Cinnamon in Medieval Europe
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
Cinnamon is a tricky spice. Other well-known spices in the Middle Ages were produced by a single plant species — black pepper (Piper nigrum), for example, or cumin (Cuminum cyminum) — and the origins of certain others can be narrowed down to specific regions or islands. The fragrant resin known as mastic came from trees of the species Pistacia lentiscus which grew almost exclusively on the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea; cloves were harvested on only five small islands in Maluku in what is now eastern Indonesia. Whenever we see references to cloves or mastic, we are seeing indirect references to the harvesting of plants in and trade out of Chios and Maluku.
Cinnamon isn’t like this. Cinnamon, the spice, is made from the dried bark of certain trees, most of them in the genus Cinnamomum, but these trees are different species growing in different places. (And this is before we get onto the topic of American cinnamons, like Ocotea quixos, which are also referred to as ‘cinnamon’ in early modern texts.) These cinnamon varieties are seldom distinguished precisely in medieval texts, whether European, African, or Asian, and most names for cinnamon are generic or poorly defined.
In medieval Latin and in medieval European texts in vernacular languages cinnamon went by three common names, all with significant variations in spelling (I’m sticking with Europe here to keep things simple):
1) Cinnamon, from Greek κιννάμωμον, possibly meaning ‘Chinese Amomum’ (where amomum/ἄμωμον = black cardamom) and likely related to similar words in Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic;
2) Cassia, ultimately from an Aramaic word, קצע qṣa, meaning ‘to cut’ (as in, bark which has been cut from a tree); and
3) Canela, a medieval diminutive of Latin canna ‘reed’, after the tube-like shape of whole cinnamon sticks (which are in truth rolls or quills of cinnamon tree bark).
These names do not correspond to specific cinnamon varietals. Some texts distinguish between them, some equate them, and others use them differently but without clearly defining what each is supposed to mean. The key point here is that a reference to cinnamon, canela, or cassia in a medieval text can usually be interpreted as a reference to any sort of cinnamon and not to a specific type. Modern European languages tend to use one or other of these names for all varieties of cinnamon — #3 in the case of French, Spanish, and Portuguese (cannelle, canela), for example, and #1 in the case of English and German (Zimt). The word ‘cassia’ isn’t used so much these days; when it is it tends to refer specifically to Chinese cinnamon, Cinnamomum cassia.
In medieval herbals, cookbooks, and medical treatises one can often find two or more of these words in quick succession, and in some texts cinnamon and canela are explicitly equated, as in the Danish canon Henrik Harpestræng’s late-thirteenth-century adaptation of the Libellus de Arte Coquinaria, which I looked at on the Medieval Indonesia blog a while ago (Figure 1).
In medieval European texts, then, we find three overlapping ‘cinnamon’ names. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were only one species of cinnamon — there were, after all, several words for ‘clove’ in medieval Europe — but in fact there were several cinnamon tree species. As mentioned above, most of these are in the genus Cinnamomum, which also incidentally includes C. camphora, the Chinese camphor tree, and they all grow and grew in different parts of the world, most of them somewhere between India and southern China.
Sorts of Cinnamon
‘True’ cinnamon is Cinnamomum verum, which produces delicate sheets of light-brown bark with an excellent fragrance, usually sold in quills made up of several layers of bark (Figure 2). C. verum comes from Sri Lanka, still its primary producer. It was certainly widely traded across Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages and it was probably the usual referent of the Classical Greek word κιννάμωμον — although even that is uncertain, as the earliest Greek descriptions of cinnamon (e.g. Herodotus, Histories 3:110; Aristotle, History of Animals 9:13) may suggest a different plant entirely, one outside the genus Cinnamomum (and perhaps a plant of African rather than Asian origin).
At least two species of scented cinnamon trees from China (Cinnamomum cassia) and Vietnam (C. loureiroi, so-called ‘Saigon’ cinnamon) also have long histories of trade and consumption across Afro-Eurasia. One cinnamon species, C. burmannii, grew and still grows in Sumatra in what is now Indonesia; it makes up a significant proportion of the spice traded globally under the name ‘cinnamon’ today. (Some sources even say that most of the ‘cinnamon’ consumed in the Western world today comes from Indonesian C. burmannii trees.) These sorts of cinnamon — Chinese, Saigon, and Sumatran — are usually sold in single-layer quills, as the bark isn’t quite as slender as that of C. verum, although the oil content of the bark is similar and the flavour not necessarily weaker or worse. When ground up into fine powder, these cinnamons are not easily distinguished. In the Middle Ages, it appears that cinnamon was traded as either quill or powder.
Mentions of Cinnamon
The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between cinnamon-producing species and names for cinnamon in European languages, medieval or otherwise, means that we don’t really know where the cinnamon mentioned in any particular medieval European text came from unless the text explicitly says so. Middle Eastern texts aren’t necessarily much better in this regard. There are more references to cinnamon in medieval European texts than there are references to clove and nutmeg, and they appear earlier, but they are somewhat less exciting than references to those other spices — to me, at least — because they’re so much less precise with regard to both species and geographical origin.
To demonstrate what I mean: Cinnamon is mentioned in the Miller’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Figure 3). The reference to cinnamon tells us of a link to a general trade in Asian spices; the cinnamon so named might have been Sri Lankan, Chinese, Sumatran — we can’t be sure. It may have referred to any or all of these, and is used here, in any case, as a pet name. Chaucer also mentions clove (clowe gylofre) and nutmeg (notemuge) in the Tale of Sir Thopas, elsewhere in the same work. These references connect The Canterbury Tales and its author to specific and identifiable places far away, to small volcanic islands almost off the coast of New Guinea whose inhabitants practised non-Abrahamic religions and captured the severed heads of enemies for use in ritual.
This is why I have devoted so much time and ink to cloves and nutmeg (and other things like them) on this blog and so little time to cinnamon, even though, as you can see above, cinnamon was exported from parts of what is now Indonesia in the Middle Ages. (Cinnamon is also mentioned as an export from Java in several medieval European sources, including Polo’s Travels.) We just can’t be sure if a reference to cinnamon in a text is a reference to Sumatran cinnamon specifically, and thus much less can be extracted from these references from the perspective of the history of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago.
It’s not that these things — clove, nutmeg, camphor — are more exciting because of where they came from (although from my Indonesia-focused point-of-view I suppose they are). They’re more exciting because we can state their origins with some certainty. The medieval cinnamon trade is more amorphous. This is a pity: it would be nice to be able to pinpoint Sumatran cinnamon in the European sources. Instead, we just have to wonder where Chaucer’s cinnamon might have come from.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022. (Posted here 2024.)
