Ambiguous wonders part two: the Mediterranean's precious red coral

By Roxani Margariti and Dimitra Mylona

In our previous post on corals, we followed the convoluted attempts to classify corals, undertaken by sages of all kinds from antiquity to the early modern era.  The colorful calcareous bodies and the feathery polyps that build and inhabit those bodies attracted the attention of naturalists and philosophers, because the many different species of corals were part of the maritime economy and lore of people across temperate and tropical seas. And while scholars were pondering the nature of corals, people kept diving for them and using them in a surprising multitude of ways.

Corallium rubrum is endemic to the Mediterranean. Its eight-tentacle polyps just 5 mm in diameter build its hard branches. It grows slowly, 2-6 mm per year. 50 cm specimens are at least 200 years old.  Slow growth and its vulnerability to rapidly changing environmental conditions make its present recovery from overexploitation particularly precarious. Image by Gery Parent in Wikimedia Creative Commons

The coral harvests ended up in jewelry workshops, medicine laboratories, royal boudoirs, markets, and even construction sites!  In this second installment on corals, we will deal primarily with the twin subjects of supply and consumption of corals in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean mostly in premodern times.  Researching this aspect of corals, we were not very surprised to find out that our sources placed at the center of the coral cultural universe the emblematic red coral of the Mediterranean, the Corallium rubrum, or else, the precious red coral! Harvested in the waters of the Mediterranean, these corals traveled far and wide.  They were adored and coveted by many, were hoarded by few, created a global network of trade, and enjoyed appreciation that is analogous to that of other marine precious products that we discussed in this blog, such as pearls, cowries and tortoise shell.  Other corals, from other seas, were also used in many ways, including as construction materials, but we will not discuss them here.  Look out for a future post!

Coral block construction in present-day Massawa, Eritrea.  Red Sea denizens quarried live and fossilized coral and used it in building construction since at least the first century CE.  More on this in a future post!  Photograph by Roxani Margariti, March 2019.

There is no doubt that climate change has brought about tremendous changes to the health of coral banks everywhere in the world.  While the environmental impact of the diachronic thirst for corals is hard to fully estimate and our post will only lightly touch upon the vexing subject of coral conservation, we make note of it at the outset and perhaps we will return to it when we know more! 

When did corals first catch peoples’ attention?

When did coastal people view corals as something more than beach debris?  When did they deliberately harvest them to use?  Our earliest evidence is indirect.  A handful of objects believed to be of coral have been found in such distant inland places as Çatal Höyuk in Anatolia in Turkey (7th mil. BCE), or on archaeological sites in Italy, Germany or Switzerland (6th to 4th mil. BCE), all dating to the Neolithic, an era when farming and herding provided a living.  Those coral finds are so totally out of place, far from the sea, that we can safely assume that they were brought there on purpose, perhaps as parts of jewelry.

A polished piece of Corallium rubrum, served as the bow of a bronze fibula, once adorned someone’s garment.  It was found in Cumae in Campania, Italy, and it is thought to date to the first half of the 1st mil. BCE. It is now kept at the British Museum, London.

It seems that the point in time where corals had definitely moved from being chance beach finds to becoming deliberately collected items  is the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, what Mediterranean archeologists and historians call the Archaic period.  The evidence spans from the Aegean shores, including the islands to Naukratis in Egypt and Greek colonies to the West.

Excavations at a sanctuary on Kythnos Island, by Alexandros Mazarakis Ainian and his team  from University of Thessaly brought to light handfuls of dedicatory objects, things that were offered to god by pilgrims over centuries of worship . Among them there are 142 pieces of precious coral, Corallium rubrum, that date to the 6th  and 7th centuries BCE. Those were part of a huge collection of items that also included carved ivory and bone objects, jewelry and other decorated or sculptured pieces  made of bronze, gold, rock crystal, fayence, and more.  Many years after their initial offering, in the 3rd century BCE,when the sanctuary was refurbished, those, by then old, special, and probably sacralised objects that were still in good condition, were collected among the destruction debris and displayed on shelves in the temple’s adyton. That is where archaeologists found them. 

