The History and Natural History of Spices E-Book

Ian Anderson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 515

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A tale of kings and conquests and high-sea adventures … A must-read for those interested in the history of spices.' – Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria and Abdul and Curry: The Biography of the Nation's Favourite Dish Humans have crossed the oceans and traversed the unknown in search of spice and flavour for thousands of years. Mustard has been found at Neolithic sites in Iran, Germany and Denmark; the Romans' love affair with black pepper was insatiable; pepper, saffron, cinnamon, ginger, galangal and grains of paradise were ordered in large quantities for Richard III's coronation feast; and vanilla was credited as helping 342 eighteenth-century men become 'astonishing lovers'. Although the Romans had imported black pepper, and Eastern spices had trickled through to the West for centuries, it was only after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape that huge quantities of spices were brought back from India and the Far East, starting vicious trade wars between the Portuguese, Dutch and English as they established their colonial empires. Spices came from the West too: when Columbus reached the Americas in the fifteenth century, he brought back chilies to Europe, and from there they spread rapidly across the globe. The History and Natural History of Spices looks at spices from both a botanical and historical perspective, from their uses and classification to their influence on trade, war and global events. Both comprehensive and entertaining, it is the story of how our passion for spices helped to change the world.

Leseprobe

Jacket illustrations

Front: Capsicum from De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, illustrated by Albrecht Meyer.

Back: Green peppercorns (author).

First published 2023

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

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© Ian Anderson, 2023

The right of Ian Anderson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 493 2

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Contents

Introduction: The Allure of Spices and Botanical Origin

1   Botanists, Physicians and Geographers: The Pioneers

2   The Early Spice Trade

3   Coriander Family (Apiaceae): Ancient Spices of the Middle East and Mediterranean

4   Black Pepper and the Early Spice Trade: The First Global Commodity

5   The Ginger Family

6   The Age of Discovery, Part 1: Nutmeg, Mace, Cloves and Cinnamon

7   The Age of Discovery, Part 2: Chili and the New World Spices

8   Sugar

9   Diverse Spices

10 Spice Mixes: Medicinal Compounds, Spiritualism and Eroticism

Epilogue: The Influence of Spice on Global Cuisine

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Allure of Spices and Botanical Origin

The appeal of spices lies in their strong flavours, aromas and colours. In the wild, these factors attract pollinators or defend the plant against predators, but for humans over the last four millennia, or perhaps longer, spices have been sought to add flavour and exoticism to bland and ordinary diets.1 Many spices are restricted to exotic tropical climates, while others thrive in warm Mediterranean settings; they have all promised the hint of something special and unattainable, or only attainable with great difficulty and expense. In the classical Greek era, spices and herbs were sought after, acquired and studied primarily for their medicinal benefits, and this gradually evolved into the application to cuisine. So highly valued were spices from very early times, the so-called ‘Spice Trade’ developed, with dynamic networks that spanned South Asia to the Mediterranean from the late centuries BCE.2 By the first century CE, the demand for spices as seasonings and flavourings in Roman society was huge, and vast sums of money were spent on large fleets importing black pepper from southern India via the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. But it wasn’t only pepper they wanted: the kitchens of the upper echelons of Roman society were every bit as sophisticated as modern kitchens in their use of a huge variety of seasonings and condiments.

The nutritional value of spice is modest because of the tiny amounts used for seasoning food, so for millennia the demand for spice has been as a luxury commodity. The practicalities of importing spices from the East were a daunting and dangerous task, whether by sailing ships across the Indian Ocean – a round journey of many months – or by caravan overland along the myriad routings of the Silk Road or other trade routes.

But the continuing demand for spices always outweighed the risks. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Arab and Byzantine traders ensured the continuing supply of spices to the West. The sources of the more exotic spices like nutmeg, mace and cloves were jealously guarded, and it wasn’t until the early sixteenth century that the Portuguese became the first westerners to set foot on the remote Banda Islands, which were the only source of nutmeg. A century later, nutmeg commanded fabulous prices: 10lb of the spice could be bought for less than a penny in Banda and sold in London for £2 10s.3 Vast fortunes were made by those fortunate to return home from the dangerous journeys, but the trade attracted violent competition between Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English, and many lives were lost to weather, shipwreck, war and disease. The search for spices in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, allied with political ambition, had led to Columbus’ discovery of America (and by chance finding chili in Cuba and Hispaniola), Vasco da Gama’s proving of the route to India around the coast of Africa, and Magellan’s discovery of the western route to the Spice Islands. All of these incredible achievements had been driven by the huge potential rewards of the strong-flavoured little spices that were so much in demand in Europe.

The Meaning of ‘Spice’

There is a need for definition, as spices have meant different things in different periods of history. ‘Spice’ is not a botanical term, but we can use botanical words to describe them. Today we might reasonably define a spice as the (usually) dried part of a plant used to season or flavour food, typically seeds, fruits, berries, roots, rhizomes, bark, flowers or buds, as opposed to the green leaves and stems. They are often, but not always, strongly aromatic. This is quite a good working definition, but it fails to include substances that have been referred to as spices in earlier times.

The earliest use of spices was for medicines, which then in many cases gradually evolved to culinary use. Black pepper is the best-known example, which became immensely popular for seasoning food from the start of Imperial Rome. Sugar had been used in the kitchen by Europeans since medieval times but only became commonplace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; prior to that it was an exotic luxury spice. The aromatic resins of certain trees from the Middle East have been used as perfumes and as incense since the Bronze Age, and were also regarded as spices. In medieval times, not only did food have to be seasoned, but it also had to look the part, and in many cases this meant adding colour. Yellow was provided by saffron, egg yolk and later turmeric. Alkanet, the roots of a herb in the borage family, was used to add red, as was Red Sanders – an Indian tree that provided a red dye. Pink could come from rose petals and green from a variety of herbs. Turnesole, a plant of the spurge family, was used for purple or blue. (Even black and white were catered for: black by boiling or frying blood, and white from egg whites, crushed almonds and milk.) There was even a peculiar category of spices from animals; musk (from the caudal gland of the musk deer) and ambergris (from the digestive system of the sperm whale) were used both as perfumes and food flavourings.

Notwithstanding medicinal use, the common thing about all of these substances is that they were unassumed luxuries – and they had great value. The search for them was to change the world.

Botanical Classification of Spices

The turbulent world of plant taxonomy needs to be touched on briefly – and we need to do this to understand where spices come from.

