A History of the World in 6 Glasses (8 page)

The advance of Islam into Europe was halted in 732 CE at the Battle of Tours, in central France, where the Arab troops were defeated by Charles Martel, the most charismatic of the princes of the Frankish kingdom that roughly corresponds with modern France. This battle, one of the turning points in world history, marked the high-water mark of Arab influence in Europe. The subsequent crowning of Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE heralded the start of a period of consolidation and eventual reinvigoration of European culture.

The King of Drinks

"Woe is me!" wrote Alcuin, a scholar who was one of Charlemagne's advisers, to a friend during a visit to England in the early ninth century CE. "The wine is gone from our wineskins and bitter beer rages in our bellies. And because we have it not, drink in our name and lead a joyful day." Alcuin's lament illustrates that wine was scarce in England, as it was elsewhere in northern Europe. In these parts, where wine could not be produced locally but had to be imported, beer and mead (and a hybrid drink in which cereal grains were fermented with honey) predominated instead. The distinction between beer in northern Europe and wine in the south persists to this day. Modern European drinking patterns crystallized during the middle of the first millennium and were largely determined by the reach of Greek and Roman influences.

Wine drinking, usually in moderation and with meals, still predominates in the south of Europe, within the former boundaries of the Roman Empire. In the north of Europe beyond the reach of Roman rule, beer drinking, typically without the accompaniment of food, is more common. Today, the world's leading producers of wine are France, Italy, and Spain; and the people of Luxembourg, France, and Italy are the leading consumers of wine, drinking an average of around fifty-five liters per person per year. The countries where the most beer is consumed, in contrast, would mostly have been regarded as barbarian territory by the Romans: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Britain, and Ireland.

Greek and Roman attitudes toward wine, themselves founded on earlier Near Eastern traditions, have survived in other ways, too, and have spread around the world. Wherever alcohol is drunk, wine is regarded as the most civilized and cultured of drinks. In those countries, wine, not beer, is served at state banquets and political summits, an illustration of wine's enduring association with status, power, and wealth.

Wine also provides the greatest scope for connoisseurship and social differentiation. Appreciation of wines from different places began with the Greeks, and the link between the type of wine and the social status of the drinker was strengthened by the Romans. The
symposion
and
convivium
live on in the modern suburban dinner party, where wine fuels an almost ritual discussion of certain topics (politics, business, career advancement, house prices) in a slightly formal atmosphere with particular rules about the order in which food is consumed, the placement of cutlery, and so on. The host is responsible for the choice of wine, and the selection is expected to reflect the importance of the occasion and the social standing of both the host and his guests. It is a scene that a time-traveling Roman would recognize at once.

5

High Spirits, High Seas

One can distill wine using a water-bath, and it comes out like rosewater in color.
—
Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi, Arab scientist and philosopher (c. 801-73 CE), in
The Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations

A
T THE CLOSE of the first millennium AD, the greatest and most cultured city in western Europe was not Rome, Paris, or London. It was Cordoba, the capital of Arab Andalusia, in what is now southern Spain. There were parks, palaces, paved roads, oil lamps to light the streets, seven hundred mosques, three hundred public baths, and extensive drainage and sewage systems. Perhaps most impressive of all was the public library, completed around 970 CE and containing nearly half a million books—more books than any other European library, or indeed most European countries. And it was merely the largest of seventy libraries in the city. No wonder Hroswitha, a tenth-century German chronicler, described Cordoba as "the jewel of the world."

Cordoba was only one of the great centers of learning within the Arab world, a vast dominion that stretched at its height from the Pyrenees in France to the Pamir Mountains in central Asia, and as far south as the Indus Valley in India. At a time when the wisdom of the Greeks had been lost in most of Europe, Arab scholars in Cordoba, Damascus, and Baghdad were building on knowledge from Greek, Indian, and Persian sources to make further advances in such fields as astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. They developed the astrolabe, algebra, and the modern numeral system, pioneered the use of herbs as anesthetics, and devised new navigational techniques based on the magnetic compass (an introduction from China), trigonometry, and nautical maps. Among their many achievements, they also refined and popularized a technique that gave rise to a new range of drinks: distillation.

