The Greeks had three words for the asphalt family, _pissa_, _asphaltos_, and _naphtha_; and the translator had at least three Latin words (which he has actually used) wherewith to translate them, _pix_ (or _picula_), _asphaltum_, and _petroleum_. How, then, came he to use the barbarism, _alkitran Græcum_, in recipe 1? The original of this phrase came from no Greek source. We could not expect the author of the tract to reveal the secret of the sea-fire, which was only known to a few officials; but the mediæval Greeks were not an exceptionally modest people, and we naturally look for some slight allusion to this triumphant incendiary and the siphons in which it was employed. They are never referred to, although ballistæ, bows, and rockets are mentioned in recipes 10, 12, 13, 32, 33. The title of the tract, _Liber Ignium, a Marco Græco descriptus_, assuming it to have been correctly and literally translated, was not written by a Byzantine Greek. No Byzantine Greek ever described himself (or a compatriot) as a Greek: “in the lowest period of degeneracy and decay the name of _Roman_ adhered to the last fragments of the Empire of Constantinople.”[143] The writer of the title, therefore, was either a Moslem or a western. The author of recipe 26, _Ignem Græcum_, &c., was neither a Greek nor a Moslem. No Greek[144] or Moslem[145] writer ever uses the phrase “Greek fire,” which sprang up in the West during the Crusades.[146] The recipe, therefore, cannot have been written before the siege of Nice, 1097, the first act of the first crusade, and it was probably not written until long afterwards. The phrase “Greek fire” must have taken some time to reach the West, and it spread there very slowly. Abbé Guibert de Nogent, who died in 1124, speaks of “discharging from machines the fire they call Greek” (_Græcos, quos ita vocitant, Ignes injicere machinis_).[147] At the close of the century William the Little, Canon of St. Mary’s, Newburgh, Yorkshire, mentions “a certain kind of fire which they call Greek “ (_quodam ignis genere quem_ _Græcum dicunt_)[148] Such modes of expression show that Greek fire was very little known in the West during the twelfth century. In the _Liber Ignium_, on the other hand, it is spoken of without qualification or explanation, like sulphur or pitch, as a substance too well known to require note or comment. The 26th recipe, therefore, belongs very probably to the first quarter of the thirteenth century, and its author was certainly a western.