The largest group of plants is the Angiosperms, the flowering plants, which first appeared in the Cretaceous period (c. 145 to 65 million years ago) and then spread extremely quickly. Most of the plants from which spices are derived, with a couple of exceptions, belong to the Angiosperms. It is certainly very interesting to see how spices group together within that large division (there are a total of 64 Orders and 416 Families of flowering plants in the latest APG IV classification). Table 1 on page 14 shows the broad relationship between ninety-six more or less well-known spice plants. Of the thirty-nine families illustrated, three are of particular interest; the Piperaceae (peppers), Apiaceae (coriander/parsley) and Zingiberaceae (ginger) families each contain many different spices (only the ten most important are shown in the table). While this is of general interest in the context of popular spices, it may not amount to much in the wider sense in that there are likely very large numbers of plant species that might be considered ‘spices’ that occupy many different taxa. For example, just the Lamiaceae (mint family) contains around 7,000 species including numerous popular herbs and aromatic plants; the Asteraceae have over 30,000 species.

The quandary of which spices to include and which to leave out reaches a head in this chapter. Spices have already been defined, so ostensibly this should be relatively straightforward. But consider the Piperaceae family: it encompasses approximately 3,600 species, ‘approximately’ because new species are frequently found, others may be disputed, and so on. Furthermore, most of those species occur within the Piper genus. Also, should I include obscure species that may be used as a seasoning by an indigenous population dwelling in the rainforest, or restrict the species to the economically important ones? (Answer: I hedged and focused on the most important ones but also included mention of some lesser-known types.) What about species used for traditional medicines (of which there are many)? Many of the well-known spices used today were initially used as medicines by the ancient Greeks and later, before being adapted for use in the kitchen. I’ve covered both, but with an emphasis on culinary. Some spices have close relatives that are not pungent or aromatic – should they be included? Well, no, not really: I have omitted celeriac (definitely a vegetable), which is a variety of celery (vegetable and herb, and the seeds are a spice) and this has been included. Herbs themselves should also be considered – ‘herb’ is another imprecise catch-all term generally meaning small, non-woody, aromatic plants with culinary or medicinal uses that die back in the winter. Herbs and herbal remedies are referred to in numerous instances in the book, even though this is not the main focus. How about Piper methysticum, the root of which is used to make the well-known stimulant drink ‘kava kava’ of the Pacific Islands? (It’s not strictly a spice, though it does have a certain pungency, but I’ve included it for its interesting and unusual nature.) Other questions lingered around spices used as food colourings, vegetables such as garlic and mustard (pungent seasonings), pomegranate seeds (a spice in Indian cuisine); all were included. Conversely, chia, flax, quinoa, pine nuts, etc., were excluded as they are neither aromatic nor pungent.

The geographic distribution of native species (i.e. those that have not been introduced through the intervention of humans) is also very interesting, though there is usually significant uncertainty regarding their precise geographic origin. When fifty-five of the better-known spice plants are plotted on a map in their approximate native position, the distribution is complex (Figure 1). But concentrating on two important botanic families only, then two clear geographic groupings appear: one in the Mediterranean–Middle East area, dominated by the Apiaceae, and the other in south and Southeast Asia, dominated by the Zingiberaceae (Figure 2). Latitude appears to be important – one group is largely temperate and the other largely tropical. The distribution of native species is a snapshot of the relatively recent historic past, i.e. a few thousand years BCE and in most cases bears little relation to the distribution in the distant geologic past.

To look further back into that geologic past can at first be somewhat daunting and confusing. There are fossil records of tropical plants now situated in distinctly temperate climates and vice versa, i.e. temperate plant fossils now situated in tropical settings. The key to understanding this state of affairs is the realisation that the continents themselves are not fixed but have moved vast distances across the earth over geologic time by the process of continental drift.

At the start of the Mesozoic era, a little over 250 million years ago, the world was dominated by a single super-continent, named Pangaea. In fact, this continent had already been in existence for about 100 million years at that point in geologic time. Pangaea later split into two large continents, the northern Laurasia and the southern Gondwanaland (see the maps on p. 17).

The Apiaceae family appears to have originated in the Australasia region in the Late Cretaceous, at around 87 Ma.4 This was after the southern supercontinent Gondwanaland had started breaking up. The Apiaceae spices all belong to the Apioideae subfamily, which seems to have appeared in southern Africa, having made an ancestral jump from Australasia while it was still relatively near. To confuse things even more, the true geographic origins of many commonly known species are only doubtfully known – according to Reduron, this is the case for ajowan, anise, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel and parsley – because they have been used since ancient times, being exchanged, cultivated, etc., and generally moved around, making it impossible to trace them. So-called wild populations may have been plants escaped from cultivation and then naturalised. Could early humans, moving northwards from their origins in East Africa, have helped move these attractive and aromatic fruits with them (by natural ingestion/expulsion)? Possibly, though other animals could also have transported them. So the location of certain prominent native Apiaceae spices, as shown in Figure 2, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (if you’ll pardon the expression). However, in broad terms it seems fair to assess their native region, i.e. not long before the domestication of crops, say 9,000–10,000 BCE, as the Med–Middle East–North Africa. Today the Apiaceae have a global distribution, but many of the herbaceous genera seem to belong to this region.

With regard to the Zingiberaceae family, we’ll take a closer look at the Indian subcontinent, which certainly punches above its weight considering both the large number of spices that thrive there in the present day and the diversity of native species. The ginger family is native to the region, and yet the parent order, Zingiberales, originated in Gondwanaland at around 124 Ma in the Early Cretaceous period.5 India was part of this southern supercontinent, together with South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia. Gondwanaland had already started to break up by this time. The Zingiberaceae family split from its close relation the Costaceae at around 105 Ma (the latter became well represented in the Americas), probably before the final break-up of Gondwanaland. The continental fragments were still probably close enough to allow dispersal. India, together with its precious ‘cargo’ of the ginger family, drifted northwards and finally collided with Asia. The Zingiberaceae became highly diversified and dominant in India and Southeast Asia (53 genera/1,200 species). What about Aframoum melegueta (grains of paradise), the ginger family spice that is endemic to West Africa? Well, Africa was also part of Gondwanaland, where the Zingiberaceae originated; however, the genus possibly didn’t diversify until the Pleistocene, around 2.7 million years ago, i.e. very recently in geological terms.6

The Piperaceae are unusual for different reasons: the approximately 3,600 species referred to earlier mostly occur within just two genera: Piper and Peperomia. The present distribution is pan-tropical with four main centres of origin: the Neotropics (i.e. the tropical parts of the Americas and Caribbean); Southeast and South Asia; Africa; and the Pacific Islands (Figure 3). Molecular dating suggests a Late Cretaceous age for the origin of the two main genera, though it appears that the current species distribution is a result of much later divergence in the Tertiary.7 The genus Piper appears to have originated in the Neotropics before dispersal to the other areas. Radiation/speciation has occurred in the Neotropics, Asia and the Pacific, but the species-poor Africa (there are only two native species of Piper in the entire continent) appears to be the result of much later introductions. The present distribution of spices is completely different yet again because of widespread naturalisation and cultivation by man in suitable and varied ecologic settings.

