The Crusaders feared the blade of the Saracens it was their bane and the Saracens secret weapon. The Crusaders had nothing like it, or that even looked like the Saracen blade.
It was rumored that this wonder weapon came from Yemen where it was forged by master sword makers. No it didn't come from Yemen it came from the Eastern side of the Arabian Sea from India. The Indians didn't know it as Damascus steel like the European Crusaders did, they knew it instead as Wootz Steel.
At the time of the Crusades wootz steel in India was already an old invention having its origins hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Unlike European's steel that was made by putting wrought iron into a sealed box that was filled with charcoal and subjecting the whole contents of the box to a high temperature for a week or more. This caused the wrought iron, which was practically pure iron into absorbing some of the carbon from the charcoal it was sealed in the box with. This was called the cementation process for making steel. This laborious process was used in the West until well into the 18th century when finely some other steelmaking processes were developed. Some of these processes were really developed from of wootz process that was developed in India.
The wootz process was perfected by the Indian Iron Masters who actually developed it as a crucible process for making steel. This kind of steel was first made in central and southern India about 300 B.C.; in this case the iron ore was added directly to the crucible along with charcoal for carbon and broken glass shards that were used as the flux. The steel actually formed inside the crucible as buttons of steel. After the crucible was removed from the furnace and allowed cool these steel buttons were broken out of the slag and welded together. In this fashion it was possible to make large pieces of steel.
In Delhi India there is a solid column of this wootz steel over 7 m high that is existed there since before Christ. Samples taken from this column by metallurgists have helped to develop the modern steel industry. There are other examples of large steel beams used by the Indians in construction projects hundreds of years before this technique was even thought of in the West.
Wootz steel also figured into the commerce of the old world, it was traded across the Arabian Sea to the Arab world. The Arabs fashioned it into weapons and many other useful objects. The West became familiar with this steel and weapons used by the Arabs especially the sword called a Scimitar. They called this Damascus steel having mistakenly thought it was made in Damascus, Syria; it wasn't!
Wootz steel is the primary ingredient of Damascus steel and was used by Arab blacksmiths to forge some of the finest steel blades in the world. They did this by welding wootz steel bars together in layers, and then by doubling the resulting ingot several times and each time they folded it they welded together again. This gave the steel the appearance of having waves of water in the steel. This not only made for an extremely tough sharp blade but also one of great beauty.
For many years the techniques for making Damascus steel was lost, and it was only within recent years that the technique was rediscovered by modern metallurgists. Today you can go to a knife dealer and buy your own Damascus Blade.
