An Indonesian Tree Product in Medieval German Gunpowder
So far we’ve seen Indonesian commodities used in European kitchens, in glossaries and word-lists, as metonyms of paradise and fantastical luxury, and in medicines for sick hunting falcons. In this post I’m going to show you something stranger: the use of camphor in the manufacture of gunpowder in medieval Europe.
Camphor is a crystalline substance found in the wood and bark of at least three tree species. (1) Two of them grow in what is now Indonesia, and both are tall Dipterocarpaceae that grow deep in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo: Dryobalanops aromatica, a Sumatran species generally considered to produce superior camphor, and D. lanceolata, a Bornean one. The third tree, Cinnamomum camphora, grows in southern China, Japan, and Taiwan, and has been exploited far more than either Dryobalanops species in modern times. In the Middle Ages, however, the Indonesian species were significantly more prominent, especially in the west (and, in any case, Chinese camphor would have had to have gone through the Indo-Malaysian archipelago en route to western Afro-Eurasia at this time). (2)
Dryobalanops aromatica is and was closely associated with Barus in North Sumatra (Figure 1). Barus was a famous place: It appears in texts from across the medieval world, and a well-known Old Tamil inscription has been found at the site (a transcription and translation of which can be found in Subbarayalu 2012:38–47). In Arabic Barus was known as Fanṣur, probably from the Malay or Batak Pancur, which means ‘spring’ (i.e. a place from which water flows); Portuguese sources in the early sixteenth century confirm that Barus and Fanṣur were the same place. (3)
Barus was so closely associated with camphor, in fact, that the modern name for the substance in Indonesian is kapur Barus ‘Barus camphor’ or ‘Barus chalk’. This formula was also used in the Middle Ages: We find it in Classical Malay and Old Sundanese texts, and a variant is also found in European and Middle Eastern languages, as in the <canfara fa᷉surí> in the account of Marco Polo’s travels. (4)
In fact the English word ‘camphor’ and its other European relatives derive from the Malay word via Arabic and Greek (and perhaps some other intermediaries). The root is proto-Malayo-Polynesian *kapuR, which originally meant ‘chalk’ or ‘lime’ (calcium carbonate). The name was applied to camphor because it resembled lime and was used for some of the same purposes; camphor and lime were often added to betel quids in the archipelago, for example. It was once thought that the word originated in Sanskrit karpūra, but that is almost certainly a borrowing from the Malay. This means that ‘camphor’ is one of a handful of Malay (or Malayo-Polynesian) words to have entered European languages in the Middle Ages. It even appears in the Qur’an. (5)
This fact alone is rather interesting, but more interesting still are the uses to which camphor was put. It was used in food and drink — quite a few medieval European and Middle Eastern cookery books recommend it — and medicinally, as you might expect. But it was also used for making gunpowder. The main ingredients of gunpowder are sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre (potassium nitrate); camphor was an additional extra, something to give the powder a little more oomph.
The texts below are taken from the Vienna Büchsenmeisterbuch (Vienna, ÖNB, Codex 3069), an illustrated manual for the production and use of gunpowder and firearms written in Early New High German in 1411 somewhere in southern Germany. The work (which has been digitised) is notable for its depiction of a serpentine handgun (f.38v), the oldest image of a firearm with a mechanical action in the world (Figure 2). This is the world’s first trigger mechanism: Prior to this, guns were fired by touching a hot poker or handheld match (a cord impregnated with gunpowder) to a touch-hole in the chamber.
More importantly for my purposes, a number of recipes for gunpowder and other pyrotechnical devices in the Büchsenmeisterbuch call for the inclusion of camphor. These are listed in the contents (Figure 3).
Some of the recipes are quite complicated and use camphor at several stages. A potent powder could contain salperticum, a concoction made with saltpetre, camphor, and ammonium chloride (salarmoniac) boiled with brandy (as in the recipe on f.7v). The recipe I’ve translated below recommends boiling camphor (‘as much as you want’) with brandy and using the result to enrich gunpowder or to make good fire arrows (<fu’rpfilen> — Figure 4, middle of line 5). (6)
TEXT
Nim campfor als vil du wilt. (vnd leg d͠r jn eine᷉ a͠l cou-
curpit (vnd tů gepran͠te win daa zů und tů eine᷉ alembicū
dar vf (vnd pro͑n dz vff wz uß dem alembic get da wirt dz
pulur gar stark von (dar das pulur da mit netzet […]
TRANSLATION
‘Take as much camphor as you want and lay it in an old cucurbit (7), and put brandywine therein and put an alembic on it, and burn that off. What comes out of the alembic enriches your powder to full strength when you wet the powder with it.’
