Diffusion of Mesoamerican Food Complex to Southeastern Europe

Abstract

THE Columbian quincentennial celebration has brought an intensified interest in the related diffusion of ideas, adaptive strategies, material culture, and domesticated plants of the New World. One crucial element that achieved a widened distribution as a result of the post-Columbian exchange was the traditional Mesoamerican food complex of maize, beans, squash, and peppers (Capsicum), to which the turkey might be added. Oddly, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, especially Anatolia, rather than Iberia became a center of diversity for squashes, pumpkins, popcorn, and possibly other American crops, which presents the puzzling Anatolian mystery (Anderson 1958). My own work, focused on the spread of the five domesticated capsicums--Capsicum annuum var. annuum Linne, Capsicum chinense Jacquin, Capsicum frutescens Linne, Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pavon, and Capsicum baccatum pendulum (Willdenow) Eshbaugh--suggests that peppers diffused as part of this complex, that the spread to the Old World was far more complicated than is usually assumed, and that the circuitous routes by which the complex reached Anatolia and southeastern Europe largely bypassed the western Mediterranean. My findings also suggest, improbably, that the Portuguese and Turks were far more influential than the Spaniards in the diffusion of the Mesoamerican plant complex, even though the source lay in the Spanish colonies and the complex was discovered by Columbus on several voyages, probably including the first. I was led to these conclusions by the initially troubling fact that the prevalent pepper brought to their Atlantic islands and India by the Portuguese was the Mexican-derived C. annuum var. annuum rather than the South American-West Indian-Brazilian C. chinense, popularly called aji. What is generally agreed is that the diffusion of Capsicum and the related complex occurred with great rapidity. Their spread to Africa and Asia occurred in such a short time that centuries later Europeans thought they had originated in the Orient. Nicholas J. Jacquin in 1776 named a new Capsicum species chinense because he thought it had originated in the Orient. In 1542 the first European illustrations of peppers were published in a German herbal. Such books listed plants and their medical properties and were written for the most part by medical doctors. The herbal by Leonhart Fuchs (1543) proves that peppers were known in central Europe no more than a half-century after the first Columbian voyage. All appear to be the Mesoamerican C. annuum var. annuum, which implies an even more rapid diffusion that almost certainly began before the conquest of Mexico by Cortes between 1519 and 1521. Moreover, though published in 1542, the herbal may have been written as early as 1538, which allows less than two decades for the diffusion from Mexico (Sauer 1969, 148). The herbal included illustrations and descriptions of the Mesoamerican squash, beans, and maize. PRE-COLUMBIAN DIFFUSION AND COLUMBIAN DISCOVERY This troubling narrow time frame rests on false assumptions concerning the pre-Columbian distribution of C. annuum var. annuum. I propose that Columbus encountered the plant perhaps several times. On New Year's Day 1493, near Navidad, Espanola, he recorded a momentous circumstance in his journal: the pepper that the natives used as spice was more abundant and valuable than either black pepper or melegueta (grains of paradise) peppers. The three peppers have no botanical relationship with one another. Melegueta pepper, of the ginger family, is native to Guinea, Africa, and was known in Venice during the thirteenth century as a less expensive substitute for black pepper, which is of Indian origin. Melegueta was also known as Guinea or ginnie pepper. Soon after the Columbian discovery, several American chillies of the cayenne type became established in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea and were likewise called ginnie pepper, while in the Brazilian colonies tiny local capsicums were referred to as malaguetas by the African slaves transported from Guinea. …