VIII 
PEPPERS 
251 
White pepper is mentioned first by Dioscorides, and, 
generally speaking, it was supposed in the early days 
that white pepper was produced by a different plant from 
that which produced the black pepper. Pliny states 
that in his time long pepper was worth 15 denarii a 
pound, white pepper 7 denarii, and black pepper 4. 
In the Periplus of the Erythroean Sea, dated a.d. 64, 
we find it stated that pepper was exported from Barake, 
a shipping port of Net Kunda, where it is said to grow 
in great abundance, and where alone it occurs. These 
places are identified with localities between Mangalore 
and Calicut in Madras. 
In about 540, Cosmas Indicopleustes visited the 
Malabar coast, and gives an account of the plant as a 
climber, sticking to high trees like a vine. This appears 
to be the first account of the plant producing the spice. 
Marco Polo mentions pepper as being produced in 
Java in 1280, and Nicolo Conti, a Venetian traveller, 
saw it in Sumatra in the fifteenth century, but there is 
no evidence of its being in the Malay region earlier, and 
the supplies were mainly, it seems, brought from the 
Malabar coast before this. Garcia da Orta says that in 
his time it grew on the Malacca coast, and in the islands 
near, Java and Sunda and Cuda (? Kedah). The pepper 
of these parts was inferior to that of Malabar, where it 
was widely spread from Cape Comorin to Cannanore. 
During the Middle Ages pepper was the most valued 
spice, and Venice, Genoa, and other European cities owe 
much of their wealth to the importation of the spice. 
Taxes and tributes were often paid in pepper. Thus in 
the siege of Eome by Alaric, king of the Goths, the 
ransom of the city was 5,000 lbs. of gold, 30,000 lbs. of 
silver, and 3,000 lbs. of pepper, and after the capture of 
Cesarea by the Genoese in 1101, each of the conquering 
army received 2 lbs. of pepper and 48 soldi as a share 
of the spoils. 
The first mention of pepper in England is in the 
Statutes of Ethelred (978 to 1016), where the Easterlings 
coming to trade with London were required to pay a tax 