Coral objects from the 7th and 6th c. BCE strata of the Sanctuary at Kythnos island, Greece.  Some are highly modified, while others are just polished or pierced.  The photograph image is a collage from photographs copied from Koukoulidou et al. 2016 (see bibliography).

Many of the coral items were polished and slightly modified, some were sculptured, others were pierced and some had a silver or bronze wire wrapped around them to turn them into beads and pendants.  Some were found in their natural state and a few of them retain some of their original red colour.  Sadly, it is not clear whether the white pieces of coral were collected already bleached or had lost their color during the millennia of exposure and burying after their processing. What is clear about this assemblage of coral objects is that coral, already in the 7th and 6th c. BCE, was considered a remarkable material, a worthy offering to the gods, along with ivory, bronze, gold and glass.  This idea that was definitely not restricted to the island of Kythnos. Excavations in other sanctuaries of the same era (e.g. Hera Akraia and Limenia at Perachora, Kato Phana at Chios, Kamiros on Rhodes and Cumae in south Italy) also produced coral objects, very similar to the ones from Kythnos. Many are also found stranded, with no provenance or dating information, in the large museums of the world.  

This 3-cm long twig of coral, wrapped with a silver wire, was found during the 19th century excavations at Kamiros on Rhodes, Greece, and was brought  to the British Museum in London.  Its date is unknown but it appears to be very similar to coral objects from several other Archaic sanctuaries.

Geographical distribution of Corallium rubrum in the Greek seas based on scientific data.  Map from Dounas et al. 2009 (see bibliography).

By the time worked and partially worked or natural branches of precious corals reached the sanctuaries of the Archaic world, they had already opened up paths to lands further east that later became major importers of Mediterranean red coral.  

Fishing for corals, copper engraving by Cornelis Galle I, printed on paper, 1596. It shows Sicilian coral divers using goggles.  In this picture large branches of Corallium rubrum are uprooted from the shallows, not far from a harbour.  Several fishers, however, dive from a boat, manned by a crew of 6-7 people.  The Latin inscription on the right repeats the view that green coral branches turned red when removed from the water. The engraving is kept at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

These early occurrences of coral objects, however, are surrounded by much uncertainty. We know next to nothing about whether they were harvested intentionally or they were found on the beach after storms or even entangled in nets by accident. A recent find sheds light to the problem by offering some tangible evidence for coral fishing in the Archaic period. A little off the coast of Marseilles a 6th-century BCE shipwreck has been excavated and studied. In the tar that was used to seal the gaps between the hull’s planks, small fragments of red coral were found embedded.  The boat was probably used in coral fisheries, coral branches were uploaded on the deck and some of their tiny fragments got stuck in the tar and remained there for us to find! 

Ιn the 1st century CE, a time of Roman expansion even beyond the Mediterranean, Pliny the Elder worried that exportation of red coral to the East was taxing the local supplies and created a problem, since at times, no coral was left for the locals to use.  All that demand was met by fishers diving and cutting the corals’ roots with an iron tool, or by uprooting the corals after entangling them in nets. 

Coral phallic pendant on a gold chain, dated to the 2nd century CE.  Such phallus-shaped objects were worn as charms and were meant to ward off harmful energy. A similar trend appears to have captivated Victorian-era wearers looking for protective energies!   British Museum 1814-0704-1175

And that is all we know about the topic. We have to move forward about a millennium, to the medieval period, to learn more.  By that time collection of corals from underwater “coral forests” was so intensive, and the trade in it so extensive that the topic attracted much scholarly attention in European and Arabic literature.  By that time, the precious coral of the Mediterranean was well on its way to conquer the globe!

