Clove

 ( Aromaticum ) 

The Liber Pontificalis records an endowment made by Passinopolis under Pope Sylvester I. This endowment included an Egyptian estate, its annual revenues, 150 libra (around 50 kg or 108 lb) of cloves, and other amounts of spices and papyrus. Cosmas Indicopleustis in his book Topographia Christiana outlined his travels to Sri Lanka, and recounted that the Indians said that cloves, among other products, came in from unspecified places along sea trade routes.

Cloves were also present in records in China, Sri Lanka, Southern India, Persia, and Oman by around the third century to second century BC. These mentions of "cloves" reported in China, South Asia, and the Middle East come from before the establishment of Southeast Asian maritime trade. But all of these are misidentifications that referred to other plants (like cassia buds, cinnamon, or nutmeg); or are imports from Maritime Southeast Asia mistakenly identified as being natively produced in these regions.

Archaeologists recovered the earliest known example of macro-botanical cloves in northwest Europe from the wreck of the Danish-Norwegian flagship, Gribshunden. The ship sank near Ronneby, Sweden in June 1495 while King Hans was sailing to political summit at Kalmar, Sweden. Exotic luxuries including cloves, ginger, peppercorns, and saffron would have impressed the noblemen and high church officials at the summit.

Cloves have been documented in the burial practices of Europeans from the late middle ages into the early modern period. During renovations on the Grote Kerk of Breda a tomb was rediscovered that was used between 1475 and 1526 AD by eight members of the house of Nassau. These burials had to be moved, but before being re-interred these burials were studied for botanical remains. The burial of Cimberga van Baden contained pollen from cloves. The Dutch Physician Petrus Forestus wrote down multiple recipes for embalming some of which included cloves. One of these recipes he wrote down was that used by his fellow physicians Spierinck and Goethals. An Canopic jar associated with Vittoria della Rovere also contained clove pollen. This probably came from her ingestion of clove oil as a medicine in her final days. When burials needed to be moved from the church of Saint Germain in Flers, France they were also studied for botanical remains. The body and coffin of Philippe René de la Motte Ango, count of Flers who was buried in 1737 AD contained whole cloves.

During the colonial era, cloves were traded like oil, with an enforced limit on exportation. As the Dutch East India Company consolidated its control of the spice trade in the 17th century, they sought to gain a monopoly in cloves as they had in nutmeg. However, "unlike nutmeg and Nutmeg, which were limited to the minute Banda Islands, clove trees grew all over the Moluccas, and the trade in cloves was beyond the limited policing powers of the corporation".Krondl, Michael. The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. One clove tree named Afo that experts believe is the oldest in the world on Ternate Malay may be 350–400 years old. Tourists are told that seedlings from this very tree were stolen by a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre in 1770, transferred to the Isle de France (Mauritius), and then later to Zanzibar, which was once the world's largest producer of cloves.

Current leaders in clove production are Indonesia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, and Comoros. Indonesia is the largest clove producer, but only about 10–15% of its cloves production is exported, and domestic shortfalls must sometimes be filled with imports from Madagascar. The modern province of Maluku remains the largest source of cloves in Indonesia with around 15% of national production, although provinces comprising the island of Sulawesi produced over 40% collectively.