Table 1 | Taxonomy of Some Well-Known Spice Plants

The movement of continents from the Permian period to the present day. Note the separation of the Indian subcontinent from Gondwanaland and northwards movement towards Asia, where collision started around 50 million years ago, causing the uplift of the Himalayas.

However, the importance of this early geographic distribution is that all these groups have clearly influenced regional cuisines, and in some cases from the very earliest days of civilisation. The concomitant effect of this is the extreme pungency of many Asian and Southeast Asian cuisines compared with the milder aromatic cuisines of the Middle East and Mediterranean. Capsicum spp. (chili), however, although widely associated with Asian food today, is native to South America and didn’t reach Asia until the sixteenth century.

1

Botanists, Physicians and Geographers:The Pioneers

The men who first described plants and spices and the countries they came from often got their geography wrong, as they frequently relied on hearsay and their world was poorly understood. However, when they had direct access to plants, their descriptions were often sophisticated and accurate. The main reason for these studies was to catalogue an array of medicines, as that is how most spices were originally used. These early scientists were often, but not exclusively, Greek and Roman. The geographers themselves were a mixture of theoreticians and adventurers. One thing that unites them all is their enormous level of achievement: many were polymaths and made huge discoveries in differing fields of expertise, while others were specialists and prolific writers; each has become legendary, and justifiably so.

Anonymous Author of Ebers Papyrus

The Ebers Papyrus is an Egyptian hieratic scroll that was written c. 1550 BCE. The papyrus came to light in 1872 when Georg Ebers, a German Egyptologist excavating in the vicinity of Thebes, was approached by a wealthy Egyptian offering the document for sale. It was duly acquired and spirited away to the University of Leipzig, where it still resides. The scroll is a medical text that is mainly devoted to the medicinal treatment of disease, but with some detail given to cosmetics! There is a total of 811 prescriptions written down, some simple, some complex. If that sounds like a lot, the scroll measured 68ft in length by 1ft in width (unfortunately it was cut up into pages at Leipzig to make it easier to study). Many of the prescriptions are, with today’s perspective, bizarre. Simple remedies of this category include ‘old book cooked in oil’, ‘the film of dampness which is found on the wood of ships’, ‘rotted cereals’, blood, bile, excrement and urine! Consequently, some of the compounds are interesting (e.g. a worm-cake to treat tapeworm comprising herbs-of-the-field and natron, baked into a cake with cow’s bile).1 Incantations were often part of various treatments.

There are 119 plant remedies, of which around thirty could be deemed herbs or spices, plus many mineral and animal remedies. The more recognisable spices and herbs include acanthus, aloes, balsam, caraway seed, coriander, fennel, juniper berries, peppermint, poppy seeds and saffron.

Many of the remedies described in the papyrus had probably been used for hundreds of years already; despite their strangeness, we can see the start of a pharmacopoeia, which would become much more logical, scientific and effective over the course of the succeeding millennium.

Sushruta (c. Eighth Century BCE)

Sushruta was an Indian physician and surgeon, possibly descended from the legendary sage Vishvamitr.2 His compendium, the Sushruta Samhita, is one of the foundations of Ayurvedic medicine. His specialism was surgery, amazingly advanced for the period, but the book also lists some 700 medicinal plants and their properties. It comprises 186 chapters in six main volumes. Volume 1 Chapter 46 covers food and drink; a long description of grains, meats from wild and domestic animals, fruits, vegetables, etc., is followed by a list of culinary herbs and spices including the relatively well-known sesame, white and red mustard seeds, long pepper, black pepper, ginger, asafoetida, cumin, coriander seed, holy basil, common basil, lemongrass, cassia, sweet basil, brown and black mustard, radish, garlic and onion, as well as more obscure types. Many of these are known to be used in herbal medicines – possibly spreading sneezeweed (Centipeda minima), drumstick plant (Moringa oleifera), Mullein (a species of Verbascum), Himalayan poplar (bark is a useful medicine), gandira (possibly Coleus forskohlii Briq., the dried mature roots of which are an aromatic herb), red sanders or pot herb Cleome gynandra, purnava (Boerhaavia diffusa Linn.), chitrak (the dried root of Plumbago zeylanica), and grass pea, Lathyrus sativus. The identification of some of the plants named and described in the treatise is not always clear!

In addition to the above, there is a huge list of edible plants, trees, pot herbs, flowers and bulbs, together with descriptions of their taste, digestibility, heating/cooling effect, effect on the Ayurvedic forces (Vayu, Pittam and Kapham) and curative powers.

The book was a huge undertaking and very sophisticated for its era. It has gone through many redactions over its long history. The oldest surviving manuscript may be a palm leaf document that dates to 878 CE, preserved in a library in Nepal.

Valmiki(no specific dates but within period 500 BCE–100 BCE)

The epic Ramayana poem was written by Valmiki, the name adopted by Agni Sharma after being blessed and rechristened by sages. He is revered as the first Hindu poet. The Ramayana comprises around 480,000 words and tells the story of Rama, a Hindu deity. The poem refers to over 100 plants, trees and herbs.3 Herbs, spices, fruits and their sources include ajowan, agarwood, Indian lotus, myrobalan, castor oil plant, neem, Indian jujube, Dragon’s Blood, elephant apple, bastard mryobalan, citron, ivy gourd, champak, pomegranate, phalsa, cluster fig, Egyptian balsam, Malabar plum, royal jasmine, saffron crocus, cotton tree, kachnar, karira, camphor tree, wild sugarcane, screw-pine, pithraj tree, Lodh tree, madhuka, mogra, black pepper, Ceylon ironwood, burflower tree, wild Himalayan cherry, white fig, holy basil, charoli, Indian frankincense, field mustard, Indian sandalwood, toddy palm, Himalayan Garcinia, sesame and wax gourd. Many of the plants have value in traditional Ayurvedic medicine.