Marvelous Marjan: Harvests, Supply and its Limits

This spectacular painting by Renaissance Jacopo Zucchi (d. 1580s?) has been called “The Treasures of the Sea,” “The Kingdom of Amphitrite,” and perhaps more appropriately given the visual prominence of fiery red coral accents, “The Coral Fishery.” Dozens of working figures are collecting marine creatures; mythological beings, clustered around Amphitrite the Queen of the Sea, are handling them proudly.  Coral fishing (along with fishing for pearls and shells) is here placed “within a realm where foreign treasures are gathered by foreign bodies, both mythological figures and men of color,” as Anna Grasscamp puts it (in the volume on Conchophilia that we have mined in your post on the marine contents of European cabinets of curiosities).  While scholars have linked the painting with the 16th-century “discovery” of the Americas, the kind of dazzling Corallium rubrum pictured here came to Europe from a much more proximate sea: the Mediterranean.  There, fishers of various ethnicities from both its southern and northern shores collected and supplied it for elite consumption.  Painting in the collection of the Galleria Borghese, image from Wiki creative commons.

In the first installment of our exploration of corals, we encountered the Tunisian-Egyptian author Ahmad al-Tifashi (580-651/1184-1253) and his gemological handbook entitled Blooming Thoughts on Precious Stones.  Al-Tifashi’s description of coral fishing and processing is an intriguing mix of detailed factual information and scientific theory and probably mirrors aspects of the coral fishing industry across the Mediterranean:

“In the sea of corals, divers use strong nets made of hemp and mounted with lead weights.  They cast these nets and wrap them around the coral tree until it’s fully enveloped.  They then pull on the nets until the coral is uprooted and drag it out while it’s still white and flexible. When it dries and reddens, its roots are set aside; the term for that part of the coral is bussad.  Then its branches are separated into large and small pieces, according to the size of the limps and the location of the joints; the term for that part of the coral is marjan. The pieces are then rubbed on a whetstone and polished with emery kneaded with water on a marble slab.  Its color thus shows and improves.  And if so desired, the pieces may be perforated with a tempered steel bore”.

[my translation from Ahmad b. Yusuf al-Tifashi, Kitab ahzar al-afkar fi jawahir al-ahjar, edited by  M.Y. Hassan and M. Sabyuni Khafaja (Cairo 1977), p. 180]

About a little over a century ago, Yemen’s master silversmiths, most likely Yemeni Jews, combined intricate silverwork with imported Mediterranean beads to create this exquisite necklace.  Tifashi tells us that in his time Mediterranean coral was exported eastward, and mentions Yemen first and foremost.  This latter-day creation of Yemen’s renowned silver industry testifies to the fact that the coral network has clearly endured long past the high middle ages.  Artwork in the Walters Museum, Baltimore.  Image from Creative Commons. 

Of course, red coral does not turn red upon warming up, as Tifashi seems to insist here following a generalized medieval notion that we discussed in our previous coral post.  We explained this general idea as an example of how received (and essentially faulty) theoretical wisdom blends seamlessly with practical know-how based on maritime local knowledge in the works of medieval and ancient authors (Roman Pliny the Elder for example believed that the corals berries -whatever these are- were white when taken out of the sea, becoming red upon drying up - same link as above).  Tifashi’s account certainly offers us a lively view of the medieval coral industry in the Mediterranean and perhaps the Indian Ocean too, that seems to come from contact, perhaps indirect, with men of the sea.  

The ingegno or engine collecting red Mediterranean coral. Two crossed beams, weighted down at their center, have sturdy nets hanging on their four ends. The engine is lowered to the sea depths by a rope from a boat and is hovering over the sea bed or along underwater precipices. It can even reach overhangs and sea cave mouths where red corals are growing hanging upside down. The coral branches are entangled in the nets, get uprooted and pulled up to the boat. The image is a detail from a Matthys Pool’s han-coloured engraving (plate XXIV in Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Histoire Physique de la Mer, 1725). It is fascinating to think that this particular image  is from a copy of Marsigli’s book that belonged to Sir Joseph Banks, an English naturalist who accompanied Captain James Cook in his first great voyage (1768–1771) to Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and back, to become the president of Royal Society for over 40 years.  This volume and the illustrations in it prepared Joseph Banks for his encounter with other types of corals in the warm waters of the global south (image reproduced from Shick 2018, see bibliography). 

