Note (2) — 42.—How pepper grows in India.

(2.) “the juice of an apple which they call liuon.”—There can scarcely be a doubt that this was the lemon, called nimbouka in Sanscrit; neemon, leemon in Hindostani, and lemonn by the Arabs, a fruit with which Schiltberger could scarcely have been familiar in his own country, or in those parts of Asia Minor, Central Asia, and even Egypt, through which he travelled. The lemon, brought from India by the Arabs about A.D. 912, was first planted at Oman; then at Basra in Irak; afterwards in Syria, where the plant became common, whence it was introduced into Palestine and Egypt. Jacques de Vitry includes the lemon tree with others he saw for the first time when in the Holy Land in the 13th century: “sunt ibi speciales arbores tam fructiferæ quam steriles” (Gesta Dei per Francos, etc., lxxxvi); from which it might almost be inferred that the Crusaders, who are supposed to have introduced this plant into Europe, did not do so until after Jacques de Vitry wrote. The genus, however, could not have been entirely unknown in the West, it being recorded in Chronica Montis Cassiniensis, Pertz Scr., 7, 652, that when the prince of Salerno in the year 1000 (1016?) was besieged by the Arabs, forty Norman knights who passed that way on their homeward journey from the Holy Land, delivered him. Upon taking their leave, the knights were accompanied by ambassadors from the prince, who were bearers of presents of the “poma cedrina (citrina?), amigdalas quoque et deauratas nuces”, and a message to the Norman people, inviting them to come to so beautiful a country and help him to defend it (Abd-Allatif, S. de Sacy edition, 115–117; Makrizi in Quatremère; Journ. Horticultural Society, ix, 1855; Risso et Poiteau, Hist. et Culture des Orangers, Paris, 1872; Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere in ihrem Uebergang aus Asien nach Griechenl. und Ital., Berlin, 1877).