Hippocrates (460–370 BCE)

Hippocrates is widely recognised today as the ‘father of medicine’. He was born on the Aegean island of Kos to a wealthy family, where his father was a physician. He is said to have learned medicine from his father and grandfather and other notable physicians, e.g. Herodicus. He almost certainly studied at the Askleipion (healing temple) of Kos. Askleipions were commonplace in Greece, with several hundred known to have existed – they operated in a similar fashion to the health spas of today, with emphasis on rest, diet and baths. Most of the information we have about Hippocrates himself comes from his earliest biographer, Soranus, a second-century CE Greek physician, with further information from the much later Suidas and Tzetzes.4

We know from the above that Hippocrates travelled widely across Greece and that he was sufficiently well regarded for his medical expertise to be sought after by the King of Macedonia (Perdiccas) and the King of Persia (Artaxerxes). Two contemporaries certainly knew of him: Plato referred to him as Hippocrates Asclepiad, using a Greek medical title, and his fame was recognised by Aristotle, who referred to him as ‘The Great Hippocrates’. Plato (in Phaedrus) stated a basic principle of Hippocratic medicine was that understanding of the body required understanding of nature as a whole. In fact, Hippocrates is credited with bringing disease out of the shadow of the supernatural and into the light of rational thought, where he regarded it as a natural phenomenon.

The main work that bears his name is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of about sixty medical treatises that was certainly the work of several, or even many, different authors, and probably spanning several centuries. The authorship of Hippocrates himself to any of these is unproven, but most scholars agree that a dozen or so of the collection might be ascribed to him.

His approach seems aptly summed up by the following: ‘The body’s nature is the physician in disease. Nature finds the way for herself, not from thought.’5

This is not to say that medicines, drugs, ‘recipes’, etc., were not used. Where medicines were used, spices and herbs were often part of the prescription. In Regimen in Acute Diseases, for example, black hellebore was mixed with cumin, anise, euphorbia, juice of silphium to soften the bowel;6 in Epidemics spodium (burned bone), saffron, stone of a fruit, white lead and myrrh were mixed together for an eye condition;7 saffron and beans or beans with cumin are used against upset intestines;8 ground Egyptian nitre, coriander and cumin were used as a pessary to stimulate conception;9 cumin and egg in broth helped alleviate chest pain;10 Ethiopian cumin in wine and honey linctus for a breathing problem.11 Many other examples illustrate the use of spices for medicinal means in the time of Hippocrates; most of these are from plants more or less locally available, and a few are exotics from the Far East, e.g. pepper and castorium solution to relieve toothache,12 cardamom, cucumber and opium to treat fever an intestinal problem.13 L. M. V. Totelin listed exotic ingredients of the Hippocratic Corpus, many from the gynaecological treatises, which included amomum, galbanum, sweet flag, cardamom, cassia, cinnamon, safflower, frankincense, spikenard, pepper, sumac, sagapenum, ginger grass, silphium, myrrh, styrax, terebinth (resin from the Pistacia tree), saffron and cumin.14

Treatment was generally passive, however, with rest and simple treatments typical. Many case histories were accumulated in the Corpus which helped in prognosis of disease. The passive concept is illustrated by the instruction in Epidemics I, as good advice today as then: ‘Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.’15

Theophrastus (370–285 BCE)

Born in the year of Hippocrates’ death, Theophrastus was a Greek scholar who was a student of Plato and Aristotle, and is often regarded as the ‘father of botany’ because of his pioneering work on plants. Most of what we know about him comes from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, written sometime in the first half of the third century CE. Theophrastus is actually a nickname given to him by Aristotle, meaning ‘divine phrase’ on account of the skill and rich beauty of his conversation; his formal name was Tyrtamus. After Aristotle’s departure, he took over as head of the Lyceum in Athens and its ‘Peripatetic School’ of philosophers (a large school of some 2,000 students), staying in that position for thirty-six years. (It was called the Peripatetic School because of Aristotle’s charming habit of walking while he was giving lectures, presumably in groups smaller than 2,000.) The remains of the Lyceum were discovered as recently as 1996 in a park near the modern Hellenic Parliament building, though it was originally outside of Athens’ city wall, and is now open to the public.

Aristotle and Theophrastus were firstly both students of Plato, Aristotle being some fifteen years older – not a huge age difference – and they appear to have been close friends. When Aristotle died, he bequeathed his books and his garden in the grounds of the Lyceum to his old friend. Like his mentor, Theophrastus was a prolific writer – Diogenes credited him with 227 works, most of which have sadly been lost or are only fragmentary. His work covered a very wide variety of subjects – politics, philosophy, botany, mathematics, rhetoric, law, astronomy, logic, geology, history, physics – in other words he was a true polymath. His greatest contributions, however, were in natural history, and the two main botanical works, which are almost complete, are the nine books of Enquiry into Plants and the six books of On the Causes of Plants.

Apart from being friends with Aristotle and Plato, Theophrastus also lived in the same era as Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great. Aristotle was appointed tutor to Alexander in 343 BCE and so would have been known to Theophrastus. The significance of these relationships is that when Alexander marched on the East, he took with him trained observers and the results were available to Aristotle and Theophrastus.16 So, the exotic spices later described by Theophrastus would have been either brought back to Greece, or their descriptions brought back, to be included in his botanical treatises.

As regards the main botanical works, he was the first to attempt a classification of plants, his main groups being trees, shrubs, under-shrubs and herbs. He described about 500 species. That may not sound like many given that there are now estimated to be over 390,000 species known globally, but at that period in history it was a huge undertaking. It also stood the test of time: it was to be another 1,800 years before any significant botanical advances were made. He described many important spices: alexanders, asafoetida, cardamom, cassia, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, dill, fenugreek, frankincense, galingale, ginger grass, juniper, liquorice, mustard, parsley, pepper, saffron, sesame, silphium, spikenard, sumac and tamarind. Of these, several were from the tropical East (cardamom, cassia, cinnamon, galingale, pepper and spikenard) and must have been collected or traded by Alexander’s armies or reached Greece via ancient overland trade routes. The descriptions of cinnamon and cassia, for example, are clearly second-hand, with ‘various accounts’ given of their occurrence, at least one of which he acknowledged as implausible.17

Theophrastus lived a long and productive life, finally dying around the age of 85. He is purported to have lamented, ‘We die just when we are beginning to live.’18

Megasthenes (350–290 BCE)

Megasthenes was a Greek historian, explorer, ambassador and chronicler most famous for his accounts of India in his book Indika, of which only fragments found in works by later writers remain. The classic English translation of an earlier compilation of fragments was produced by J. W. McCrindle in the nineteenth century.19

Megasthenes was sent by Seleukos Nikator (former general under Alexander and subsequent founder of the Seleucid Empire) on an embassy to the Mauryan King Sandrakottos (Chandragupta). He appears to have been based in Arachosia (an area in the vicinity of modern Kandahar, Afghanistan), from where he made frequent visits to Sandrakottos. He was referred to by Arrian, Pliny and Strabo, though the exact timing of his visits is not clear – they possibly started around 302 BCE. The veracity of his accounts was called into question by Eratosthenes, Strabo and Pliny, but he is now generally regarded as an important and mainly reliable source about India in that era. The most troublesome passages are those that describe certain races, which are plainly absurd, e.g. a race with their feet back-to-front, mouthless peoples who sustain themselves by vapours from roasted meats and fruits, people who have ears that extend to their feet, etc.20

