Christopher Columbus, Gonzalo Pizarro, and the Search for Cinnamon

Abstract

days not very mysterious and not very expensive. In exploring the role that this powerful aromatic has played in world history, we are recalling a period when cinnamon was highly mysterious and was one of the most expensive commodities on the market.1 We know that cassia, a form of cinnamon, was available in the Mediterranean world by 600 b.c.: around that time it is mentioned both in Hebrew literature and in Greek. The prophet Ezekiel lists cassia among the trade goods that formed the wealth of the Phoenician city of Tyre. The Greek poetess Sappho imagines a wedding at which the smoke of frankincense, myrrh, and cassia rose to Heaven. Two hundred years later the “father of history,” the Greek author Herodotus, describes both cassia and cinnamon and is able to say exactly how they are obtained. Cassia, he assures his audience, grows in a shallow lake somewhere in Arabia, where the air is filled with fierce bats that attack the eyes of the harvesters.