The Influence of Islamic Culinary Art on Europe

The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE brought a halt to the advance of human civilization. It was only in the 7th century CE that another civilization of comparable proportions arose in a totally unexpected area: Arabia. This heralded a period of transition for the world, as Islam expanded beyond the ethnic boundaries of its Messenger.
As different areas embraced Islam, the Arabs encountered a whole range of fruits and vegetables previously unknown to them. The transplantation of a diversity of crops and fruit-bearing trees to different climates became the challenge that motivated the Islamic Agricultural Revolution.

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Figure 1: Frontispiece of the Latin translation of a medical work by Ibn Zuhr, the De Cognitu difficilibus (Venice, 1628). FULL ARCHIVE