When Did Smoking Start in Europe?

Christopher Columbus and his crew brought smoking to Europe. Columbus was given tobacco by North American Indians.

Reports from the first European explorers and conquistadors to reach the Americas tell of rituals where native priests smoked themselves into such high degrees of intoxication that it is unlikely that the rituals were limited to just tobacco. No concrete evidence of exactly what was smoked exists, but the most probable theory is that the tobacco used was much stronger, consumed in extreme amounts or that it was mixed with any number of other, unknown, psychoactive drugs. In North America the most common form of smoking was in pipes, which today are best known as the peace pipes offered both to other tribes and later European settlers as a gesture of goodwill and diplomacy. In the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America, early forms of cigarettes, smoking reeds or cigars were the most common smoking tools. Only in modern times has the use of pipes become fairly widespread. Smoking is depicted in engravings and on various types of pottery as early as the 9th century, but it is not known whether it was limited to just the upper class and priests.[10]

By the time Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late 15th century there was widespread use of tobacco smoking as a recreational activity. At the banquets of Aztec nobles, the meal would commence by passing out fragrant flowers and smoking tubes for the dinner guests. At the end of the feast, which would last all night, the remaining flowers, smoking tubes and food would be given as a kind of alms to old and poor people who had been invited to witness the social occasion, or it would be rewarded to the servants.[11]

Europe
A Frenchman named Jean Nicot (from whose name the word nicotine is derived) introduced tobacco to France in 1560. From France tobacco spread to England. The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol in 1556, seen “emitting smoke from his nostrils”.[12] Like tea, coffee and opium, tobacco was just one of many intoxicants that was originally used as a form of medicine.[15] Early modern European medical science was still to a great extent based on humorism, the idea that everything had a specific humoral nature that varied between hot and cold, dry and moist. Tobacco was often seen as something that was beneficially in its heating and drying properties and was assigned an endless list of beneficial properties. The concept of ingesting substances in the form of smoke was also entirely new and was met with both astonishment and great skepticism by Europeans

Tobacco smoking is the inhalation of smoke from burned dried or cured leaves of the tobacco plant, most often in the form of a cigarette. People smoke for pleasure, to satisfy a nicotine addiction, for ritualistic or social purposes, or for self-medication,[1] . Tobacco use by Native Americans throughout North and South America dates back to 2000BC. The practice was brought back to Europe by the crew of Christopher Columbus. Tobacco smoking took hold in Spain and was introduced to the rest of the world, via trade. Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the fresh leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. Tobacco has been growing on the northern continents since about 6000 BC and began being used by native cultures at about 3000 BC. It has been smoked in one form or another since about 2000 BC. There are pictoral drawings of ancient Mayans smoking crude cigars from 1400 BC.