Tobacco reached the Ottoman Empire in under a century and a half: the journey began in the Caribbean in the 1520s, and by 1700 the empire was already growing its own.

How the Spanish first learned about tobacco

Tobacco originates in the New World. Following Spanish conquests in the Caribbean, European sailors saw local people smoking and adopted the practice. The chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas described how scouts sent inland on Cuba by Christopher Columbus met islanders smoking rolled dried leaves — "tabacos"; the Spanish on the island picked up the habit from the locals.

At first tobacco was seen not as a pleasure but as a medicine — a cure-all from the common cold to the plague — and only later did it shift into recreational smoking. This observation comes from James Grehan's peer-reviewed study of tobacco in the Ottoman Empire: the same path from medicine to habit would later repeat itself in the Middle East.

When tobacco reached Spain and the rest of Europe

The Spanish introduced the rest of Europe to tobacco around 1528, and the trade sprang up remarkably fast: by 1533 Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, mentions a tobacco merchant in Lisbon in his will.

The key episode for the history of the word itself is 1559: Jean Nicot, the French ambassador in Lisbon, sent samples of tobacco to Paris for King Francis II and Catherine de' Medici, with instructions to use the plant as snuff. His name gave rise to the botanical Nicotiana, fixed by 1570, and from that — the word "nicotine."

Across continental Europe, tobacco spread through a specific channel: Iberia exported dried leaves, twisted into "ropes," in baskets to the Netherlands and southern Germany. The Spanish canastro ("basket") gave the colloquial canaster, which influenced the German Knaster. By the end of the 16th century tobacco had become a common pastime in England, the Netherlands, and Spain, then spread to the rest of Europe over the following decades.

Why England taxed tobacco right away

The English case stands apart: there, smoking became a matter of state policy almost from the start. Walter Raleigh introduced Virginia tobacco, John Hawkins was the first to bring tobacco seeds — not leaf — to England, and William Harrison's chronicle already mentions smoking in the country in 1573.

In 1604 King James I published the pamphlet "A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco" and that same year raised the duty on imported tobacco fortyfold — from 2 pence to 6 shillings 10 pence per pound. Demand did not fall. In 1624 James I went further, introducing a royal monopoly on tobacco imports, permitting purchases only from Virginia: the state saw in the new commodity not just a subject for debate about harm, but a source of treasury revenue.

When did tobacco reach Asia: 1542 or the early 17th century?

Here the sources disagree, and that disagreement deserves to be shown plainly. According to Grehan's peer-reviewed study — drawing on the work of Ashin Das Gupta, B. G. Gokhale, Irfan Habib, Fernand Braudel, V. G. Kiernan, and Berthold Laufer — the first tobacco leaves reached South Asia by the mid-1500s, while the plant reached China and Japan only in the early decades of the 17th century. By 1700 tobacco had become an important cash crop across nearly all of Asia, which by then grew its own supplies.

A separate source gives a different date for Japan — 1542, when Portuguese sailors introduced tobacco to the Japanese. A gap of 60–70 years is too large to write off as rounding. One possible explanation: 1542 marks a single first-contact episode, while Grehan's "early decades of the 17th century" is an estimate of mass adoption of smoking — but the sources themselves never spell out this distinction directly, and presenting either version as the final word would be inaccurate.

How tobacco reached the Ottoman Empire

Tobacco first reached the empire at the end of the 16th century, brought by the Spanish. As in Europe, it began not with smoking pipes but with medicine: it quickly caught the attention of physicians and became a widely prescribed remedy for various ailments, already appearing in Middle Eastern medical manuals in the closing years of the 16th century.

The most likely channel through which knowledge of the plant reached the region was non-Muslims who had contact with Europeans or could translate their works; the transmission of ideas was aided by the humoral medicine shared across the Mediterranean and inherited from antiquity. Ottoman physicians made compresses from tobacco leaves for bites and burns, and used tobacco juice as an antidote to poison — this is recorded in Ibrahim Peçevi's chronicle "Tarih-i Peçevi" and in a work by 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi.

