Incendiary rockets were known in the East from an early time, and they are frequently mentioned at later periods; but we are told so little about the loss they inflicted upon an enemy that one is inclined to suspect their effect was confined to wounding a few men and frightening elephants and horses. They are said to have been used by the Chinese against the Tatars in 1232.[396] The _Malzufat-i Timuri_ and the _Zafarnama_ leave us in doubt whether Timur’s rockets were used or not at the great battle of Delhi, 1399.[397] The effect produced by a single rocket led to the fall of the strong fort of Bitar in 1657, but this result was purely accidental. The commander of the fort, foreseeing that an assault would be made upon one of the bastions which had been much damaged by artillery fire, ordered a hole to be dug in it and filled with gunpowder, grenades, &c., intending to blow up the besiegers when they entered. Just before the assault was made, one of the besiegers’ rockets fell by accident into this pit and fired its contents, creating thereby so much loss and confusion among the garrison that the place was carried after a short struggle by Aurangzeb’s troops.[398] In the West, rockets were employed as early as 1380,[399] if not earlier; but they were never looked on with favour, and they appear to have been seldom, if ever, used between the earlier part of the fifteenth century and our bombardment of Boulogne with Congreve rockets in 1806. Dunois’ capture of Pont Audemer in 1449 was a consequence of a fire that broke out in the town; but the fire appears to have been caused by a hand-grenade or fire-arrow, not by a rocket. However, the exact meaning of the word _fusus_ is so doubtful that the matter is not worth pursuing.[400] Towards the close of the eighteenth century rockets were almost forgotten in the one European city where they were most likely to have been remembered—Constantinople. In 1783-84 Tipu Sultan sent a mission to the Sultan of Turkey, and of the presents which they offered “none were so much admired as the Rockets, of which there were none in that country.”[401]