This process, which involves vaporizing and then recondens-ing a liquid in order to separate and purify its constituent parts, has ancient origins. Simple distillation equipment dating back to the fourth millennium BCE has been found in northern Mesopotamia, where, judging from later cuneiform inscriptions, it was used to make perfumes. The Greeks and Romans were also familiar with the technique; Aristotle, for example, noted that the vapor condensed from boiling salt water was not salty. But it was only later, starting in the Arab world, that distillation was routinely applied to wine, notably by the eighth-century Arab scholar Jabir ibn Hayyan, who is remembered as one of the fathers of chemistry. He devised an improved form of distillation apparatus, or still, with which he and other Arab al chemists distilled wine and other substances for use in their experiments.

Distilling wine makes it much stronger, because the boiling point of alcohol (seventy-eight degrees centigrade) is lower than that of water (one hundred degrees centigrade). As the wine is slowly heated, vapor begins to rise from its surface long before the liquid starts to boil. Due to alcohol's lower boiling point, this vapor contains proportionately more alcohol and less water than the original liquid. Drawing off and condensing this alcohol-rich vapor produces a liquid with a far higher alcohol content than wine, though it is far from being pure alcohol, since some water and other impurities evaporate even at temperatures below one hundred degrees. However, the alcohol content can be increased by repeated redistillation, also known as rectification.

Knowledge of distillation was one of many aspects of the ancient wisdom that was preserved and extended by Arab scholars and, having been translated from Arabic into Latin, helped to rekindle the spirit of learning in western Europe. The word
alembic,
which refers to a type of still, encapsulates this combination of ancient knowledge and Arab innovation. It is derived from the Arabic
al-ambiq,
descended in turn from the Greek word
ambix,
which refers to the specially shaped vase used in distillation. Similarly, the modern word
alcohol
illuminates the origins of distilled alcoholic drinks in the laboratories of Arab alchemists. It is descended from
al-koh'l,
the name given to the black powder of purified antimony, which was used as a cosmetic, to paint or stain the eyelids. The term was used more generally by alchemists to refer to other highly purified substances, including liquids, so that distilled wine later came to be known in English as "alcohol of wine."

Distillation equipment in a medieval laboratory. The production of spirits began as an obscure alchemical technique known only to a select few.

A Miracle Cure?

On a winter night in 1386 the royal doctors were summoned to the bedchamber of Charles II of Navarre, the ruler of a small kingdom in what is now northern Spain. The king was known as "Charles the Bad," a nickname he earned early in his reign when he suppressed a revolt with particular cruelty and ferocity. His favorite pastime was plotting against his father-in-law, the king of France. Now, after a night of debauchery, Charles had been struck down by fever and paralysis. His doctors decided to administer a medicine reputed to have miraculous healing powers, and made using an almost magical process: the distillation of wine.

One of the first Europeans to experiment with this novel process was the twelfth-century Italian alchemist Michael Saler-nus, who learned of it from Arab texts. "A mixture of pure and very strong wine with three parts salt, distilled in the usual vessel, produces a liquid which will flame up when set on fire," he wrote. Evidently, this process was known only to a select few at the time, since Salernus wrote several of the key words of this sentence (including
wine
and
salt)
in secret code. Since distilled wine could be set on fire, it was called
aqua ardens,
which means "burning water."

Of course, burning also described the unpleasant sensation produced in the throat after swallowing distilled wine. Yet those who tried drinking small quantities of
aqua ardens
found that this initial discomfort, sometimes disguised using herbs, was far outweighed by the sensation of invigoration and well-being that swiftly followed. Wine was widely used as a medicine, so it seemed only logical that concentrated and purified wine should have even greater healing powers. By the late thirteenth century, as universities and medical schools were flowering throughout Europe, distilled wine was being acclaimed in Latin medical treatises as a miraculous new medicine, aqua vitae, or "water of life."

One firm believer in the therapeutic power of distilled wine was Arnald of Villanova, a professor at the French medical school of Montpellier, who produced instructions for distilling wine around 1300. "The true water of life will come over in precious drops, which, being rectified by three or four successive distillations, will afford the wonderful quintessence of wine," he wrote. "We call it aqua vitae, and this name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth."

