Rhodon, Rosa Gallica, Al-Ward

Abstract

From the 4th to 8th centuries, unusually cold weather was correlated with cataclysmic events such as the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, leading to the dark ages in Europe, the transfer of the center Roman culture to Constantinople, and the rise of Islam. Finally a warming trend in the 8th century was coincident with an intellectual blossoming under Charlemagne in western Europe, in Byzantium, and by Islamic scholars in the Middle East. The Materia Medica of Dioscorides, Greco-Roman military physician of the 1st century, was an herbal-an illustrated manuscript describing medically useful plants. Learned men in Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic lands, increasingly used the styles of their civilizations in copying these manuscripts as illustration grew more and more stylized and errors crept in as the works were more divorced from the direct study of nature.