Spice traders invented giant cinnamon birds to hide where cinnamon grew
Herodotus reported that huge birds built nests from cinnamon sticks gathered in an unknown land. Pliny called it a traders' fiction designed to inflate prices, yet the tale still circulated in Byzantium in 1310. For centuries, merchants kept the spice's true origin, the bark of Asian trees, a closely guarded secret.
Cinnamon is the inner bark of trees in the genus Cinnamomum, part of the laurel family, and its flavour comes chiefly from an oil called cinnamaldehyde. Only Cinnamomum verum from Sri Lanka counts as true cinnamon. Most of what is sold worldwide is more correctly called cassia, from Chinese, Indonesian and Vietnamese species. Cassia is thicker, harder and spicier and survives baking well, while Ceylon quills are thin, papery and subtler. A drop of iodine tells the powders apart: cassia turns deep blue.
Egypt was importing it by 2000 BC and used it in embalming. Pliny said a Roman pound could cost up to 1,500 denarii, fifty months' wages, and Nero reportedly burned a year of Rome's supply at the funeral of his wife Poppaea in AD 65. Medieval Europeans loved cinnamon sauce but had no idea of the source. A French chronicler on the Seventh Crusade was told it was fished from the Nile at the edge of the world. Maimonides linked it to India around 1180, and al-Qazwini named Sri Lanka around 1270.
Control of the trade shifted repeatedly. Venetians distributed it from Alexandria until Mamluk and Ottoman power disrupted the route, one factor pushing Europeans to seek new paths to Asia. The Portuguese held Sri Lankan supplies until the Dutch ousted them by 1658; one Dutch captain boasted that sailors downwind could smell the island eight leagues out to sea. Britain seized Ceylon in 1796.
Growers coppice the trees after two years, cutting stems at ground level so a dozen new shoots spring up. The wet stems are scraped, beaten with a hammer and peeled, keeping only half a millimetre of inner bark, which curls into quills within hours. In 2023 the world produced 238,403 tonnes, with China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka supplying 98 percent. Counterfeiting is common: one study found supposed Ceylon cinnamon carrying coumarin levels far above genuine bark, a sign of cassia mixed in.
Source: Cinnamon
