252 i Flora Unveiled
All told, the Middle Ages lasted approximately a thousand years, ending definitively with
the defeat of a tottering Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Even before its
demise, early Renaissance scholars like Petrarch already were referring to it as the “Dark
Ages” because of its domination by religion. This view is now regarded as incomplete, if not
obsolete. Far from being a mere place- holder between the Classical and Renaissance peri-
ods, the Middle Ages transformed human society in fundamental ways that set the stage for
the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. The period is usually divided into three main
phases: the Early Middle Ages (500 ad– 1000 ad), the High Middle Ages (1000 ad– 1299
ad), and the Late Middle Ages (1300– 1453), with the latter, in some regions, overlappping
the Early Renaissance.
In this chapter, our focus will be on the Early Middle Ages, a formative period during
which the three dominant monotheistic faiths— Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, and
Islam— vied for hegemony and borrowed freely from one another and from paganism to
enhance their mass appeal. Sometimes called the “Age of Faith,” the Early Middle Ages
was not a favorable period for rationalistic philosophy. Neoplatonism, with its emphasis on
otherworldliness, submerged Aristotelian empiricism, while in art, iconography and sym-
bol replaced naturalism. Nowhere are these trends more apparent than in the decline of the
medieval herbal from practical field guide to decorative status symbol.
The Early Greek HerbalsThe Greek pharmacopoeia had been compiled largely from more ancient traditions, includ-
ing Minoan, Egyptian, Babylonian, and other sources. By the time Theophrastus began
teaching at the Lyceum around 335 bc, Greek pharmacological knowledge had already been
gathered and systematized by his contemporary, the Athenian physician Diocles. Diocles
wrote two medically oriented works on plants, one dealing with their nutritional value and
the other describing their medicinal properties. The latter was titled Rhizotomikon, from
the term rhizotomist, or “root- cutter”— referring to mostly illiterate men and women who
made their living by collecting medicinal plants. Theophrastus, who regarded Diocles as the
pre- eminent authority on pharmacology, quoted him extensively in Book IX of his Historia
Plantarum. Book IX is sometimes referred to as the oldest extant Greek herbal.^1 Many of
Diocles’s plant descriptions were incorporated into other herbals during the Roman period.
With the death of Theophrastus in 287 bce, theoretical botany, the study of plants as
organisms, came to an end in the classical world. However, Greek physicians continued
to distinguish themselves in pharmacology, an applied branch of botany. One of the most
important of these was Krateuas, the court physician to King Mithradates VI of Asia Minor,
who was himself a skilled herbalist legendary for his knowledge of poisons.^2 Krateuas
authored two works that had long- lasting influence on the history of herbals. The first was a
treatise on medicinal plants (Rhizotomikon), which was designed for practicing physicians.
Many features of Krateuas’s Rhizotomikon were retained in the herbals of the Middle Ages,
including the alphabetical arrangement of the plants. a written description of each plant’s
appearance, a list of synonyms, and an account of each plant’s medical uses. Although the
text of Krateuas’s Rhizotomikon has been lost, it was likely derived from Diocles’s book
by the same name. Later, it served as the primary source of the herbal of Sextius Niger, a