Ibn al-Baytar

Diya' al-Din Abu Muhammad Abd Allah ibn al-Baytar was a botanist and pharmacologist born in or near Malaga, in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), around 1197 (the year is a traditional estimate; some sources give c. 1190 or c. 1188). His epithet "ibn al-Baytar" means "son of the veterinarian/farrier." He studied plants under the Malagan botanist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, gathering specimens across Andalusia. Around 1219-1220 he left Spain and worked his way eastward, crossing the North African coast and reaching as far as Asia Minor (Anatolia), collecting and identifying medicinal plants as he went.

By about 1224 he had entered the service of the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil in Egypt, where he was appointed chief herbalist. When al-Kamil extended his rule to Damascus around 1227, Ibn al-Baytar is reported to have accompanied him, gaining the opportunity to botanize across Syria and Palestine; he retained his post under al-Kamil's successor al-Salih Ayyub, to whom he dedicated his second pharmacological work. The physician-historian Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, his pupil and the chief early source for his life, reports studying plants under him. He died in Damascus in 646 AH / 1248.

His best-known work, Kitab al-Jami' li-mufradat al-adwiya wa-l-aghdhiya ("Compendium of Simple Drugs and Foodstuffs"), describes roughly 1,400 plants, foods, and remedies, drawing on Greek, Arabic, and his own field observations; a second work, al-Mughni fi al-adwiya al-mufrada, was dedicated to al-Salih Ayyub and arranges remedies therapeutically, by the bodily organ or ailment they treat. Translated and consulted in Europe and the Islamic world, the Jami' remained a standard pharmacological reference into the eighteenth century.