Mastic: a Mediterranean luxury product

Abstract

Mastic is a resin produced by plants that grow only on the southern part of the Aegean island of Chios. Its cultivation and commerce were regulated by the rulers of Chios to assure substantial profits on this valuable commodity. Mastic is an example of a Mediterranean product that was in great demand in both Islamic and Christian societies. Yet its particular utility and the reasons for its long-lasting prestige are not easily understood beyond generalizations about its culinary, medical and cosmetic uses. The article concludes with a discussion of Columbus, who erroneously believed he had found mastic in the New World.

Keywords:

• mastic
• Chios
• spice trade
• Genoa
• Columbus

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Negotiating Trade: Commercial Institutions and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Medieval and Early Modern World’ held at Binghamton University (State University of New York) in September, 2010. I received many helpful comments from conference participants. I am also grateful to Aglaia Kremezi, an expert on Greek cuisine, for her help with the modern and traditional uses of mastic.

Notes

 1. Abulafia, ‘Crocuses and Crusaders’, 227–43.

 2. On saffron in medieval Catalonia, Rafat i Selga, Masos, 270–85; Verdés i Pijoan, ‘Una espècia autòctona’, 758–86.

 3. Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, 294. Although Pegolotti includes such things as alum and cotton in his catalogue, the usual definition of spices is aromatic products of high unit value. Most of them were imported into Europe, often from quite far away and so differed from herbs in that they were items of grand commerce and not local aromatic substances.

 4. For marketing reasons (rebranding and internationalization) the Association now prefers to use the transliterated Greek ‘mastiha’ in English as well as in all other languages rather than ‘mastic’. I retain the latter term here, however, as it is the traditional English term for the product and relatively familiar under that name to students of medieval commerce and material culture.

 5. Kochilas, Mastiha Cuisine.

 6. Columbus, A Synoptic Edition, 67, 86, 224.

 7. Perikos, The Chios Gum Mastic. The harvest and processing information is also described in more recent materials available from the website of the Chios Mastiha Growers Association.

 8. Cited and translated by Dalby, Dangerous Tastes, 136.

 9. Balard, La Romanie Génoise, 2: 743.

10. Argenti, The Occupation of Chios, 3: 490–91 (document no. 13).

11. Gual Camarena, El primer manual, 104. Gual Camarena is not sure what ‘gruell’ means here – probably crumbly, doughy, perhaps from being too dried out. I thank the philologist Josep Moran for this reading.

12. Taviani, Cristoforo Colombo, 1: 159.

13. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 483–99.

14. Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, 295, 299. He does not give the basis for grading, but this is what the modern criteria are.

15. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 463.

16. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS m 461, fol. 11: ‘Celle region est nomee Arabie selon le langaige du pais pource que cest une terre moul doulcement odorant et soues fleurant comme encens, car en celle region croist le bon mastic et fin encens’. I am grateful to John Friedman for this information.

17. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 561, note 54.

18. Pliny, Natural History, XII, 72.

19. Dalby, ‘Mastic for Beginners’, 41.

20. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 464–5; Malamut, Les îles de l'empire byzantin, 2: 389.

21. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 72–3.

22. Balard, La Romanie Génoise, 2: 742; Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 502, no. 17 quotes Ludolph: ‘Haec insula specialis est nobilis, in qua crescit masticus, et non in alia parte mundi; licet arbores eius in aliis partibus bene crescant, tamen fructus non reperitur’.

23. Argenti, Hieronimo Giustiniani's History of Chios, 207: ‘Quantunque alchuni scrittori, peccando piutosto d'ignoranza et coniscione de’ paesi, che per veruna certezza, o da solo udito d'altri, presumeno scrivere pazzamente quello que ignorano, onde ardiscono dire, come il Matheolo nel trattato della mastice et altri suoi seguaci, che non solamente a Scio, ma etiamdiò ad alcuni altri paesi nascere il mastice, cosa certo falza…'

24. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 225–30; 359–66.

