Mondo Knows Facts
Cinnamon reached Rome through middlemen
Roman cooks burned it in perfume and medicine without knowing the tree Cinnamon was sold in Rome as a perfume, incense and medicine, and Pliny complained that its price was inflated many times over. Arab traders kept the source secret and told fantastic stories about giant birds and flooded lakes. The tree was later found in Sri Lanka, and the Portuguese, Dutch and British each fought for control of the trade. It sits in Mondo's food collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: cinnamon, rome, trade
Cinnamon reached Rome through middlemen: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Roman cooks burned it in perfume and medicine without knowing the tree. The figure is taken from The Food Timeline, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a food fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Food shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.