Similar stories circulated around the Mediterranean until much later, and they have been reported by naturalists of the 18th and 19th century as seen in the caption of the 1569 engraving of Sicilian coral divers above. 

Al-Tifashi tells us that this laboriously retrieved coral, by which he means the precious red coral of his native Mediterranean, is present in the “Sea of Africa” (bahr Ifriqiyya) and the Sea of the Land of the Franks (bahr al-Ifranja).  Ifriqiya is the Arabic geographical name for central North Africa (Libya, Tunisia, sometimes including eastern Algeria), while the Land of the Franks roughly coincides with modern-day France and perhaps Italy too; the seaboards of these regions are indeed sources of the precious Corallium rubrum. 

The coastal regions known in Medieval times for their lively coral fisheries coincide with some of the areas where red corals are still to be found. The map is modified from Bruckner 2016 (see bibliography) and the blue eclipses mark the coral-rich areas discussed by al Tifashi. Image modified by D. Mylona and R. Margariti.

The Algerian port of El Kala, medieval Marsa al-Kharaz (port of beads), is to this day identified with its fisheries, including that of coral.  Image from wiki creative commons.

Al-Tifashi explains that although coral is to be found in both these northern and southern Mediterranean waters, the most abundant and most excellent variety is collected in the latter, specifically a place called Port of Beads (marsa al-kharaz) in Ifriqiyya.  The rich geographical literature of the Islamicate middle ages and modern accounts reveal that this must be identified with the small but lively historic port of El Kala in Algeria, located not far from the Tunisian border.  A glance at the modern distribution of red coral in the southern Mediterranean confirms that parts of this coast are still hotspots of native coral habitats, even though a closer look reveals a tragedy of over-exploitation and environmental degradation.

Modern-day coral fisheries from Torre del Greco near Naples, one of the last surviving coral processing hubs in the Mediterranean.  The corals pulled out of the sea by divers are very small compared to the legendary specimens of the past.  Torre del Greco, a sleepy coral fishing village turned into a renowned center for the manufacturing of coral objects when Genoese Paolo Bartolomeo Martin, came there from Marseilles and set up the first workshop for coral cameos

The Ifriqiyya coast and the coast of France were not the only areas where red coral was systematically harvested.  By the middle of the 19th century, a time of a global red coral craze, all coasts around Italy and those of Spain, Sardinia and Corsica were also exploited as did less significant and rich fields, such as the Ionian Sea, for example, that produced smaller specimens than other places.  No matter where the corals came from, most ended up in one of the few centers of coral working and trade: Genoa, Naples, Livorno (also known in English as Leghorn), and Marseilles.  In those places, coral was processed on a large scale to be sent to the markets of the world. It was mostly turned into beads that made good use of even the smaller coral pieces, but also other small artifacts, with high artistic value.  Several thousand people were involved in the coral business in each of those places. The art of coral working was highly specialized, with technicians dedicated to each stage of processing, thus increasing efficiency of work. It is remarkable that it was mostly women that were employed in the carving and polishing stages.

This image offers a snapshot of a modern-day coral carving workshop at Torre del Greco near Naples, Italy

The trade in corals in those days was immense.  Peter Lund Simmonds, in his book on Commercial Products of the Sea in 1883 (p. 444-445) (see bibliography), lists some of the most significant importers of red coral in his time. He mentions India as a great importer who preferred beads with imperfections, because of a local belief that gods dwell in the little crevices and recesses of the coral. Germany was a big importer, using inferior quality coral as funerary ornaments. A large demand for corals came from Russia but not so much from France, even though that situation seemed to be improving. Morocco was importing large amounts of coral to further transport in inland Africa, where it was used as funerary offerings. England was a strong importer of coral, even having developed local carving styles. The English craze for coral left us not only exquisitely curved objects, but also poetry and music inspired by corals and their mysterious habitat (check out the musical piece at the end of this post).  Mediterranean red corals even reached China and Japan. From antiquity up to the 19th century the Mediterranean was the exclusive source of precious red corals.  Only at that time we have reports for the discovery in other parts of the world of other species of red coral, besides the Corallium rubrum, but similar to it, which could serve the same needs.  From that point in time onwards, specialized coral fisheries developed in places like Japan or the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.

