Juniper: From Medicine to Poison and Back Again in 17th-Century Muscovy

Abstract

JuniperFrom Medicine to Poison and Back Again in 17th-Century Muscovy Rachel Koroloff (bio) Early modern Russians were well aware of the natural world that surrounded them. They knew that plants, minerals, and animals had value, were abundant in their own realm, and could be traded domestically and exported internationally to generate profit. Imports like tobacco, exports like fur, and transport goods like rhubarb were all natural resources that early modern Russians sought to control. But how did Russians in the 17th and 18th centuries go about doing this? How did they come to know the natural world, and what ultimately did they make of it? This article attempts to answer these questions by focusing on the tree known as juniper, an evergreen that grows widely throughout the northern hemisphere. In the 17th and 18th centuries juniper was so abundant it was hardly worth cultivating or exporting, but so valuable a medicine was it that an entire state apparatus, that of the juniper obligation (mozhzhevel´ovaia povinnost´) sprang up to secure great quantities of it for Moscow’s medical community. This essay traces the collection, processing, distribution, and use of common juniper or Juniperus communis to illustrate the infrastructures that gave Muscovite officials and their Western doctors a steady supply of the important plant. The comparison in the second half of the essay between common juniper and its close relative, savin or Juniperus sabina, suggests one of the more intangible ways in which those infrastructures influenced Muscovite knowledge of the plant world. Ultimately a somewhat liminal object, juniper was one of many plants that comfortably inhabited both sides of the boundaries that Muscovites routinely drew between magic, [End Page 697] medicine, and poison. From collection, processing, and distribution to use and belief, juniper in its many forms helps uncover some of the ways that Russians came to know the natural world in the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus in recent years on the natural world in early modern Russian history has resulted in new work looking at nature across the Muscovite and imperial periods using a largely top-down, market-centered approach. The most prominent among these works demonstrate just how thoroughly Muscovites understood the natural world in distinctly mercantilistic terms, an attitude exemplified by state monopolies on such natural resources as potash, caviar, and rhubarb and quasi-monopolistic state control over the fur and tobacco trades.1 From the 17th century on, it was becoming increasingly clear to some that the products of the forest and the field constituted a deep well of resources that if properly tapped could free the Muscovite state from specie-draining imports. Domestic production if suitably robust would result in an increasingly favorable balance of trade and ultimately the greater integration of Russia into the wider global economy.2 It was in this spirit that Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, for instance, explored establishing domestic silk manufacture along the southern Volga River—importing mulberry trees, silk worms, and silk “masters” from across the Caspian Sea.3 Medicinal plants were also considered valuable resources, and as Matthew Romaniello has demonstrated with rhubarb, doctors and naturalists in Russian employ were sent to investigate medicines as fair afield as China in what was “not a disinterested pursuit but rather Russian ‘bioprospecting,’ a search for materia medica that could become valuable commodities.”4 In addition to this literature putting “nature” into a mostly economic framework, another recent body of literature sheds a great deal of light on [End Page 698] Muscovy and the natural world by detailing instead how various aspects of nature served as symbols of divine order and acted as repositories for popular belief and folk traditions. Valerie Kivelson’s studies of maps, religious imagery, and witchcraft trials are perhaps the best example of this approach.5 Equally important, however, is the recent work of Russian- and German-speaking historians who, using a combination of techniques from linguistics, folklore, and anthropology reanimate the dynamic and meaningful associations early modern Russians derived from the natural world that surrounded them.6 All these studies have opened and enriched the discussion of the natural world in early modern Russia by starting with the economic and the cultural systems that...