His description of the Suppers of the Indians in Fragment XXVIII can surely be interpolated as an early account of rice and curry:

And Megasthenes, in the second book of his Indian History, says – ‘Among the Indians at a banquet a table is set before each individual; and it is like a sideboard or beaufet; and on the table is placed a golden dish, in which they throw first of all boiled rice, just as if a person were going to boil groats, and then they add many sorts of meat dressed after the Indian fashion.’21

Fragment XLI lists plants that grow in the mountainous land (presumably northern India), including laurel (could include cinnamon, malabathrum and camphor), myrtles (could include Indian bay leaf and myrobalan), box-tree and other evergreens, ‘none of which are found beyond the Euphrates’.22 He described Brahmins, who ‘abstained from hot and highly seasoned food’.

In Fragment LVI, several trade emporia are described, e.g. the Cape of Perimula, ‘where there is the greatest emporium of trade in India’, and Automela (possibly in Gujurat).23 In this section, Megasthenes, via Pliny, appears to be describing the area around the Gulf of Cambay, which McCrindle notes was the chief seat of Indian trade with the West, which was monopolised by the port of Barygaza.

Eratosthenes (276–194 BCE)

Eratosthenes was a Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician who was born in Cyrene (in modern Libya). He studied in Athens, where he wrote several poems and historical works, and subsequently moved to Alexandria at the age of 30 to work at the library (the most important such institution of the ancient world) at the invitation of Ptolemy III. He spent the remainder of his life there. After a few years, he was elevated to the position of Chief Librarian. While he was there, he studied and wrote scholarly works in several different fields; all have been lost, but we know of the breadth of his endeavours due to numerous references by succeeding scholars. His three-volume work Geography was of huge importance – he perceived the earth to be a globe, devised and used a system of latitudes and meridians to describe it, and calculated the circumference of the earth to be 250,000 stadia (there were 8 stadia to the Roman mile), remarkably close to the actual measurement. Unfortunately, none of his works survived to the present day, but there are over 150 fragments preserved through other authors. In the last years of his life he became blind, which left him unable to study and so depressed him that he ultimately starved himself to death.

Strabo (64 BCE–24 CE)

Strabo, also a Greek geographer, became most famous for his seventeen-volume work Geographica. He was born in Amasya (in modern Turkey) to a wealthy and well-connected family. He moved to Rome around the age of 19 or 20 (44 BCE) and studied under Tyrannion, a distinguished geographer, and several other prominent teachers.24 He also knew Posidonius, another geographer and polymath. He may have stayed in Rome for many years – he was certainly there in 35 BCE and in 31 BCE and visited again in 29 BCE. He travelled widely (for the time): he was in Egypt from 25 to 20 BCE, evidently based in Alexandria; there he sailed up the Nile as far as Philae (Aswan area) and the frontiers of Ethiopia in 25 BCE, then travelled to various locations in Asia Minor, the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea) and Beirut in Syria. His final visit to Rome was around 7 BCE and he may have spent the last twenty-six or twenty-seven years of his life in his native Amasya.

We are mainly interested in Strabo here for his Geographica, the greater part of which was probably written before 7 BCE. He probably used his time in Alexandria to research information in the Great Library, one of the most important such institutions of the ancient world. Strabo’s world, or rather his view of the world, was substantially narrower than the reality we know today. Africa (largely limited to ‘Libya’ and adjoining areas) was much smaller, Asia only extended as far as India, and Europe is only recognisable in the Mediterranean area; there was nothing else. Eurasia, and North Africa reduced to a small continent: this was the extent of the Graeco-Roman world. Fifteen of the seventeen books cover specific regions and half of those are focused on Mediterranean countries. He typically describes the places, peoples, products and a little of the history, which often reverts to legend and myth, a good part of it implausible to a twenty-first-century reader. He praises certain earlier geographers, but totally disregards others: ‘Still, while many are beneath discussion, such men as Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Hipparchus, Polybius, and others of their stamp, deserve our highest consideration.’ However, even these worthies were not exempt from severe criticism.25

He draws heavily on Alexander’s great expedition to Asia and on the discussion of India, but there is little else. Curiously, there is no mention of black pepper, let alone its provenance, despite his acknowledgement that 120 ships were leaving Myos Hormos annually for India (mainly for the spice trade).26 Despite this and other shortcomings, his voluminous work is impressive in coverage and provides by far the best understanding of the world in his era.

Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. 25 BCE–c. 50 CE)

A near contemporary of Strabo, Celsus was a Roman writer on medicine and was probably himself a physician; however, details of his life are scant. He hails from the time of the early Roman Empire, though his exact dates are uncertain. His famous surviving treatise on medicine, De Medicina, is a single volume of an originally much larger work, with eight constituent books. In the later chapters in Book II, he has much to say about food, e.g. those that are hurtful to the stomach, those that heat and cool (‘Heat is excited by pepper, salt … garlick, onion, dry figs, salt fish, wine which is the more heating, the stronger it is’), soporifics, diuretics (‘The urine is promoted by whatever grows in the garden of a good smell, as smallage, rue, dill, basil, mint, hyssop, anise, coriander, cresses, rocket, fennel’), etc.27 Book III deals with various remedies for fevers and other ailments and includes many herbal remedies, mainly using locally available medicines, i.e. from within the Mediterranean area. Book IV deals with treatments of illnesses of different parts of the body, again using many herbal remedies. Books V and VI are devoted to pharmacology and contain a vast array of medicines, including many exotics from the Far East – cardamom, nard, costus, cinnamon, cassia, bdellium, sesame, black pepper, long pepper, white pepper, amomum, malabathrum, sweet flag, ginger – as well as the Arabian peninsula and Horn of Africa – frankincense, myrrh, aloe, gum arabic, tragacanth, balsam, opopanax and sandarac. The number and variety of more local herbs and spices is even greater. Poppy tears, i.e. opium, are commonly part of the treatment, a useful drug in an era devoid of painkillers but with much suffering. The overall impression of the works of Celsus is that medicine of the Roman era was more effective and sophisticated than we may care to give credit for, despite a crude level of knowledge of anatomy and physiology compared with today. The huge array of herbal remedies that could be brought to bear was impressive, and in this we can clearly see the early motivation for import and use of exotic spices.