Young boys stand in front of a raft loaded with corals, with more coral branches in their hands. They dived for them and one of the boys is seen holding a knife used in the process.  The photograph was taken at KiraKira, the capital of Makira Island (previously known as St. Christobal) in 1935.  Solomon islands, in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, were a British Protectorate until 1978.  We can safely assume that the Europeans were trading in the local coral species, similar to the Mediterranean red coral, to satisfy market demand in Britain (British Museum photographic Archive, Museum number Oc,A51.84.

The distribution of Corallium rubrum native suitable habitats today and projected for 2050 show the progressive depletion of the surviving colonies across the Mediterranean, especially from its warmer eastern part.  The color scheme represents probability of occurrence, with red being the highest probability (.8 to 1) and yellow the lowest (.01-.19).  Note that the North African coral colonies that Tifashi tells us were the sources of the most beautiful and sought-after coral in his time barely make it into these maps and, even more shockingly, will be almost completely wiped by 2050. The computer generated maps put together for acquamaps.org and appears in the page on Corallium rubrum on the SeaLifeBase website.

It is perhaps the most urgent of the many questions that arise from the glimpse of coral fishing and trade in the past: how much did the practices Pliny and Tifashi described impact the health of coral colonies in the region?  Corallium rubrum can be found at a very wide range of depths, their colonies starting at less than 10 meters and, as recent studies show, reaching to areas almost a thousand meters deep. Ancient and Medieval authors mention nets guided by divers.  Working with nets at the limits of the human breath was surely a slow process and could only have impacted the shallower depths.  Even so, century upon century of artisanal fisheries feeding international demand must have wiped out the colonies from these shallower waters and confined corals to deeper waters.  A sobering documentary from the 1970s shows the manic quest for red coral of our times.  Mechanized trawlers drag nets devastating the seafloor and diminishing returns.  More shockingly, dare-devil deep divers put their lives on the line (literally) diving deeper and prohibitively deeper to extract the last surviving treasures from their remaining habitat. 

In the middle of the 19th century, utopian socialist and inventor Narcís Monturiol was living on the coast of Catalonia, one of the coral fishing hubs of the Mediterranean coasts.  A diving accident inspired him to build a submarine that could harvest corals from deep waters safely and efficiently. The most advanced versions of the submarine, that was called Ictineo II (from the Greek word Ichthys, fish), was created in 1864. It was fitted with a steam combustion engine that provided propulsion and also produced oxygen.  It dived to 27.5 m, stayed underwater for 7.5 hours and developed an underwater speed of  4.6 km/h. Special equipment was attached to its bow to harvest corals.  Monturiol’s submarine business went bankrupt in 1868 and Ictineo II was sold for scrap, just one year before Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with its fictional technologically advanced submarine! More on Monturiol adn his submarines here. Photograph from Maritime Museum of Barcelona, 1961

Fiery accents and coral cures: coral in Medieval jewelry and medicine

The Mediterranean red coral is now rare and very precious.  At Torre del Greco, one of the centers of coral carving in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a few workshops still survive.  Even the smallest fragments of the corals are pierced and polished, transformed into beads. In this photograph coral beads, combined with turquoise, pearls, shell and silver elements have been arranged into enchanting necklaces, sold in Sorρento, near Torre del Greco (Photograph by D. Mylona).

