The Strange Case of Dr. Alderotti and the Arabic Liquor in Europe
(Note: I am grateful to Dr. Jelena Mrgić and Dr. Gordan Ravančić who responded thoughtfully to the emails of a stranger enquiring about alcohol in the Balkans. All views or errors remain mine.)
Many Croatians enjoy sipping a distilled alcoholic beverage called “rakija”, a name they no doubt associate with merriment and conviviality. The name and the drink are also connected to the lengthy and serpentine history of alcohol distillation.
Less than 200 miles away from the Croatian coast, on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, lived a key figure from the alcoholic annals: Dr. Alderotti. This professor at the University of Bologna wrote about alcohol more than 700 years ago, and was the first to mention water cooling in his distillation procedure[1]. The invention of a process that would distill alcohol efficiently eluded human beings for centuries, and the development of water cooling in the 13th century was a major breakthrough.
But despite the geographic proximity to Northern Italy, there are no traces of distilled alcohol in Croatia or the rest of the Balkans until 300 years later. We have to wait for an official Ottoman document from 1586. This official tax register mentions the custom duty charged on distilled alcohol in Vidin, a town located in present-day Bulgaria[2]. This 300 year hiatus is puzzling. You would have expected Dr. Alderotti’s revolutionary technology to spread at a faster rate across the neighboring regions of Northern Italy. There was also extensive trade across the Adriatic Sea.
One explanation could be the dearth of medieval sources from the Balkans[3]. Under this narrative, the region was enjoying liquors in medieval times, but we simply lost all sources attesting such consumption. There may however be a more plausible explanation. The name “Rakija” derives from an Arabic word meaning “distilled”[4]. It is a close cousin to Turkey’s Raki and Lebanon’s Araq, two other distilled alcoholic beverages. The Balkans may have imported their liquor-making technology from the East rather than the West.
Dr. Alderotti and his peers were developing distilled alcohol purely for medicinal purposes. They produced small quantities of the liquid with sophisticated apparatus and high quality glassware. They probably achieved very high levels of alcohol content. But around the same time, far away east in Central Asia, distillers had developed a technology to produce spirits for conviviality rather than medicinal purposes. They were producing distilled alcohol for consumption during banquets, feasts and parties[5].
This eastern technology probably required less sophisticated equipment and produced lower alcohol content than Dr. Alderotti’s equipment. But it spread swiftly across geographies, and reached the Balkans around the 16th century. And Croatians understood that sipping Rakija for conviviality purposes is a great medicine too, with all due respect to Dr. Alderotti.
[1] Dr. Edmund O. von Lippmann transcribed Dr. Alderotti’s Latin writings relating to the distillation of alcohol (“aqua vite”). I was able to find these in “Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften (1913–1914)”. The key passage is on page 386.
[2] I was unable to find a digital version of the original Ottoman document. I have found a translation written in Serbo-Croat: Dušanka Bojanić, Turski zakoni i zakonski propisi iz XV i XVI veka za Smederevsku, Kruševačku i Vidinsku Oblast (1974). The relevant passage is on page 67 of this document. The author provides the following references for the original document: “Opširni defter Vidinskog Sandžaka iz 1586, godine, fol. 6r-6v Table XI-XII”. Vidin is located approximately 600 miles away from Bologna (Italy) according to Google Maps.
[3] In her paper, “Wine or Raki — the Interplay of Climate and Society in Early Modern Ottoman Bosnia”, Dr. Jelena Mrgić writes about the Central Balkans (Bosnia and Serbia) that “not a single royal or town archive has survived from the Middle Ages”.
[4] “Rakija” derives from ‘Araqi (“عرقي”). The Arabic word could be translated as “sweated”, a reference to the similitude between the distillation process and perspiration.
[5] A Chinese dietary book dated 1330, the “Yin-Shan cheng-yao”, mentions a distilled alcoholic beverage based on wine. See Paul D. Buell, Eugene N. Anderson, A soup for the Qan : Chinese dietary medicine of the Mongol era as seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-shan cheng-yao : introduction, translation, commentary and Chinese text (page 499).