The shift from medicine to recreational smoking took a surprisingly short time: the Palestinian scholar Mar'i bin Yusuf al-Karmi already reported, in the early decades of the 17th century, that tobacco was being openly smoked "in places where people gather — markets and streets." The first smokers were mostly city dwellers, who alone could afford an expensive import from across the Atlantic. That same era and region would later give rise to hookah culture — read more in the article "The History of the Hookah"; on how the tobacco used for smoking itself changed over time, see "From Tumbak to Moassel: How Hookah Tobacco Changed"; on the state's response to the spread of smoking, see "A History of Smoking Bans: From Murad IV to Modern Laws."

Could tobacco have reached the Mediterranean by a route other than Europe?

The Spain–Caribbean–Europe–Ottoman Empire route is backed by more sources than any other, but it wasn't the only one known to contemporaries. Seventeenth-century authors suggested that West Africa could have served as a second, separate source of tobacco's spread, at least along the southern Mediterranean coast. This hypothesis is mentioned by Ibrahim al-Laqani in his work "Nasihat al-ikhwan" (d. 1631/1632).

The theory is also backed by archaeology: 17th-century smoking pipes from Palestine show a clear resemblance to West African styles — a finding presented by researcher Uzi Baram in his work on the material culture of Palestine. If the theory holds, the spread of tobacco in the region was not a single line: alongside the European channel, an independent African one may have existed.

What does the Dutch East India Company have to do with it?

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) began trading in Iran and the Persian Gulf in 1623, following a favorable trade agreement with Shah Abbas I and the opening of trading posts in Bandar Abbas and Isfahan. Throughout the 17th and into the early 18th century, the VOC remained Iran's most important foreign trading partner.

Here a caveat is needed, right at the edge of what is known. The VOC's presence in the region and its status as Iran's largest trading partner are well established. But exactly what share of that trade was tobacco cannot be determined from the material gathered here: a dedicated academic work on the subject exists ("Tobacco, Eurasian Trade, and the Early Modern Iranian Economy," Iranian Studies, 2015), but its contents could not be verified for this piece. It's more honest to leave the question open than to build a connection between "the company" and "the tobacco trade" from a title alone.

How the Ottoman Empire stopped depending on imported tobacco

By 1700 the Ottoman market was producing most of its own tobacco: it was grown in Macedonia, Anatolia, and northern Syria, in addition to the highly valued imports from Iran, where the plant had also taken root. From the first mentions in medical treatises at the end of the 16th century to the empire's own plantations, barely more than a century had passed — a remarkably fast pace given the speed of communication at the time.

Self-sufficiency showed up in the price: from the late 17th century, tobacco steadily grew cheaper across the eastern Mediterranean, even as wheat prices in Egypt and Syria roughly doubled over the same period. By the end of the 17th century tobacco was already cheaper by weight than coffee, and by 1800 the gap had widened roughly threefold — it was smoking, not coffee drinking, that quickly became the most affordable pastime for the Ottoman population. For more on today's tobacco-growing geography, see "Where Is Shisha Tobacco Made? The Geography of Production."

In Cairo, the first tobacconists' guild appeared by the mid-17th century; the French expedition of 1798–1801 counted two more such guilds in the city, plus five guilds making smoking pipes.

In short

When did tobacco first reach Europe?

The Spanish introduced it to Europe around 1528; by 1533 a tobacco merchant was already operating in Lisbon, mentioned in Diego Colón's will.

When did tobacco reach Japan?

The sources disagree: one version cites 1542 and Portuguese sailors, another, a broader estimate covering China and Japan together, cites the early decades of the 17th century; which is more accurate, the sources don't say directly.

How did tobacco reach the Ottoman Empire?

It was brought by the Spanish at the end of the 16th century; at first it was used as medicine within the framework of humoral theory, and by the early decades of the 17th century it was already being smoked openly in markets and streets.

Is it true that tobacco reached the Mediterranean only through Europe?

Not necessarily: 17th-century authors and the archaeology of Palestinian smoking pipes point to a second, lesser-known version — a spread through West Africa along the Mediterranean's southern coast.

When did the Ottoman Empire stop depending on imported tobacco?

By 1700: it was already being grown in Macedonia, Anatolia, and northern Syria, supplemented by imports from Iran, and the price of tobacco was steadily falling by that point.

The subject continues in "The History of the Hookah," "From Tumbak to Moassel," "A History of Smoking Bans: From Murad IV to Modern Laws," and "Where Is Shisha Tobacco Made? The Geography of Production."