The Mediterranean red coral stands out for its fiery red colour, or at least that is what most people think!  In reality, its colour ranges widely, with whitish, pink and many red hues making up the coral colour chart. The  rarer the colour hue the most expensive the coral object was. In the heyday of red coral fishing and trade of the recent centuries, traders defined the price by colour (and also compactness, freshness, fragmentation and size of fragments, etc).  We read in the book by P.L. Simmonds, The Commercial Products of the Sea, 1883, p. 443 see bibliography) about these colour classifications and coral qualities:

“In some countries red coral is classified into the following five commercial grades : 1, froth of blood ; 2, flower of blοοd ; 3, blood of first quality;  4, blood of second quality; 5,  blood of third quality”.

This image illustrates the variety of colours that can be found within the same species of coral, in this case the momo coral (Corallium elatius), depending on individual specimen, whether it was collected dead or alive, and the degree of processing. Image from Bruckner 2016, see bibliography).

This categorisation of coral has deep roots. In an article on the “most-cherished gemstones of the medieval Arab world,” Arabists Amar and Lev comb through literary and documentary sources on the relative value of precious stones.  Diamonds (al-mas) and rubies (yaqut) top the list in terms of desirability and price, but coral appears among the least expensive treasures.  Corals appear in a variety of sources, ranging from commercial records to the Quran.  Indeed, coral is one of only three gems, along with pearls and rubies, to receive mention in the Quran!  And it is indicative that in one verse (Quran 55:58), the beauty of the (enigmatic) heavenly maidens is likened to that of “rubies and coral.”  What the two have in common, of course, is their fiery and deep red hues, and perhaps that pairing gives us a sense of a fundamental appeal of coral: used as adornment, its rich color pops.  

Twentieth-century silver armlets, the coral beads set in bezels providing fiery accents and upgrading the rest of the cheerful decoration of enamel.  In the collection of the Institute of the Arab World, AE 88-1. Copyright IMA, Nabil Butros

 We already saw several examples of coral jewelry as offerings to the gods in antiquity.  Who wore them, how and under what circumstances remains unknown.  Also, next to nothing survives of the red coral jewels that were produced and widely traded in the Arab world in Middle Ages.  But with al-Tifashi’s description of the steel implements used to perforate coral pieces and turn them into beads, as well as the very name of the Mediterranean’s most famed coral port in his day, dazzling strings of fiery coral beads flash before our eyes!. 

Polished red coral in its original form has been used as a shaft for this specialised knife used by scribes to cut their reed pens,  Turkey, 19th c. Kept at the Department of Islamic Arts in Louvre, Paris.

An Ottoman calligraphy set at the British Museum shows how a single coral finial to a cutter haft enlivens the staid elegance of brass, steel and ivory.

Al-Tifashi elaborates on the kind of objects made from coral.  First, he mentions hafts for swords and inkwells.  He says that he had personally seen such an inkwell belonging to the ruler of Ifriqiyya, and again, we can only imagine the contrast of the brilliant red of thick red coral branch carved into the ink receptacle contrasting with the blackness of the ink inside.  Another type of object Tifashi describes in some detail is rings with red coral ring stones.   He provides a blow-by-blow description of how to etch one of these rings with a phrase to the owner’s liking.  Take the coral stone ring, cover it in wax.  Using a sharp tipped stylus, inscribe the words you want through the wax all the way to the coral surface.  Then immerse the ring in vinegar; the exposed coral surface will slightly dissolve, revealing the writing, while the remaining surface under wax will be protected and pristine.  We imagine the effect to be similar to that we see on modern rings inscribed with Quranic verses and sold on etsy or ebay websites in our days!!

Screen-captured image of coral stone ring with Ayat al-Kursi sold on ebay on March 13, 2025.  

We can get a sense of the diachronic appeal of red coral in jewelry in the immediate region of its maritime origin by perusing the creations of the famous silversmiths of Kabylia, in modern-day Algeria over the last couple hundred years.  Coral bezels and branch chunks grace necklaces, bracelets, pendants, and earrings in beguiling patterns. Further afield, far from the underwater coral gardens of the Mediterranean we encountered enthusiastic use of coral beads in the necklaces and other creations of the silversmiths of Yemen, the first non-Mediterranean area that Tifashi mentions as a recipient of the medieval coral production.