Antonius Castor (First Century CE)

Castor was an eminent Roman botanist who was known for his huge botanical garden. Pliny refers to him several times, and he was one of Pliny’s sources on botanical matters. Pliny on Castor:

Nor is this a kind of knowledge by any means difficult to obtain; at all events, so far as regards myself, with the exception of a very few, it has been my good fortune to examine them all, aided by the scientific researches of Antonius Castor, who in our time enjoyed the highest reputation for an intimate acquaintance with this branch of knowledge. I had the opportunity of visiting his garden, in which, though he had passed his hundredth year, he cultivated vast numbers of plants with the greatest care. Though he had reached this great age, he had never experienced any bodily ailment, and neither his memory nor his natural vigour had been the least impaired by the lapse of time.28

A nineteenth-century reconstruction of Strabo’s world map. (Edward Bunbury, 1883) The Mediterranean area and parts of the Middle East are quite recognisable today, but the distortion of the known world is very marked at its peripheries.29

Ptolemy’s world map, redrawn in the fifteenth century but based on a late thirteenth-century rediscovery of Ptolemy’s work. (British Library Harley MS 7182)

Columella (c. 4–70 CE)

Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was born in Cádiz in southern Spain to wealthy Roman parents, and grew up to become an authority on agriculture. He apparently spent much time in his youth with a favoured uncle, an expert farmer, in the Baetic province (more or less equivalent to Andalusia). He left Spain at some time in his youth and pursued a military career and appears to have served in Syria. He spent much of his later life in the vicinity of Rome, and may have died at Tarentum (Taranto) in the heel of Italy, based on an inscription found there.30

His main legacy is the twelve-volume work De Re Rustica, which has been completely preserved, and is a treatise on Roman agriculture. From the point of view of herbs and spices, our main interest is in Books X–XII. Book X, ‘On the Culture of Gardens’, is a dramatic contrast to the previous nine, which were prose texts describing practical aspects of agriculture, in that it was written in hexameters of verse in the style of Virgil giving praise to his (Columella’s) garden. His lyrical garden includes mandrake flowers, giant fennel, poppies, chervil, garlic, wild parsnip, capers, elecampane, mint, dill, rue, mustard, alexanders, onion, Lepidium, green parsley, marjoram, sweet cicely, cress, savory, pomegranate tree, coriander, fennel flowers, saffron flowers, sweet cassia, horehound, houseleek, buckthorn, butcher’s broom and purslane, in addition to numerous vegetables, fruits and vines.

Book XI deals with the duties of the farmer and calendar of work, and specifies when and how vegetables and herbs should be sown and planted within a garden. Book XII covers the tasks of the farmer’s wife and is valuable for a number of recipes, many of which include (mainly) locally available herbs and spices. This is an extremely useful record of Roman cuisine from the first century CE, much more prosaic than those of Apicius, and focused on pickling, preserving and wine-making. Recipes include pickled herbs; oxygal (sour milk seasoned with herbs); lettuce pickled with dill, fennel, rue and leek; pickled purslane and garden samphire; dried figs mixed with parched sesame, Egyptian anise, fennel and cumin seeds; spiced wine using flower-de-luce, fenugreek and sweet rush with boiling of the must, also adding spikenard leaf, dates, costum, cyperus, sweet rush, myrrh, calamus, cassia, amomum, saffron and melilot; preserves for wine; horehound wine; squill wine and squill vinegar; wormwood, hyssop, fennel and pennyroyal wines; squeezed must using rosemary; myrtle wine; pickled elecampane; olives pickled with fennel seeds and mastic seeds; pickled black olives using aniseed, mastic and fennel seed, rue and parsley; a marmalade of olives using fenugreek, cumin, fennel seed and Egyptian aniseed; gleucine oil (made from oil and must) with calamus, sweet-smelling rush, cardamom, palm bark, Egyptian anise and others; prepared mustard; pickled alexanders and skirret roots; spicy salad with garum and vinegar.

Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE)

As well as being one of the greatest natural historians of his era, Gaius Plinius Secundus was also a lawyer, military commander and author. He was born in Como (or possibly Verona) to a wealthy family, and educated as a lawyer in Rome. He joined the army in his early twenties as a junior infantry officer, and later served in Germania under the legatus Pomponius Secundus, the governor of Germania Superior, who became a friend and ally.31 He was subsequently promoted to command a cavalry battalion and would have fought in military campaigns in the region.

After leaving the army at the age of 29, he returned to Rome and combined a literary career with a return to law. He wrote the twenty-volume History of the German Wars, a narrative history of Rome, and a biography of his friend Pomponius, none of which have survived.

After Nero’s death in 68 CE, instability in Rome followed in the Year of the Four Emperors (69 CE), the last of these being Vespasian. Pliny had been appointed procurator in Nearer Spain by Nero at some unknown date, but returned to Rome on the death of his brother and adopted his nephew (Pliny the Younger) in 70 CE. He was known to, and trusted by, Vespasian since the Germanic wars and was appointed to a number of procuratorships. At some stage in the mid-to-late 70s CE, he was given the post of Prefect of the Roman fleet at Misenum in Italy, which set the scene for Pliny’s dramatic death.

His sole surviving literary work is the Natural History; it is a huge encyclopaedia of the natural sciences written in thirty-seven books and was a tremendous achievement by any standards. The subjects cover astronomy, meteorology, geography, geology, ethnography, anthropology, physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, pharmacology, medicine, metals, mineralogy and the arts. Books of relevance to spices are Book VI (covering Asia geographically), Books XII and XIII (trees), Book XIX (garden plants), Book XX (remedies from garden plants), Book XXI (flowers), Book XXIII (remedies from cultivated trees) and Book XXIV (remedies from forest trees). Natural History was probably started during his period of procuratorships under Vespasian and continued up to his death in 79 CE, the book later published by his nephew. His enormous productivity was enabled by his strong motivation and aided by his ability to work at all hours, and especially through the night; he wasted no time and focused all his efforts on his achievements. His nephew (in an epistle to the Roman senator Baebius Macer) observed that ‘he looked upon every moment as lost which was not devoted to study’.

He quoted over 470 earlier or contemporary Greek and Roman authors and authorities. For all that, he was not perfect: errors were frequent, myths were perpetuated, but the work is unrivalled in scope from the era of classical antiquity.

Pliny died at age 56 in suitably dramatic circumstances. He was based at Misenum near Pompeii, where he was in command of the fleet during the cataclysmic eruption of nearby Vesuvius in 79 CE. He sailed to help evacuate his friends but was overwhelmed by a cloud of toxic gases and was asphyxiated.