25. From the fifth century BC wine from Chios enjoyed great fame. According to Athenaeus there were sweet, medium and dry varieties. Analysis of amphorae indicates that at least some of this wine had resin added to it (like modern retsina) and it is possible that mastic rather than ordinary pine resin gave Chiote wine its particular character. The first reference to wine flavoured with mastic, however, is Alexander of Tralles in the sixth century AD. See Barron, ‘Chios in the Athenian Empire’, 95. On wine from Chios during the late Byzantine Empire, see Jacoby, ‘Mediterranean Food and Wine’, 137, 141, 144.

26. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 366.

27. Argenti, The Occupation of Chios, 2: 194–5.

28. Balard, La Romanie Génoise, 2: 749.

29. Suggested by Argenti, Chios vincta, xlii, note 2.

30. As pointed out to me by Professor David Jacoby. On Byzantine Chios see Malamut, Les îles de l'empire byzantin, 2: 388–9, 440–45, 540.

31. In addition to the works of Argenti, Pistarino and Balard already cited, see Balard, ‘Les Grecs de Chio’; idem, ‘Le mastic de Chio’; idem, ‘Chio, centre économique’; Balletto, ‘Chio dei Maonesi’; idem, ‘Chio dei Genovesi’; Lopez, Benedetto Zaccaria; Hopf, Les Giustiniani, dynastes de Chios. For a bibliography of Genoese Chios, see Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 75–8.

32. Argenti, Chios vincta, xli–xlvii.

33. Argenti, The Occupation of Chios, 1: 123–37; Balard, ‘Chio, centre économique’, 14–17.

34. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 479–80; Balard, ‘Chio, centre économique’, 15.

35. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 79–121; Argenti, The Occupation of Chios, 1: 332–5; Argenti, Chios vincta, xliii.

36. Balard, La Romanie Génoise, 2: 749.

37. On this process Balard, ‘The Genoese in the Aegean’, 166–72.

38. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 482; Balletto, ‘Chio dei Maonesi’, 146.

39. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1: 154, 268. I thank Jessica Goldberg for this information.

40. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 468, 484.

41. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 492–5.

42. Galland, Recueil des rites, quoted (and trans.) Argenti, Chios vincta, cclxxii–cclxxiii.

43. I am grateful to Jessica Goldberg for her estimate of the price of mastic based on the Cairo Geniza documents.

44. Perikos, The Chios Gum Mastic, 47–56; Roden, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, 44, 425.

45. Bebb et al., ‘Mastic Gum’, 522–3.

46. Pliny, Natural History, XXIV, 42; XXXVII, 51.

47. Examples taken from Argenti, Bibliography of Chios.

48. Wölfel, Der Arzneidrogenbuch Circa Instans, 73; Livre des simples medecines, facsimile: fol. 129v–130r; translation: 199–200.

49. St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Fr. Fv. VI, 2, Livre des simples médecines, fol. 166r. Facsimile edition, Libro de los medicamentos simples .

50. López Pizcueta, ‘Los bienes’, 29, 37.

51. Vela i Aulesa, L'obrador d'un apotecari medieval, 83, 125, 184, 196, 273, 294, 314.

52. Gorce, Les voyages, 54.

53. Apicius, De re coquinaria 1, c. 1, c. 3 (1–3).

54. Taillevent, The Viandier of Taillevent , 218 (no. 155) and 230 (no. 170). The cameline recipe is in all manuscripts of the Viandier. For the use of mastic in the Arab world of the Middle Ages, Rodinson et al, Medieval Arab Cookery, 39, 150, 285, 303.

55. Taillevent, Le Viandier de Guillaume Tirel, 182, 187–8, using an unspecified incunabulum. Mastic is absent, however, from the sixteenth-century edition in the Bodleian Library given in Taillevent, Viandier de Taillevent: The Cookery Book .

56. Gould, Neuva lista documentada, 431.

57. Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi, 489–90.

58. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape, 202–3.

59. On medieval notions of scarcity especially with regard to spices, Freedman, Out of the East, 130–45.

60. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape, does a particularly effective job of demonstrating Columbus's conceptual antecedents. See as well her article ‘Travel Fact and Travel Fiction in the Voyages of Columbus’.