Short answers, pulled from the story.
Black pepper is the dried fruit of Piper nigrum, a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae native to Southeast or South Asia. The fruit is a drupe about 5 mm in diameter that dries into the peppercorn used as a spice and seasoning.
Black pepper is made from still-green, unripe drupes that are cooked and dried until the skin wrinkles black. White pepper is only the seed of the ripe fruit with the skin removed, usually by retting. Green pepper comes from unripe drupes treated to keep their green colour.
Black pepper was so prized it was called black gold and used as commodity money and collateral. Alaric, king of the Visigoths, demanded 3,000 pounds of pepper in his ransom of Rome in the fifth century, and its high medieval price drove the Portuguese to seek a sea route to India.
In 2023, world production of black peppercorns reached 855,105 tonnes, led by Vietnam with 30 percent of the total. Brazil, Indonesia, and India were the secondary producers, and pepper accounts for one-fifth of the world's spice trade.
Black pepper gets its heat from piperine, making up between 4.6 and 9.7 percent of its mass, a spiciness different from the capsaicin in chilli peppers. Its aroma comes largely from rotundone and terpenes such as germacrene, limonene, and pinene in the outer fruit layer.
No, this is a myth that historians view as highly unlikely. Pepper was a luxury affordable only to the wealthy, who had unspoiled meat, and people of the time knew spoiled food would make them sick.
Black pepper has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE and was found stuffed in the nostrils of Ramesses II after his death in 1213 BCE. It first appears with certainty in Chinese texts in the third century CE as hujiao, or foreign pepper.