The discovery of worlds beyond Europe was a momentous event of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. With explorations in the new worlds, the first tobacco seeds came from Brazil into Portugal around 1520. The French ambassador in Lisbon, Jean Nicot de Villemain, then carried them to France and with this transfer ‘nicotine’ began its conquest of the world. In the 1550s, the potato was brought into Spain from Peru. Initially people deemed the tubers poisonous, but when the tubers went from Spain to Austria, people learnt to eat them.