PIPER 247 



when Rome was besieged by the Goths the ransom 

 included three thousand pounds of pepper. In fact, 

 the value placed upon pepper in the records of the past 

 is in itself an indication of its importance to the people 

 who used it. We transcribe verbatim, in part, the 

 exceptionally interesting history of piper given in Dy- 

 mock's Pharmacographia Indica, pp. 167-8, as follows: 



"Cosmas Indicopleustes, a merchant, and in later life 

 a monk, who wrote about A. D. 540, appears to have 

 visited the Malabar Coast, or at all events had some 

 information about the pepper-plant from an eye- 

 witness. It is he who furnishes the first particulars 

 about it, stating that it is a climbing plant, sticking 

 close to high trees, like a vine. Its native country he 

 calls Male. The Arabian authors of the Middle Ages, 

 as Ibn Khurdadbah (about A. D. 869-885), Edrisi in 

 the middle of the 12th, and Ibn Batuta in the 14th cen- 

 tury, furnished nearly similar accounts. 



"Among Europeans who described the pepper-plant 

 with some exactness, one of the first was Benjamin of 

 Tudela, who visited the Malabar Coast in A. D. 1166. 

 Another was the Catalan friar, Jordanus, about 1330; 

 he described the plant as something like ivy, climbing 

 trees and forming fruit, like that of the wild vine. 

 'This fruit,' he says, 'is at first green, then, when it 

 comes to maturity, black.' Nearly the same state- 

 ments are repeated by Nicolo Conti, a Venetian, who, 

 at the beginning of the 15th century, spent twenty-five 

 years in the East. He observed the plant in Sumatra, 

 and also described it as resembling ivy. 



"It is worthy of remark that all the foreign names 

 for black pepper are derived from Pippali, the Sanskrit 

 name for long pepper, which leads one to suppose that 