Coral and silver in intricate design, form remarkable jewelry pieces. From the collection of jewelry historian and ethnographer Sigrid van Roode. 

Now beauty was not the only “use value” of coral! To stay with eloquent al-Tifashi a bit longer, he provides an astonishing array of prophylactic and medicinal uses of coral–though we cannot be entirely certain about which coral species he has in mind.  Burning and grinding coral into a toothpaste makes teeth whiter and more brilliant and helps gum health.  Applying coral powder as an eye ointment helps with eye pain, dryness, and boils.  When ingested, it acts as a diuretic and blood thinner! This list seems to build upon earlier medicinal knowledge that we read in some Roman texts. Pliny the Elder cites that calcined and pulverized red coral taken in water, coral gives treats afflictions of the urinary system while when take with wine it reduces fever and acts as soporific.  Aulus Cornelius Celcus in his De Medicina, states that coral is an erosive substance and Aretaeus in his treatise “De curatione acutorum morborum libri duo” informs us that pulverised and dried coral  is a potent medicine for persistent coughing blood, together with  pulverised gall and dried root of bramble.

But one did not have to ingest red coral to benefit from it.  Al Tifashi tells us that a coral pendant can benefit a person with epilepsy and ward off the evil eye and a host of malevolent spirits targeting small children.  Again this is a set of ideas with long history in the Mediterranean world and to return to Pliny the Elder (see the link above), branches of coral, hung at the neck of infants, are thought to act as a preservative against danger. Doesn’t this detail bring in mind the pendants in Archaic sanctuaries?

Beliefs on the apotropaic and medicinal qualities of red coral did not stop at the Medieval times.  In 15th and 16th century  this idea became elaborate and at times bizarre!  The object in the photograph below, which was created at around 1500, illustrates this trend perfectly. Its base is a gilded salt-cellar destined for a sympotic table or at least a side table, like others we have seen in this blog.  The upper part consists of a large branch of coral polished and perfectly proportioned.  From it are hung fossilised shark teeth turned into pendants with metal and precious stones.  In Medieval Europe these teeth were thought to be the tongues of poisonous adders and in the framework of the sympathetic magical logic of the time mixed with a bit of Christinan lore, they could detect and counteract poisson. The coral accentuated these qualities. During a feast, the guests could take one of the teeth, dip it in their wine to detect poison and detoxify it and make sure that they would survive the feast and evil intentions of their rivals.

A Languier or tonguestone holder, made in western Germany or Burgundy. The object combined two apotropaic elements, the coral and the adder tongues (in reality fossilised shark teeth). It was used during feasts by guests to detect poison in their wine and detoxify it.  This Languier is held in the treasury of the Teuronic Order, Vienna, since 1526 (photograph from Deutscher Orden: Brüder und Schwestern vom Deutschen Haus St. Mariens in Jerusalem - Natternzungenkredenz).

This post focused on the story of one species of coral, the Corallium rubrum, in a small part of the world, the Mediterranean Sea.  Other seas gave birth to other coral species and their stories are quite different but equally fascinating.  We will undoubtedly return to this topic in the future.  For now, we would like to conclude our double tribute to corals with a musical image: Edward Edgard’s  “Where the Corals Lie” by Janet Baker and  London Symphony Orchestra (Janet Baker Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra  από τη συλλογή Sea Pictures  του 1899) 

Do you want to know more?  We have suggestions!

Do you want to cite this work?

Margariti, R. and D. Mylona, 2025. Ambiguous Wonders, Part II: The precious red coral of the Mediterranean, Archives of the Sea, https://www.archivesofthesea.com/en/post/ambiguous-wonders-part-2-the-mediterranean-s-precious-red-coral, accessed on **-**-****