Cocoa has an eventful history: What was once considered a luxury good with risks and side effects is now an affordable treat for everyone. A team from the Institute of Archaeology dived right in.

Eva Mika

From the currently trending Dubai chocolate and seasonal gingerbread to the humble Cadbury bar: The range of chocolate, whether in solid or liquid form, is limitless. Chocolate is a consumer good that has become indispensable. That was not always the case: Chocolate arrived in Europe in the middle of the 16th century – at that time in the form of drinking chocolate, chocolate bars did not yet exist. However, it remained out of reach for most people at the time.

Spanish ships brought cocoa beans back from Guatemala and Mexico to the Spanish harbours and cities. Once chocolate arrived in Europe, scholars and physicians as well as Christian dignitaries examined it for its potential effects and possible properties. After all, this novelty from the ‘new world’ first had to be integrated into the existing system of values and science. Not an easy task for a society whose medical and religious beliefs are rooted in antiquity. But it worked: Scholars investigated the purported healing (or harmful) properties of chocolate, Christian cardinals pondered whether Adam had brought the cocoa tree directly from paradise, and authors from a wide range of genres wrote about chocolate in prose and poetry. A new cultural asset began its triumphal march, which continues to this day.

So how did chocolate develop from a rare asset to a ubiquitous consumer good? That is one of the questions addressed by the cultural-historical exhibition at Cologne’s Chocolate Museum, which is currently being redesigned - from the beginnings known from archaeological research to the present day. Starting with pre-Columbian America, before it was subjugated by Europeans, through the first cultural contact to industrialization, visitors will move along a timeline and discover 5,000 years of chocolate history. The opening is planned for the summer of 2025.

An important contribution to the new exhibition is made by the Latin Philology Department of the Institute of Classics, which has translated, catalogued and analysed historical sources documenting the introduction of chocolate in Europe in a joint project. Latin Philology usually focuses on the literature and culture of the ancient Mediterranean, but Latin was still a literary and scholarly language in the mid 16th century, when chocolate arrived in Europe. Due to their special language skills, the Institute’s researchers are able to decipher the contemporaneous sources.

Detective work in the databases

The collaboration came about through a happy coincidence: In 2023, the Friends of the Institute invited Professor Claudia Schindler from Hamburg, who had been studying a Neo-Latin poem from 1689 about chocolate production for some time. The researchers were looking for a suitable venue for her guest lecture. The Chocolate Museum in the Rheinauhafen was not only the perfect location, its staff also offered a spontaneous guided tour of the exhibition and a chocolate tasting. 

One lecture and many conversations later, the Chocolate Museum and the Institute of Classics decided to collaborate. The Institute’s project team, Professor Dr Anja Bettenworth, Professor Dr Peter Schenk and Sven Johannes, offered to start by translating the Latin texts already available to the museum. Soon, however, the researchers were not only translating, but also searching for and finding other, previously untapped sources on the perception of chocolate from the 16th to the 18th century.

What did researchers and writers in Europe write down in Latin over the next two hundred years?
Searching for texts is nothing new for Sven Johannes, a philologist specializing in Medieval Latin, but even for him this search in international libraries and databases was not easy: “Many early modern prints, i.e. from the 16th and 17th centuries, have now been digitized and are available online. Nevertheless, it remains tricky to find them – after all, ‘chocolate’ is not even an ancient term. You have to come up with terms for what chocolate and the works that deal with it might have been called in Latin to have as complete a bibliographical overview as possible.” Although there is the Latin word cocolates, there are also many paraphrases, such as ‘a sweet drink’ or ‘Mexican nectar’, with nectar alluding to the ancient idea of the food of the gods.

“This is also interesting because the scientific name of the cocoa tree, which is derived from the Greek, is Theobroma, meaning ‘food of the gods’,” added Anja Bettenworth. They were rarely lucky enough to find detailed bibliographical references. Usually, they worked with brief references to other writers or writings within the sources. “While from today’s perspective we often face challenges in resolving such references, the authors could assume that the educated readers of the time knew exactly what was being referred to,” said Sven Johannes.

Attacks on chocolate bars

The team found a special treasure in an epic about Hernán Cortés from 1729: The author Gianbattista Marieni retrospectively describes some episodes from the conquest of the Aztec Empire. The three researchers all study the genre of epic poetry, i.e. a poem written in hexameters, in different eras. The newly discovered work is interesting for the researchers in several ways. Although its existence was known, the work was not catalogued – i.e. neither translated nor annotated. “We’re currently doing just that. This is also a new discovery for us, which is fascinating and helps us to make progress in our research,” said Anja Bettenworth. 

One book within the epic is almost exclusively about cocoa and chocolate. “For example, it describes how the conquistadors drank sweetened chocolate from porcelain cups – something they certainly did not do when they first came to Mexico in the 16th century. Marieni projected the customs of his own time – the 18th century – back to the time of Cortés in his writing,” Anja Bettenworth explained this part of the epic. At another point, an indigenous speaker describes in an anachronistic way the history and importance of cocoa and the negative influences it had on Aztec society: from civil war-like scenes because there was too much or too little chocolate to attacks on so-called chocolate bars.

So maybe chocolate became a consumer good earlier than we thought? The researchers’ discoveries are of great importance for the work of the Chocolate Museum: “The Institute of Classics has found important and new pieces of the puzzle that complete our picture of how chocolate came to Europe, which we can now incorporate into our cultural-historical exhibition,” said Olaf Vortmann, head of the museum’s education department.

Independently of the exhibition in the Chocolate Museum, the teams are preparing a joint publication for a wider audience with a selection of Latin texts in bilingual form (Latin-German) including commentary and introduction, as well as a scholarly edition with the first translation and commentary of the Cortesius Epic by Gianbattista Marieni. The texts on cocoa and chocolate include both literary and non-fiction texts, including texts from the fields of theology, medicine and biology. So there is still a lot to discover about the ancient food of the gods, which is not just a winter treat but a year-round delight.