Leonhard Rauwolf

Leonhard Rauwolf
The front page of Rauwolff's travel book dated 1582
Born	June 21, 1535 Augsburg, Germany
Died	September 15, 1596 Waitzen, Hungary
Nationality	German
Occupation	physician botanist
Known for	Travel in the Levant

Leonhard Rauwolf (also spelled Leonhart Rauwolff) (21 June 1535 – 15 September 1596) was a German physician, botanist, and traveller. His main notability arises from a trip he made through the Levant and Mesopotamia in 1573-75. The motive of the trip was to search for herbal medicine supplies. Shortly after he returned, he published a set of new botanical descriptions with an herbarium. Later he published a general travel narrative about his visit.

The young Rauwolff studied initially at University of Wittenberg and then studied botany and medicine at two universities in southern France, University of Montpellier and University of Valence. He was a pupil of Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier in 1560. In 1564 he had the benefit of visiting the renowned botanist Carolus Clusius (who once had been a student of Rondelet too). In 1565 he set up a medical practice in his hometown, Augsburg, in Bavaria. In that year he married.

Rauwolff's travel in the Near East was made possible by his brother-in-law Melchior Manlich, who hoped Rauwolff would come back with new plants and drugs that could be traded profitably by his firm. The Manlich firm already had trading relations with exporters in Tripoli in Lebanon. Rauwolff started his journey by going from Augsburg to Marseilles in southern France, from which he sailed in 1573 to Tripoli in Lebanon. From Tripoli he went to Aleppo, where he stayed for many months. In 1574 he went from Aleppo to Baghdad and Mosul. In 1575 he went back to Aleppo and Tripoli and then on to Jerusalem. He was back in Augsburg in 1576. Rauwolff was the first European botanist of the post-medieval era to travel in Syria and Mesopotamia. Very shortly after his return he published the results of his botanic expeditions in his fourth herbarium "Viertes Kreutterbuech -- darein vil schoene und frembde Kreutter".