Madder was known well and largely employed in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman worlds and it was used not only in dyeing but also in medicine and painting. Historian Herodotus of Halikarnassos (Bodrum) described its use as a dye for clothes in Libya . In the First dye trade document written in Greek, there is a record of trade in this root between India and Asia Minor . Pliny the Elder wrote that madder was grown near Rome during the first century AD. It eventually became a major item of trade between the Near East and Europe . Its cultivation developed parallel to the production of fabrics and spread to all around the Mediterranean area and Western Europe . It did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire, since trace was found in north of France and in Normandy at the late Middle Ages, under the reign of good king Dagobert, 629 to 638 AD, the English merchants brought to the fairs in Lendit in Saint-Denis close to Paris .
