Among Europeans who described the pepper-plant with some exactness, one of the first was Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Malabar Coast in A.D. 1166. Another was the Catalan friar, Jordanus, about 1330; he described the plant as something like ivy, climbing trees and forming fruit, like that of the wild vine. “This fruit,” he says, “is at first green, then, when it comes to maturity, black.” Nearly the same statements are repeated by Nicolo Conti, a Venetian, who, at the beginning of the 15th century, spent twenty-five years in the East. He observed the plant in Sumatra, and also described it as resembling ivy. (Pharmacographia.)
The high cost of pepper contributed to incite the Portuguese to seek for a sea passage to India, and the trade in this spice continued to be a monopoly of the Crown of Portugal as late as the 18th century.
In January 1793, an agreement was made between the Rajah of Travancore and the English, by which he was to supply a large quantity of pepper to the Bombay Government in return for arms, ammunition and European goods; this was known as the “Pepper Contract.”
It is worthy of remark that all the foreign names for black pepper are derived from Pippali, the Sanskrit name for long pepper, which leads one to suppose that the latter spice was the first kind of pepper known to the ancient Persians and Arabs, through whose hands it first reached Europe. Their earlier writers describe the plant as a shrub like the Pomegranate (P. chaba ?). The moderns apply the name Filfil (Pilpil, Pers.) to all kinds of pepper. Black pepper is called in Sanskrit Maricha, which means a “pungent berry.” The word is derived from Marichi, “a particle of light or fire,” and appears to have been first applied to the aromatic berries known as Kakkola; it now signifies black and red pepper, and in the vernacular forms of Mirach or Mirchai, is a household word in India.