Pedanius Dioscorides (40–90 CE)

Dioscorides was a medical botanist and physician who served in the Roman army, and is famous for his five-volume book on (mainly) herbal medicine, De Materia Medica. He was more or less a contemporary of Pliny, and although it is unknown whether they ever met, it seems plausible that they would have known of each other. Little is known about the man himself, though he wrote the text in Greek and most of his work is on plants that were indigenous to the eastern Mediterranean.32 He was born in Anabarzos near Tarsus in modern Turkey.

De Materia Medica is organised into five books which are not compatible with modern taxonomical botany. Book I comprises aromatic trees and shrubs, and oils and salves derived from them; Book II animals, animal products, herbs and cereals; Book III roots, seeds and herbs; Book IV further roots and herbs; and Book V vines and their products and minerals. He covers a total of around 600 medicinal plants. Typically, there is a brief botanical description, including any interesting features, aroma, some mention of origin, any adulteration if known, followed by their medical benefits and how to prepare and use them. His influence has been extremely long-lasting: it became the most important pharmacology text for over 1,500 years. It has also been copied, modified, redacted and enhanced innumerable times. The oldest extant complete copy is the ‘Vienna Dioscorides’, also known as the ‘Anicia Juliana Codex’, which dates from around 512 CE and was made in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is beautifully illustrated (Figure 4) and was made as a gift for the Emperor Flavius Olybrius’ daughter. Even this early copy was altered from Dioscorides’ original.

Spices and culinary herb plants include alexanders, amomum, dill, anise, celery, parsley, wormwood, asafoetida, basil, bay, bdellium, bishop’s weed, black mustard, black pepper, borage, box thorn, sweet flag, camphor, caraway, cardamom, cassia, chervil, cinnamon, comfrey, fennel, rosemary, sage, thyme, cumin, coriander, costus, cow parsley, elecampane, fenugreek, ferula, frankincense, ginger, horseradish, hyssop, juniper, laser (silphium), liquorice, long pepper, lovage, lycium, malabathrum, marjoram, mustard, myrobalan, myrrh, nard, spikenard, nigella, nutmeg, oregano, poppy, pennyroyal, rue, saffron, samphire, sesame, styrax, sugar and sumac. While this list is dominated by the plants available within the Roman Empire, there are already numerous exotics from south and Southeast Asia, which reflect increased availability via trade in the first century CE.

Although information about Dioscorides himself is scant, we can get a few clues from his preface to De Materia Medica. He dedicated his work to his friend Laecanius Areius, a physician from Tarsus (in modern Turkey), where they both probably studied (or possibly Areius may have been one of Dioscorides’ teachers). He emphasised his work as being mainly original.33 The earliest English translation is that of Goodyer from as late as 1655.34

He details the collecting and storing of plant materials and his hands-on approach is apparent. Crateuas the rhizotomist (a physician from the first to second centuries BCE) was given a certain amount of praise, and indeed appears to have been one of Dioscorides’ sources, as was Andreas the physician (third century BCE). Along with the praise came criticism – they ‘ignored many extremely useful roots and gave meager descriptions of many herbs’. Disoscorides’ work was thorough and reliable and stood the test of time. The book was never ‘lost’; it has always stayed in circulation. First translations were made to Latin in the sixth century, to Syriac in the ninth century, and Arabic in the tenth century; further translations to Italian, German, Spanish and French were made during the Renaissance, but the Goodyer English translation of 1655 was not published until centuries later. Of great interest is the large number of plant medicines still used in modern pharmacology; it is fair to conclude that De Materia Medica is one of the most influential books of all time.35

Claudius Ptolemy (100–170 CE)

Ptolemy was a Roman astronomer, geographer and mathematician who lived in Alexandria in Roman Egypt. He is famous for writing numerous scientific treatises, most notably on astronomy (the most important being the Almagest), but his work the Geographia, an eight-book treatise, is also of huge importance. He produced maps of the known world using geographical coordinates based on latitude measured from the equator (expressed as ‘climata’), with thirty-nine parallels from equator to pole, each interval representing fifteen minutes of daylight on the summer solstice. He calculated longitudes from a meridian in the west that passed through the Canary Islands. The Geographia, then, is mainly focused on the geometrical representation of geography. His guiding light was his precursor Marinos of Tyre (70–130 CE), and though his treatise was lost, Ptolemy used this as the basis for his work, and improved upon it, at the same time acknowledging the debt owed to Marinos. Ptolemy assumed the world to be a sphere (as had several predecessors) and estimated the circumference as 180,000 stadia – this made a degree of longitude at the equator some 500 stadia instead of the correct 600, i.e. he had underestimated.36 Ptolemy provided coordinates for 6,345 localities, which could then be placed on a grid to generate his maps; there is clearly excessive distortion in the east–west direction, with the length of the Mediterranean being overestimated in terms of degrees.37 The world maps were made with two of his three projections, and one is illustrated on p. 31, clearly a huge improvement over Strabo’s map. His world maps that would have accompanied the text are lost but were regenerated from his tables by monks during the Middle Ages. Local maps were part of Books VII and VIII. Ptolemy’s world maps proved to be the most accurate descriptors of the world until they were superseded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during the Age of Discovery.

Galen (129–216 CE)

Claudius Galenus, usually referred to as Galen, was born in Pergamon (in modern-day western Turkey), to wealthy, if dissimilar, parents. His father was an architect, a just and benevolent man, but he considered his mother a foul-tempered shrew, leading Galen to vow to ‘embrace and love the former qualities and to avoid and hate the latter’. His education commenced at Pergamon, itself a noted centre of learning, and he studied the main philosophical disciplines of the era, before commencing medical studies at the age of 17.38 He continued his medical studies at Smyrna and Alexandria and other locations. His first professional job was working as a surgeon to gladiators at Pergamon, then he subsequently moved to Rome at around the age of 31. In Rome, he rapidly gained a reputation as a brilliant, though outspoken, surgeon, but made enemies in medical circles and withdrew to Pergamon around 168 CE, but returned to Rome within a year.

Galen was nothing if not prolific as a medical author, and may have written as many as 500 works on anatomy, physiology, medicine and philosophy; not all survived, but there is still a huge collection of treatises that remain extant. He undoubtedly benefited from the work of his predecessors, and was notably respectful to Hippocrates, though he was clearly a pioneer in many aspects of anatomy and surgery. It is interesting to reflect that Hippocrates died some 500 years before Galen was born! He accepted and promoted Hippocrates’ humoural theory, bloodletting and other areas subsequently found to be plain wrong, but, like Hippocrates, understood the importance of the body’s natural ability to heal.

