Agriculture · a Light

A Seville farmer wrote down what he had actually grown

Ibn al-Awwam's Book of Agriculture, written near Seville in the later twelfth century, is the longest farming manual to survive from the medieval world. It covers roughly five hundred and eighty five plants and fifty fruit trees, with chapters on soils and how to judge them by hand and by taste, on manures, on grafting, on irrigation, on pests, on cattle and on bees. He names the authorities he is drawing on, among them Ibn Bassal, who had run the royal garden at Toledo and written from what he grew, and he marks his own trials separately: this I have tested. A Spanish translation appeared in Madrid in 1802 and a French one in the 1860s, and nineteenth century agronomists read them for practical advice rather than as history.

Ibn al-Awwam · Seville, late 12th century