ABSTRACT
This is the story of how nux vomica reached the west. The centuries following the fall of Rome have often been dismissed as the “Dark Ages,” but across the globe trade between peoples continued. Even when Venice and other Mediterranean cities rose to prominence at the end of the Middle Ages, sea trade was by no means confined to ships going to and from western Europe. Marco Polo (not always reliable) claimed that for every load of pepper travelling to Christendom, a hundred such, “Aye, and more too,” travelled to the port of Zaytoun (Tsüan-chow) in China. During these long centuries, the Arabs controlled the main trade routes by which drugs, spices and all other kinds of goods reached the West, either overland through Egypt or through the Red Sea and so on to Salerno in the south of the Italian peninsula and thus to Venice, where in due course “Marvelous palaces rose beside green canals”1 as a result of the trade in exotic drugs.
