In medieval Europe, medicinal herbs and plants were cultivated in monastery and nunnery gardens beginning about the 8th century. Charlemagne gave orders for the collection of medicinal plants to be grown systematically in his royal garden. This royal garden was an important precedent for botanical gardens and physic gardens that were established in the 16th century. It was also the beginning of the study of botany as a separate discipline. In about the 12th century, medicine and pharmacy began to be taught in universities.
Shabbethai Ben Abraham, better known as Shabbethai Donnolo, (913–c.982) was a 10th-century Italian Jew and the author of an early Hebrew text, Antidotarium. It consisted of detailed drug descriptions, medicinal remedies, practical methods for preparing medicine from roots. It was a veritable glossary of herbs and drugs used during the medieval period. Donnollo was widely travelled and collected information from Arabic, Greek and Roman sources.
In the Early and High Middle Ages Nestorian Christians were banished for their heretical views that they carried to Asia Minor. The Greek text was translated into Syriac when pagan Greek scholars fled east after Constantine’s conquest of Byzantium,
Stephanos (son of Basilios, a Christian living in Baghdad under the Khalif Motawakki) made an Arabic translation of De Materia Medica from the Greek in 854. In 948 the Byzantine Emperor Romanus II, son and co-regent of Constantine Porphyrogenitos, sent a beautifully illustrated Greek manuscript of De materia medica to the Spanish Khalif, Abd-Arrahman III.  In 1250, Syriac scholar Bar Hebraeus prepared an illustrated Syriac version, which was translated into Arabic.