Pepper
In the Roman Empire pepper was fully established as an article of commerce. Rosengarten (1969) records that under Emperor Marcus Aurelius this trade had increased to such a degree that in A.D. 176 a customs duty was levied in Alexandria on long pepper and white pepper, but black pepper, which was cheaper, appears to have been excluded from taxation, perhaps for political reasons to please the masses.
The Greek name peperi, the Latin piper and the English `pepper’ all come from the Sanskrit pippali, which was the name for the long pepper, P. longum, which is now never seen in Europe.
Pepper was probably taken by the Hindu colonists to Java between 100 B.C. and A.D. 600 and its cultivation in the Archipelago is at least as old as that. Marco Polo in his memoirs of 1298 describes the cultivation of pepper in Java, which he visited in 1280, and the abundance of pepper on the Malabar coast. He talks of Chinese sailing vessels carrying up to 6 000 baskets of pepper.
By the Middle Ages pepper had assumed great importance in Europe. It was used to season and make more palatable dull and repulsive food and as a preservative in curing meats. Together with other spices, it helped to overcome the odors of bad food and febrifuge, but finds little use in western medicine in modern times.
With the discovery of the monsoons by Hippalus in A.D. 40, Roman-built ships took part in the trade in pepper. This direct commerce between Rome and India helped to curb the Arab monopoly in the spices.
A pepperers’ guild of wholesale merchants was founded in London in 1180 in the reign of Henry II. It was subsequently incorporated into a spicers’ guild and was succeeded in 1429 by the present Grocers’ Company. The original pepperers and spicers were the forerunners of the apothecaries, emphasizing the vital role that spices formerly played in occidental medicine.
