Tobacco Comes to Europe (1560s): Jean Nicot and Early Use

Tobacco reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century, first as a botanical curiosity and a medicine, then as a widely used stimulant. A key moment came around 1560, when the French ambassador in Lisbon, Jean Nicot, sent the plant to the court of Queen Catherine de’ Medici, giving his name to the plant genus Nicotiana and later to nicotine. By the early 17th century smoking had spread across Europe, provoking fierce opposition, including a famous attack by King James I.

Tobacco in the Americas

Tobacco plants are native to the Americas, where they had been cultivated for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples smoked, chewed and snuffed tobacco, using it in ceremonies, diplomacy, healing and everyday life.

Europeans encountered it on Columbus’s first voyage. In November 1492, two of his men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, saw people in Cuba carrying burning leaves and inhaling the smoke. Spanish writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo later described the custom in detail, often with disapproval.

Arrival in Europe

Sailors and settlers returning to Spain and Portugal brought tobacco home in the early 16th century. By the 1550s it was being grown in gardens in Lisbon and Seville, prized as an ornamental and medicinal plant. The French friar and traveller André Thevet claimed to have brought tobacco seeds to France from Brazil around 1556.

Jean Nicot (1530–1600) served as French ambassador to Portugal from 1559 to 1561. According to the traditional account, he obtained tobacco in Lisbon, tested its reputed healing powers and sent leaves or powder to Catherine de’ Medici, the queen mother, as a remedy for headaches. The plant became fashionable at court and was called herbe à la reine (the queen’s herb) and nicotiane.

The name stuck. In 1753 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the tobacco genus Nicotiana, and when the active alkaloid was isolated by Wilhelm Posselt and Karl Ludwig Reimann in 1828 it was called nicotine.

A wonder drug

Sixteenth-century medicine regarded tobacco as a powerful remedy. The Seville physician Nicolás Monardes praised it in his work on New World medicines, notably in the second part published in 1571, recommending it for ailments from headaches and toothache to wounds and chest complaints. His book appeared in English in 1577 as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde.

Tobacco was sniffed as snuff, chewed, applied to wounds and smoked. Its mild intoxication and the ritual of smoking soon made it popular for pleasure as much as for health.

Smoking spreads

In England, pipe smoking spread in the 1570s and 1580s. Sailors and returning colonists played a role, notably those who came back from the Roanoke colony in 1586. Thomas Harriot’s report on Virginia (1588) praised the plant the local Algonquians called uppowoc, and Sir Walter Raleigh made smoking fashionable at court.

By 1600 tobacco was sold in London taverns and shops and was spreading through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, carried by traders and soldiers. Portuguese and Spanish merchants also took it to Africa and Asia, making it one of the fastest-spreading products of the Columbian Exchange.

Opposition and regulation

The rapid spread provoked a backlash. In 1604 King James I published A Counterblaste to Tobacco anonymously, condemning smoking as a custom “lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs”. In the same year the import duty on tobacco was raised steeply, by around 4,000 per cent.

Other rulers went further. Pope Urban VIII forbade tobacco use in churches of the archdiocese of Seville in 1624, and the Ottoman sultan Murad IV banned smoking in 1633 under severe penalties. Such bans proved hard to enforce, and many states turned instead to taxing tobacco or making it a royal monopoly.

A colonial crop

Demand in Europe turned tobacco into a major cash crop. In Virginia, John Rolfe began growing a sweeter variety around 1612, and the Jamestown settlement shipped its first cargo to England in 1614. Tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake, Brazil and the Caribbean increasingly depended on indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

Myths and facts

Myth: Jean Nicot discovered tobacco. He neither discovered it nor first brought it to Europe; he popularised it at the French court.

Myth: Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco to England. It was known earlier, though Raleigh helped make smoking fashionable.

Timeline

• 1492, November: Columbus’s men observe tobacco smoking in Cuba.
• c. 1550s: Tobacco grown in gardens in Spain and Portugal.
• c. 1556: André Thevet claims to bring tobacco seeds to France.
• c. 1560: Jean Nicot sends tobacco from Lisbon to Catherine de’ Medici.
• 1586: Returning Roanoke colonists help popularise pipe smoking in England.
• 1604: James I publishes A Counterblaste to Tobacco.
• 1614: First shipment of Virginia tobacco reaches England.
• 1828: Nicotine is isolated in Heidelberg.

Why it matters

The arrival of tobacco in Europe shows how a New World plant, first valued as medicine, became a global commodity within a century. It shaped colonial economies, state finances and everyday habits, and its health effects, debated since the 1600s, remain a public-health concern today.