When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492 he was struck by the locals' indulgence in an unfamiliar habit. The Mayans had been smoking dried tobacco leaves since the first century B.C.E., and by the time the Spanish sailors discovered the New World the custom had spread throughout the continent. Possibly thinking their foreign visitors divine, the indigenous Arawaks offered Columbus and his men some of the leaves—who immediately threw them away.
One member of the crew, Rodrigo de Jerez, was not as skeptical, though, and very soon he also "drank" the dried tobacco leaves wrapped in palm or maize, thus becoming the first European smoker. Back home, his newly acquired habit frightened his compatriots so much that the Inquisition put him in jail.
Over the next few centuries the practice gradually spread all over the world, but to a mixed reception. Initially European doctors praised its medicinal properties—the French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain (who gave nicotine its name) even described it as "a panacea." Soon, however, people were beginning to realize its dangers and ban it. Mexico was the first country to outlaw smoking in places of worship, in 1575, and Turkey, Russia, and China temporarily declared the habit to be a crime punishable by execution in the 1630s.
A few years before that, in 1614, Seville in southern Spain had become the center of cigar making. It was here, in the same year, that beggars created the first cigarettes by taking leftover tobacco from cigars and rolling it in paper. However, snuff, cigars, and pipes remained more popular than cigarettes in the West for another 250 years, but then British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War (1853-1856) were won over by the cigarettes smoked by their Turkish allies.