Key texts related to herbal remedies include On the Powers (and Mixtures) of Simple Remedies, On the Composition of Drugs According to Places and On the Composition of Drugs According to Kind. Galen treated imbalances in the four humours or fluids; drugs were composed of animal, vegetable or mineral substances.39 Great emphasis was placed on authenticity and condition of the substance, e.g. the visual appearance of myrrh and costus, crocus stamens to be bright yellow with a pleasant scent; cinnamon bark should have a pleasant warming fragrance, etc. Galen grouped certain plants by function: major ‘opening’ roots, e.g. fennel, celery, asparagus, parsley, butcher’s broom; ‘warm’ seeds, e.g. aniseed, cumin, coriander, fennel; ‘cold’ seeds, e.g. watermelon, cucumber, squash, melon; cordial flowers, e.g. rose, violet, borage. Primary effective qualities were considered to be hot/cold or dry/moist; there were also secondary (e.g. relaxing, astringing, softening, hardening, etc) and tertiary effective qualities (e.g. purgative or promoting sweat, etc.). The first two levels were used to treat the opposite of the particular effective quality. He used various other grading parameters for his prescriptions – some 475 remedies are recorded in his extant works.

Galen’s work continued to influence medicine until the seventeenth century or later, even though his anatomical work was rendered incorrect by Renaissance scientists.

Cosmas Indicopleustes (Sixth Century CE)

Cosmas was a Greek merchant famed for his travels to India; in fact, his surname means ‘the Indian navigator’. He was probably a native of Alexandria and received an education but was not a scholar. Against the prevailing academic view, he believed the world was flat. He certainly travelled widely – through the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, west coast of India, and Sri Lanka. He described his adventures in his Christian Topography, which was written in the mid-sixth century. His devout Christian views permeate the text, which nonetheless contains an interesting geographic account in the early era of the Eastern Roman Empire. When he had finished with travelling, he returned to Alexandria and became a monk.40

The Christian Topography is written in twelve books, and we are mainly interested in Books II and XI for his geographic descriptions, the remaining books comprising religious diatribes denouncing the sphericity of the world, describing the size of the sun, and other subjects of a more spiritual nature. In Book II, he describes the Red Sea, north-eastern Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the passage to India. He writes:

The region which produces frankincense is situated at the projecting parts of Ethopia, and lies inland, but is washed by the ocean on the other side. Hence the inhabitants of Barbaria, being near at hand, go up into the interior and, engaging in traffic with the natives, bring back from them many kinds of spices, frankincense, cassia, calamus, and many other articles of merchandise …

His description of Tabropane (Sri Lanka) in Book XI clearly shows that by the sixth century CE it had risen in status to that of a major entrepot: ‘The island being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by ships from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia, and it likewise sends out many of its own.’

He mentions ‘the five marts of Male [the Malabar coast of India] which export pepper’, and moving eastwards: ‘and then farther away is the clove country, then Tzinista which produces the silk. Beyond this there is no other country, for the ocean surrounds it on the east.’ This is important – Indonesia had been identified and China’s eastern coast correctly described. Cosmas was one of the few writers on geography in that era who had actually made the journey himself (at least as far as Tabropane) rather than relying on second-hand information.

Paulus of Aegina (625–690 CE)

Paulus was a seventh-century Greek physician about whom very little is known, though he is famous for his extensive treatise Medical Compendium in Seven Books.41 Much of the work refers to that recommended by preceding physicians and scientists, i.e. a compilation of previous observations, though it also contains new ideas, and he appeared to have particular expertise in surgery. For all that, this is an excellent reference book and became understandably popular, particularly in the Arab world (it was translated into Arabic in the ninth century). Book VII deals exclusively with pharmacology. In his ‘Simples’ chapter he lists some 490 single botanical remedies, as well as mineral and animal remedies; he then describes simple and compound purgatives, antidotes, liniments, ointments and other preparations.

Abu Hanifah Al-Dinawari (c. 820–895 CE)

Abu Hanifah al-Dinawari was a Persian astronomer, botanist, geographer and mathematician born in ninth-century Iran. Although he published many works on a diverse range of subjects, he is most well known for his Book of Plants, or Kitab al-Nabat. This book originally consisted of six volumes but only three have survived, and one of those is a partial reconstruction; nonetheless, this remaining set documents 482 plants in his alphabetical listing.42 Al-Dinawari gathered a lot of his own information (e.g. from Bedouins and others) as well as relying on earlier Arabic sources. There are no detailed botanical descriptions, and the writing abounds with poetry, so it is not a conventional botanical treatise in the Western sense, but nonetheless is a valuable step forward. Its main value was that it became the most comprehensive compilation of Arabic plants for many hundreds of years.

Hu Sihui (Fourteenth Century)

Hu Sihui was a nutritionist active in China in the fourteenth century during the Yuan Dynasty. His origin is unclear (possibly Chinese or Mongol), but it is known that he had been appointed to the royal court office in the period 1314–20, ultimately rising to the position of Royal Dietician. He wrote the well-known text Yinshan Zhengyao, or The True Principles of Eating and Drinking, a work of three chapters containing 219 recipes, of which most, though certainly not all, have some perceived medical or therapeutic value. The work was presented to the emperor in 1330.43 The first chapter includes a section on ‘Rare and Precious Dishes’ containing ninety-five recipes.44 The second chapter includes recipes for various infusions/liquid foods, with notes on their therapeutic value; a section on ‘food for immortals’, i.e. diets to allow extreme longevity; food for the seasons; the five tastes (moderation is advised here, e.g. too salty a diet should be avoided); and a section on foods as remedies for the sick, among others. The third chapter is an illustrated compilation of different food types, which includes eight seasonings and twenty-eight flavourings. Sabban notes that the most frequently used condiments were scallions, ginger, vinegar, a non-specified amomum, pepper, coriander and tangerine peel, which may be typical of the fourteenth century in China. Cosmopolitan influences were common, e.g. meat coated in asafoetida then browned in ‘Arab fat’ or mastic soup, also Middle Eastern; foreign words sometimes were used in recipes to add a certain glamour and appeal, and the exoticism of imported spices added to this effect. Asafoetida, used in several dishes, is a popular Indian and West Asian spice. In addition to those listed above, spices included dill, galingale, turmeric, saffron, fagara, black pepper, long pepper, mustard, basil, cinnamon, cardamom, mastic, camphor, fenugreek, sesame and nard. Many of these spices are non-native to China and would have been imported; interestingly, pepper seems to have been used in preference to the native fagara, probably because of its greater pungency. Alkanet and saffron were also used to colour food.

Rembert Dodoens (1517–85) and John Gerard (1545–1612)