At this point, it’s fairly common knowledge that the content of your average kitchen cupboard would inspire near-fatal fits of envy in the people of the past. Tea, sugar, vanilla, pepper, salt — these are commodities that people fought, died, and were enslaved to procure.
But perhaps none developed so extensive and ancient a mythology as cinnamon. An aromatic bark obtained from several species in the laurel family, cinnamon was prized for thousands of years. This desire extended outside of its normal range, and long, complex trade routes developed to get cinnamon to consumers.
The massive and terrible cinnamon bird, the nets which hang over the end of the earth, protective winged serpents: For millennia, these were the sorts of beliefs that cinnamon’s mysterious manufacture inspired. It wasn’t an accident, but a deliberate thousand-year deception.
Cinnamon is obtained from the inner bark and sticks of Cinnamomum trees. It’s been an important and popular trade good for at least 4,000 years. People just really enjoy when things smell nice. Photo: Public Domain
The spice of life
Ancient Greeks and later Romans imported a great deal of cinnamon, but not for use in their cooking. It doesn’t appear very frequently in classical recipes, but it did appear frequently at funerals.
Sulla, the infamous general of the late Republic, had a lavish state funeral with statues of himself carved out of cinnamon. Emperor Nero is recorded to have burned a year’s supply of Rome’s cinnamon at the funeral of his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, as a show of grief. He reportedly kicked her to death.
It’s not clear how much exactly a year’s supply was. But considering that a Roman pound of cinnamon was worth four years of wages for the average laborer, it must have been an expensive funeral.
The other major use for cinnamon was in medicine. Romans in gastrointestinal distress reached for cinnamon. (And let’s be honest, in a pre-handwashing, unrefrigerated world, you were probably always in gastrointestinal distress.) It was also prized in perfumes and to flavor wine.
So the people of the ancient Mediterranean imported a lot of cinnamon. They bought it from merchants living on the Arabian Peninsula, who charged a premium for their valuable spices. The Greeks and Romans who paid dearly for boatloads of dried leaves and sticks put a great deal of thought into where the Arabian traders got their wonderful leaves and sticks. But for many centuries, they remained in the dark.
This painting of Nero and Poppea admiring the decapitated head of Nero’s first wife sums up their general reputation. Photo: ‘Revenge of Poppea’, Giovanni Muzzioli, 1876
The Cinnamon Bird of Herodotus
Herodotus, the 5th century BCE Greek historian and travel writer, wrote detailed and completely incorrect accounts of how spices were gathered in Arabia. To gather frankincense, they had to burn a kind of gum which produced acrid smoke. The smoke drove off the multicolored winged snakes that he claimed guarded frankincense trees.
There were two types of cinnamon, and both required bravery and skill to acquire. The first, called cassia, grew in a shallow lake guarded by fierce bat-like beasts. Arabian cassia-pickers covered themselves in oxhide armor and fought through the creatures to reach the plants.
The other cinnamon, called, well, cinnamon, presented even stranger challenges. Even the people of Arabia, Herodotus claimed, weren’t sure where cinnamon came from. They believed it might have been “where Dionysus was reared.” While several more well known tales have Dionysus spending his youth in India, he was in general an outsider diety who came from abroad. So the place where he was reared may have been a poetic way to say an unknown, faraway land.
Wherever the cinnamon came from originally, the rumor was that it was brought to Arabia by giant birds. The birds used these cinnamon sticks to build their nests, high up on inaccessible peaks. To get the sticks, Arabians brought offerings of dead cattle, donkeys, and oxen to the base of the mountain.
The birds flew down, picked up the meat and dropped it in their nests, which promptly collapsed from the weight. Once the nests fell to the ground, cinnamon-gatherers could pick up the sticks.
Did Herodotus think the cinnamon bird story was real? Hard to say. The father of history was interested in telling a good story first and foremost. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Aristotle and crew agree
“That seems right,” said fellow classical authors, hearing about the cinnamon bird.
In Aristotle’s History of Animals, he lists the cinnamon bird alongside real animals like storks and sparrows. His account agrees with that of Herodotus, except on how the spice traders get the nests down. He proposes that they attach heavy lead weights to their arrows and then shoot at the nests, knocking them down.
