Alchemy and the Crusades

We know that alchemy existed before christianity, but we don't have any record of it any more because diocletian destroyed all those record. The earliest records of laboratory alchemy come from a guy called zozemos who wrote an encyclopaedia on chemistry in 300 a d. So western alchemy comes from the middle east. There was no alchemy in western europe before the first crusade. And one of the things that it is believed is that knowledge of alchemy came into western europe, across the mediterranean sea, into portugal and spain around the end of the twelfth century.