Leonhard Rauwolf

Leonhard Rauwolf (1535 to 1596), also spelled Leonhart Rauwolff, was a German physician, botanist and traveller whose main notability arises from a trip through the Levant and Mesopotamia in 1573 to 1575, made to search for supplies of herbal medicine. Born in Augsburg, he studied first at the University of Wittenberg and then botany and medicine at Montpellier and Valence in southern France, where he was a pupil of Guillaume Rondelet in 1560, and in 1565 he set up a medical practice in Augsburg. His brother-in-law Melchior Manlich, whose firm traded with Tripoli in Lebanon, made the journey possible. He travelled from Marseille to Tripoli, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul and Jerusalem and was back in Augsburg in 1576. He was the first European botanist of the post-medieval era to travel in Syria and Mesopotamia, and soon after his return he published his botanical results with an herbarium, followed later by a general travel narrative.