Molle — the Andean mulli that the sources call a tree of much virtue
Acosta in 1590 calls the molle a tree of much virtue whose little clusters the Indians ferment into wine, and records that Mexico named it árbol del Perú because it came from there. Garcilaso, an Inca-descended author, credits Andean knowledge of its wound-healing resin; Cobo lists molle-berry chicha among Peru's drinks. Each fact is bound to the page that states it, the indigenous origin foregrounded, and the modern identity — Schinus molle, today's pink peppercorn — flagged as modern.
Why this wins its question: Popular writing meets the molle as the "California pepper tree" or a gourmet pink peppercorn and forgets it is Andean at all. This object restores the record from the pages that made it: Acosta's tree of much virtue whose berries the Indians fermented and which Mexico called the árbol del Perú, Garcilaso crediting Inca knowledge of its wound-healing resin, and Cobo's molle-berry chicha — each bound to its leaf, the colonial contempt in one source named rather than quoted as fact, and the modern identity as Schinus molle flagged as modern consensus instead of read back into the chroniclers.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville 1590, Libro Quarto, page 269, sets the molle down among the trees of the Indies in one dense sentence: "El Molle es arbol de mucha virtud: da vnos razimillos, de que hazé vino los Indios. En Mexico le llaman arbol del Piru, porque vino de alla: pero dase tambien y mejor en la nueua España, que en el Piru." A tree of much virtue; the Indians ferment a drink from its little clusters; and — the detail worth the claim — Mexico calls it the tree of Peru because it was carried there, and it takes to New Spain even better than to its Andean home. An intra-American plant transfer is recorded here in passing, before any ocean crossing.
The knowledge of the tree is Andean, and an Andean author says so. Garcilaso de la Vega, son of an Inca noblewoman, in the Comentarios reales — read in the 1829 Madrid edition, page 165, chapter XXV, "Las yerbas medicinales que alcanzaron" — writes: "Alcanzaron la virtud de la leche y resina de vn arbol que llaman Mulli, y los españoles Molle: es cosa de grande admiracion el efecto que hace en las heridas frescas, que parece obra sobrenatural." The Incas, he says, knew the virtue of the milk and resin of the mulli, and its effect on fresh wounds is a thing of great wonder. The Quechua name and the medical use are credited to the people, not to the chronicler.
A third witness fixes the drink Acosta only gestured at. Bernabé Cobo's Historia del Nuevo Mundo, read in the Seville edition of 1892, tomo III, page 35, sets molle among the Andean fermentations: "En este reino, fuera de la chicha de maíz, la hacen … de quínua, de ocas, de las uvillas del molle, y de otras cosas." Besides maize chicha, in Peru they brew it from quinua, from ocas and from the little berries of the molle. The passage sits inside a chapter that describes indigenous drinking with open colonial contempt — the surrounding lines call the people inmunda and liken their eating to wolves — and it is cited here only for the sober fact of the molle-berry brew, not for its author's judgement of the drinkers, which this object does not adopt.
The mulli of these pages is today the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle L. A 2019 analytical paper read in PubMed Central gives that binomial and the family Anacardiaceae, calls the species "pink pepper" and "pepper tree", an evergreen ornamental native to South America and now widespread through the world, and notes antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer and anti-inflammatory activity reported for it — the bright fruit being what today's kitchens sell as pink peppercorns. The identification of the colonial mulli with S. molle is modern botanical consensus rather than a statement of Acosta, Garcilaso or Cobo, so this claim rests its identity on the modern paper and sits at 0.8.
The limits of the entry, stated plainly. The three chroniclers agree that the molle is Andean and useful, that its berries were fermented and its resin doctored wounds, and that it had already been carried into Mexico by 1590 under the name árbol del Perú; none of them dates that transfer, names who made it, or records the tree's later spread beyond the Americas into the pantropical ornamental it became — the pepper tree of California streets. Garcilaso's "obra sobrenatural" is a report of a reputation, not a clinical result, and this object does not turn it into one. What is sourced is a tree of Andean knowledge, recorded by three sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and named for its homeland even where it was newly planted.