Aqua vitae seemed supernatural, and in a sense it was, for distilled wine has a far higher alcohol content than any drink that can be produced by natural fermentation. Even the hardiest yeasts cannot tolerate an alcohol content greater than about 15 percent, which places a natural limit on the strength of fermented alcoholic drinks. Distillation allowed alchemists to circumvent this limit, which had prevailed since the discovery of fermentation thousands of years earlier. Arnald's pupil, Raymond Lully, declared aqua vitae "an element newly revealed to men but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude." Both men lived to be well over seventy, an unusually advanced age for the time, which may have been taken as evidence for aqua vitae's life-prolonging power.

This wonderful new medicine could either be administered as a drink or applied externally to the affected part of the body. Aqua vitae's proponents believed it could preserve youth; improve memory; treat diseases of the brain, nerves, and joints; revive the heart; calm toothache; cure blindness, speech defects, and paralysis; and even protect against the plague. It was, in short, regarded as a panacea, which was why Charles the Bad's doctors decided to administer it to their patient. Working by candlelight, they enveloped the king in sheets soaked with aqua vitae, hoping that contact with the magical fluid would cure his paralysis. But the treatment went disastrously wrong: The sheets were accidentally ignited by a careless servant's candle, and the king instantly went up in flames. His subjects are said to have regarded his fiery and agonizing death as a divine judgment, for one of the king's final acts had been to order a dramatic increase in taxation.

Over the course of the fifteenth century, aqua vitae began to change from a medicinal drink into a recreational one as knowledge of distillation spread. This process was helped by a new invention, the printing press, developed by Johannes Gutenberg during the 1430s. (It was new to Europeans, at least, though the same idea had occurred to the Chinese some centuries earlier.) The first printed book about distillation was written by Michael Puff von Schrick, an Austrian doctor, and published in Augsburg in 1478. It was so popular that fourteen editions of the book had appeared by 1500. Among the claims made by von Schrick were that drinking half a spoon of aqua vitae every morning could ward off illness, and that pouring a little aqua vitae into the mouth of a dying person would give him or her the strength to speak one last time.

But for most people, aqua vitae's appeal came not from its supposed medicinal benefits but from its power to intoxicate people quickly and easily. Distilled drinks proved particularly popular in the cooler climes of northern Europe, where wine was scarce and expensive. By distilling beer, it was possible to make powerful alcholic drinks with local ingredients for the first time. The Gaelic for aqua vitae,
uisge beatha,
is the origin of the modern word
whiskey.
This new drink quickly became part of the Irish lifestyle. One chronicler recorded the death in 1405 of Richard MacRagh-naill, the son of an Irish chieftain, who died "after drinking water of life to excess; and it was water of death to Richard."

Elsewhere in Europe, aqua vitae was called "burnt wine," rendered in German as
Branntwein
and in English as
brandywine,
or simply
brandy.
People began distilling wine in their own homes and offering it for sale on feast days, a practice that was widespread and troublesome enough that it was explicitly banned in the German city of Nuremberg in 1496. A local doctor observed: "In view of the fact that everyone at present has got into the habit of drinking aqua vitae it is necessary to remember the quantity that one can permit oneself to drink, and learn to drink it according to one's capacities, if one wishes to behave like a gentleman."

Spirits, Sugar, and Slaves

The emergence of these new distilled drinks occurred just as European explorers were first opening up the world's sea routes, reaching around the southern tip of Africa to the east, and crossing the Atlantic to establish the first links with the New World in the west. The process began with the exploration by Portuguese explorers of the west coast of Africa, and the discovery and colonization of the nearby Atlantic islands, the first stepping stones on the way to the Americas. These expeditions were organized and funded by Prince Henrique of Portugal, also known as Prince Henry the Navigator. Despite his name, Prince Henry himself remained in Portugal for most of his life. He went abroad just three times, and even then only as far as North Africa, on three military excursions that respectively made, destroyed, and restored his reputation as a commander. But from his base in Sagres he masterminded an ambitious program of Portuguese naval exploration. Prince Henry funded expeditions and collated the resulting reports, observations, and maps. He also encouraged his captains to embrace advances in navigation such as the magnetic compass, along with trigonometry and the astrolabe, an invention which had, like distillation, been introduced by Arabs into western Europe. The chief motive of the Portuguese, Spanish, and other explorers of the time was to find an alternative route to the East Indies, in order to circumvent the Arab monopoly on the spice trade. Ironically, their eventual success was due in part to the use of technology provided by the Arabs.