The 2nd century CE historian Claudius Aelianus wrote an entire book listing animals he knew about, because publishing was easier back then. In it, he mentions the cinnamon bird twice, citing Herodotus, Aristotle and “others.”.According to Aelianus, more commonly called Aelian, the existence of the cinnamon bird is “certain and beyond dispute.”
He goes with Aristotle’s version of extraction — lead weighted arrows — but instead of coming from Arabia, he claims that the cinnamon bird lives in India. Gaius Julius Solinus, writing in the early 3rd century, gives us the same story, but he places the bird back in Arabia, and claims they build their nests in very tall trees, rather than cliff faces.
Due to medieval art scale issues, illustrations usually end up looking like the fierce cinnamon beast is a normal bird in a small tree being harassed for no reason. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Digitized Manuscripts
Pliny the Elder weighs in
Anyone even passingly familiar with Pliny the Elder will be surprised to hear he is a voice of reasonable skepticism in this case. Pliny was a 1st century CE Roman author, known for writing the earliest surviving encyclopedia and for being the most famous person to die in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
His 37-volume encyclopedia, Natural History, is an ambitious, genuinely groundbreaking work. At the same time, it’s full of blatantly ridiculous assertions, sometimes uncritical repetition of unreliable sources, and outright comical medical treatments. None of these things are unique to Pliny, but he is particularly notorious for them.
Pliny, who reported that snakes came from the spinal marrow of a human being, thought the cinnamon bird was too much of a stretch. He described several of the legends detailed above, and then dismissed them all. Surprisingly cannily, he said that “these tales [had been] invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities.”
In reality, he went on to say, cinnamon is grown in Ethiopia. There were also, he recorded, 180-foot-long serpents in Ethiopia. So you can’t blame later authors for not taking his word on what was and was not grown in Ethiopia.
Pliny’s Natural History remained popular for many centuries after his death. This illustration, from a manuscript produced around 1470, shows the monstrous peoples of foreign lands. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum
The Cinnamolgus of medieval bestiaries
Cinnamon birds were a common staple of medieval bestiaries, alongside more familiar beasts like unicorns and mermaids, and even stranger ones like Blemmyae and Sciapods.
In their medieval form, the cinnamon bird largely followed the description given by Solinus. The name medieval writers gave to the creature was the “cinnamolgus.” The entry from the 1230 CE Rochester bestiary describes it as an Arabian bird which “weaves its nests on very tall trees, from the fruits of the cinnamon tree.”
Authors never described the bird physically, and illustrations showed a fairly generic looking bird of varying coloration. What was important was what it represented: the value of, and difficulty in acquiring, cinnamon. Our friend, the stick that smells good, was still in high demand as the centuries wore on.
Across medieval Europe, cinnamon was immensely popular both as an aromatic and a cooking ingredient. It also played a role in medicine. According to the humoral system, it was warm and dry, making it good for digestive complaints. In an era where people thought bad smells could cause disease, the strong, pleasant smelling cinnamon could ward off sickness.
A string of middle men from Asia, to the Arabian peninsula, to Venice and from there, to the rest of Europe, became rich off cinnamon and other spices. Its legendary origin myth drove up prices and scared off would-be competitors. But not forever.
This cinnamalogus doesn’t really look fierce, but she does look mad, which is at least something. I also like the jaunty hip tilt on our cinnamon-gatherer. Photo: Bibliothèque Municipale De Douai
The secret revealed
For Europeans, the world had grown slightly more familiar since the time of Herodotus. The Crusades, the Silk Road, and a growing interest in trade and exploration made the distant fantastical lands of their ancestors real, visitable places.
Still, when the chronicler Jean de Joinville visited Egypt during the Seventh Crusade and asked about cinnamon, he got strange answers. At the edge of the world, the Nile’s source, cinnamon was fished up using nets. That was in 1248.
In 1292, John of Montecorvino, an Italian missionary, sent a letter back from his voyage to India. In it, he described how cinnamon came from a tree which was grown in Sri Lanka. From there, it was carried not by a mythical bird but by Indonesian rafts. Cinnamon rafts landed in East Africa. From there, the spice worked its way, through middle men all tacking on fees, to Venice.
But the rise of new Mediterranean powers disrupted the flow of spices. When the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, it kicked off a race to find another route to Asia and the spices therein.
This article could have been the lighthearted prologue to a book called Europe Pillages the World in a Relentless Quest for Spices. Maybe ancient Arabian traders had the right idea about keeping cinnamon’s origin secret.
