History of Herbs :: Middle Ages
“Dark Age for Herbal Healing”
With the conversion of the last Roman emperors, European medical theory and practice fell under the dominance of the Holy
Roman Catholic Church. The borders of this new Roman Empire had been severely curtailed by invading armies and peasant
revolts, but over the next thousand years, the dominance of Rome would once again be felt. New diseases and deadly plagues
would befall Europe during this period, as the Church returned to the ancient Greek doctrine that viewed illness as a divine
curse The Church vilified the village wiseperson as a charlatan and later a witch and directed the stricken to pray and do
penance in order to be healed. All the while, their own monastic orders grew physic gardens, explored the healing qualities
of herbs and preserved and copied the herbal texts of Greece and Rome.
In 812 CE, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlamagne issued an edict that declared that all towns and monasteries should grow vegetables, medicinal plants, flowers and trees in the style of the Benedictine order. The Benedictine monks had been quick to adopt the Arab practice of distillation and were adept at making wine flavored with digestion aiding herbs. The Benedictines also designed a healing monastery that contained an infirmary, bath, examining room and a blood letting room. In their plan, they included two separate 1,000 square foot gardens, one for healing herbs such as fenugreek, rose, rue, sage and savory and the other for cooking herbs and vegetables.
The herbs that had to be cultivated north of the Alps were naturally occurring in the Mediterranean region. In the tenth century, a medical school that merged the teachings of classical physicians and Arab physicians was founded in Salerno, Italy. The most well known teacher to emerge from this school was Constantine of Carthage (Constantinius Africanus) who painstakingly translated Arab herbal treatises while teaching the preparation contained therein. The School of Salerno flourished for approximately 250 years and became the model for other universities in the region. Antidotarium Salernitanum was written by Nicolaus Praepositus, a teacher at the school in 1125, but it was Regimen Sanitatis Saleritanum (Regimen of Health), a comprehensive doctrine of plant uses and daily hygiene that made the school famous. Above the Alps, many of the recommended plants had to be substituted with regional variations or the original plants had to be imported and cultivated in gardens.
In Northern Europe, the Germanic Angles and Saxons wished to expand their domain and invaded the British Isles. There they found the Celts and Druids who were already practicing their own brand of herbalism. Though their repertoire included many plants, trees and flowers, the Druids held seven to be sacred: clover, henbane, mistletoe, monkshood, pasqueflower, primrose and vervain. When Christianity arrived on the Isles in the 6th century, missionaries found established medical schools such as the one in Myddfai, Wales. As they were directed to by Rome, monks built monasteries and convents that included their own healing rooms and herbal gardens. They brought with them the classic herbals, copied down indigenous herbal preparations, and stored them in the libraries of their monasteries. Around 950 CE, a court noble named Bald persuaded Alfred, King of Wessex, to commission the translation of all stored herbals and the creation of the first British herbal. The Leech Book of Bald (leech derives from laece meaning “doctor”) included Greco-Roman, Arabic, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic herbal knowledge and discussed the use of 500 curative plants.
In the 12th century, we find the first herbal documentation by a female. Hildegard of Bingen was the abbess of the Rupertsburg convent in western Germany; she was also a writer, musical composer, counselor, administrator, gardener and herbal healer. At a time when monks merely recopied ancient herbals, Hildegard compiled her own folk knowledge and subsequent healing experience into complete treatises. Physica and Causae et Curae contain daily hygiene advice as well as herbal preparations and they are the first books to contain the German names of herbs alongside the Latin names, which made identification much easier for the largely uneducated populous.
Hildegard relied on simples, knowing that the peasantry could not afford the exotic ingredients necessary to prepare the galencials prepared by medieval alchemists for Europe’s noble class. As a Benedictine nun, Hildegard had made a commitment to the Christian God, it was this God that she claimed had visited her in a vision and instructed her to heal the sick and gather her herbal remedies into a book. Had Hildegard lived just two centuries later, she may have been executed in the Witchcraft hysteria that swept across Europe. As it stands, her herbals are the only first hand accounts we have to attest to the wisdom of Europe’s tradition of wise women as healers.
The evolution of herbal healing over the next few centuries was severely retarded, the Crusades, Witchcraft hysteria and a return to philosophical diagnosis impeded medical research. The Church’s stated reason in waging the Crusades was to free the Holy Land, specifically Jerusalem, but a secondary purpose may have been to regain control of the spice trade, which now lay in Muslim hands. Sine 1095, the Crusades against the Islamic armies decimated Europe’s male population. Men were away on campaigns for years, even decades, while their wives remained home and childless. By the end of the Crusades in 1291, Europe’s population had been cut in half. The population decline alarmed the Church so they outlawed the use of contraceptives that were supplied by the village wiseperson. The images of sage healer transformed into one of evil conspirator. Scholastically, academics returned to the philosophy of Pliny the Elder and Galen and intentionally avoided direct examination of the afflicted.
In 1271, Marco Polo, his father and grandfather set out from Venice to Chine. When Polo returned in 1295, his account of his journey and his tenure in the court of Kubla Khan was filled with mouthwatering details of Asia’s spices. Europe’s appetite for exotic spices had been wetted by the herbs brought back by returning Crusaders and now, with Polo’s accounts, traders were in a frenzy. The routes began to reopen in 1300 CE, with the largest ports of import being Venice and Genoa. For 100 years, black pepper and ginger flowed in Europe but in 1400 the Mongols lost control of the trade routes to the Turkish Ottoman Empire who put a strangle hold on Europe’s supply.
One man who made a name for himself during this dark period of medical learning was Albertus Magnus (1200 – 1280). As Bishop of Regensburg he penned six treatises on herbal healing. In the early part of the 1300’s Simon of Genoa and Mattaeus Sylvaticus compared the Arabic and Greek names of plants and reconciled them with their Latin equivalents, providing herbalists with one, universal identifying name.
Though the early part of the Middle Ages is known as the Dark Ages, it is the latter part of the period when we see strangulation in medical advancement. With village healers working under fear of persecution as witches for nearly 350 years, many folk remedies were lost or went underground. Academics turned to philosophy to explain disease and the Church looked to God to remove the curse of illness. Tendencies toward polypharmacy, or galencials, among the upper class demanded that new sources of spices be found once the Turks closed the old trade routes and so the Age of Exploration began.
Continue to History of Herbs :: Age of Exploration