What camphor really added to the powder’s potency I couldn’t say, although it has been used in the production of more modern smokeless powders and people in medieval Europe seem to have valued it quite highly, as this and other texts attest.
I think it would be quite possible to read about camphor in gunpowder and not realise how odd it really is. To get the full force you have to think about the journey the camphor would have taken. So picture this (8):
Deep in a North Sumatran forest a Batak guide leads a small party of Malays from the coast to a grove of camphor trees. A tree is cut down and sacrifices are made to placate associated spirits and deities — perhaps even sacrifices of human beings. Everyone would have been on edge; procuring camphor was famously hazardous, and camphor trees were believed to have been protected by ferocious animals.
The wood is cut and sawn into chunks for ease of transport, and these chunks are brought to Barus on foot. Merchants based in the ports buy the stuff from the hill-dwellers and take it with them in their ships, alongside other similar forest products like benzoin and damar. The ships’ captains would wait for the monsoon winds — a merchant would probably want to stay in Barus until January or so for the winds and currents to be favourable for the journey west to India and the Middle East.
The camphor could be traded and transshipped at any number of ports between Barus and Cairo, including Kochi, Kozhikode (Calicut), Khambhat (Cambay), and Aden. From Cairo a short overland voyage takes the stuff to Alexandria, where European or Egyptian merchants buy it and ship it across the Mediterranean to Venice or another port in southern Europe.
From there it is bought and taken overland to Swabia or Bavaria. An enterprising alchemist puts the refined camphor in a glass vessel where it is boiled with brandy. The resulting potion is mixed with gunpowder before finally ending up in the chamber of a newfangled serpentine handgun. It is then burned up in the process of shooting an armoured enemy to death.
NOTES
(1) See Donkin 1999 for more on camphor. More species produce camphor than merely the three I mention — e.g. the roots of Blumea balsamifera have historically been processed for camphor and borneol as well, albeit probably after the Indonesian Dryobalanops camphor industry was already well-developed.
(2) Indonesian camphor was preferred to the Chinese type by some Middle Eastern commentators because it was less volatile. Apparently Chinese camphor had a tendency to evaporate.
(3) See also my earlier post on Barus in a fourteenth-century Egyptian text.
(4) The form there is taken from the oldest Polo manuscript, written c.1310 — Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 1116, f.77ra.
(5) In Surah al-Insan 76:5. Apparently one Indian botanist thinks this isn’t likely because camphor is supposedly toxic, and why would one drink something with camphor in it if it’s toxic, as the Qur’an supposedly suggests? Camphor isn’t so toxic, though, and it has been used in food and drink in the past (in India, even). Until recently nobody doubted that the reference was to camphor.
(6) The text is rather tricky and the hand isn’t particularly clear. As ever, I’m an amateur at this; I haven’t studied German intensively since my A-levels and my knowledge of Middle/Early New High German comes mostly from Joseph Wright’s 1898 Primer, which focuses on rather different sorts of texts. Still, I think I’ve got the general idea.
(7) A term of art — the ‘cucurbit’ (from the Latin for ‘melon’) was part of an alembic, a glass apparatus used for distilling liquids. The word ‘alembic’ is from Greek by way of Arabic. See Figure 5.
(8) I’m relying on Donkin (1999) here again for the description of camphor production. Donkin himself relied on ethnographic descriptions from later times.
REFERENCES
Donkin, R. A. 1999. Dragon’s brain perfume. Leiden: Brill.
Drakard, Jane. 1990. A Malay frontier. Unity and duality in a Sumatran kingdom. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications.
Subbarayalu, Y. 2012. South India under the Cholas. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
I have a Ko-Fi account, in case you’re interested in showing your appreciation for this and other Medium stories: https://ko-fi.com/P5P6HTBI
A. J. West, December 2019
