than can propel darts - to be used during close fighting with an enemy. This is followed by a siege engine, that with the use of windlasses and an axel, can rotate and be fired in different directions. The text notes that this type weapon was used during the Siege of Damietta in the Fifth Crusade. Perhaps this was part of the tower deferces on a small island in the Nile River, which proved to be very tricky for the crusaders to overcome. 

The final and longest section of this chapter is devoted to another siege weapon, which al-Jawbari calls “the most ingenious and cunning thing I’ve come across in the manuals on tricks of war and sieges.”

It’s actually a confusing section to understand, but it describes a defenders’ siege ladder to be used against siege towers - built up connected to the inside of the wall, it has windlasses and chains, and rises up high above the walls, going over it and over the trenches surrounding the city. When an enemy siege tower is brought close, this ladder is meant to come into contact with it. The idea seems to be that the ladder is able to push or pull the siege tower off balance and tip over. Thus the besiegers are thrown down and vulnerable to counterattack. 

So what do we have here? It seems to me that the descriptions of siege machines are extracts from other miliary manuals, perhaps to pad out this chapter. Nothing wrong with al-Jawbari wanting to add a little warfare to all the other exciting tales of crimes and cons. However, I do think the recipes for concoctions to be added to blades is new and interesting. I could see them as examples of knowledge passed along among warriors and soldiers - the little tricks of the trade to give you that extra advantage when on the battlefield. It would be something that al-Jawbari and his friends might pick up in their travels, perhaps concoctions they used themselves. 

Of course, al-Jawbari may have made all this up - just a little fiction to keep his readers attention. Or is it me who has been the charlatan all along, spinning a tale to amuse and entertain all of you here? All I can say to that is: “Wise up to these things!”