by Carol Off
Chocolate quickly became a mainstay of the hybrid Spanish-American diet as a beverage but also as a flavour to spike savoury gravies and stews. It took many more years, however, before cocoa crossed the ocean to fuse with Spanish culture on the European continent, though there’s no evidence to credit Cortés with the auspicious introduction.
Cortés went to see King Charles shortly after the conquest of Mexico and brought along an extraordinary collection of wild animals, beautiful crafts and even people, including one of Montezuma’s sons. But if cocoa beans were among the curiosities presented to the court, there is no mention of it in written records of the occasion. Cortés had certainly mentioned cocoa in his letters to the king—in 1520, he described a “divine drink, which builds up resistance & fights fatigue” and “permits man to walk for a whole day without food.”
For men engaged in exploring and subduing an entire new continent, the value of such a potion hardly needed much elaboration. Yet Cortés’s main source of fascination with the bean continued to be cocoa’s monetary value in the New World. He was able to report to the king that, “they value [the bean] so highly that it is treated like currency throughout their land and they buy with it everything they need, in the markets and elsewhere.”
The Spanish could use cocoa to pay for goods and services in their colony—even to pay the meagre wages of the miners and porters who dug gold and silver and dragged it to the waiting transport vessels; even for the land they grabbed for the estates of the nobility; even for the purchase of slaves and prostitutes.
While the soldiers and the nobles knew the monetary value of cocoa, it was the clergy who understood its worth as nourishment. For this reason, it is most likely that priests and monks introduced chocolate to Europe.
These were chaotic times in continental Europe. As Holy Roman Emperor, Spain’s King Charles spent a lot of time away from home defending the realm from upstart dynasties in France and the far-flung Hapsburg empire. Imperialism is expensive, and Spaniards were struggling under the growing burden of war-driven taxation. To find himself master of new dominions rich with conventional resources and a local currency that grew on trees seemed to Charles like a gift from the Almighty.
By 1543, Charles, almost overwhelmed by imperial responsibilities, put his young son in charge of Spain. He saw to it that Philip, then just sixteen, was first well married and properly instructed in the affairs of state and then, despite his tender years, handed him the reins.
Philip was actually among the first European monarchs to seriously consider the effect Spain was having on those remote and difficult new territories and he disapproved of what he had heard about the abuse of Indians by the conquistadors. Philip’s main source of information was an extraordinary priest—a Dominican named Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Throughout history, in the midst of all the crimes and errors of Christian zealotry committed against aboriginals in the Americas, individuals like Las Casas emerged who seemed genuinely committed to human rights and justice. The priest warned the political and religious hierarchy back home that Spain was embarked on a project that would be its ruin; the abuse of the natives was mortal sin on a massive scale, and it would bring the wrath of God upon his country. Las Casas’s message was also pragmatic: the success of the New World project required the cooperation of the natives. Kindness and respect were more effective than coercion in winning the hearts and minds of those they needed as their willing partners. And he was shrewd enough to know that such a radical departure in colonial policy was going to need sympathetic support at the very top of the political system. From everything Las Casas had heard, Philip might be prepared to listen.
In 1544, a delegation of Dominicans, probably appointed by Las Casas, escorted a group of Kekchi Maya Indians to the Spanish court. They were from Guatemala, a place of fertile valleys tucked among tall cloud-clad mountains, where the forests of Xoconocho yielded some of the finest cocoa in the New World. Though their empire was crushed and their numbers diminished, the Maya could still be as dazzling as they’d been nearly half a century before when first presented to Columbus on the shores of Honduras and also, as Las Casas had learned, just as defiant.
The Maya brought many gifts for Philip, all of them associated with their own ancient deities and monarchs: thousands of rare and valuable feathers from the colourful quetzal bird, traditionally used to adorn the headdress of their leaders; sacred copa, a tree resin used to make incense, lacquered gourds—and jars of prepared liquid chocolate.
Records of the encounter are silent on whether the teenaged monarch actually sampled the mysterious brown broth, full of froth and bubbles. But it was the first known formal introduction in Europe of what was destined to become the continent’s most cherished treat. We can easily imagine the dramatic scene: a pale, curious teenaged prince surrounded by hooded monks and scantily clad copper-skinned Indians bedecked in feathers and beads, transfixed by a dark mélange in an ornate pot. It is less easy to imagine that any of them understood the social destiny of this vaguely noxious mixture.
The priests, inspired by the compassion of Las Casas, were thinking about human rights, not commerce, when they arranged the historic meeting between the young regent and his new subjects. Judged in that light, the visit was probably a failure. But it had the unanticipated effect of identifying the Dominicans as the proprietors of cocoa’s mysteries, and it wouldn’t be long before the friars were introducing their own recipes for cocoa treats to the Iberian court.
By the end of the century, cocoa was a crucial component of the trans-Atlantic trade. And soon the monks of Spain were busy turning out the new commodity. Monasteries had been involved in food production (and consumption) since the Middle Ages. Popular images of fat, waddling friars were inspired by their long association with wine and beer, cheese and butter, and now chocolate. As with many of their other products, they kept their new recipes a secret. They were so successful that Spain had a virtual monopoly over cocoa until well into the seventeenth century.
Spain also controlled what, for decades, was the only known source of cocoa beans. In fact, other Europeans didn’t even know of cocoa’s existence until long after it had become a luxury item at the Spanish court. In 1579, when English pirates boarded a Spanish vessel laden with cocoa, they mistook the dried brown beans for sheep manure. The disgusted buccaneers set the ship alight and sent the precious cargo to the bottom of the sea.
The conquistadors quickly expanded from Mexico City and soon controlled almost the entirety of what was once the Aztec Empire, including the fertile valleys of Central America, all the way to Guatemala. With an expanding market in Spain, the cocoa farms became more lucrative, and the pressure to produce more beans intensified. As the flow of New World silver and gold bullion forced down the value of precious metals in European markets, cocoa became a kind of liquid asset and a new source of economic stability.
The pressure intensified on Maya and other natives labouring in the expanding cocoa groves of what are now Belize and Guatemala. There was an insatiable demand for beans for the confectioners in Spanish monasteries and for the custodians of the Mexican and Spanish treasuries. Spanish colonists grabbed up the land, flattening large sections of the rainforest for new and expanded cocoa plantations. Cocoa’s inherent elitism played out again with the Spanish, as the “food of the gods” became a luxury for the upper classes, produced by the down-trodden.
In spite of the good intentions of the monks and young Philip back in Spain, working conditions on the cocoa plantations became even more horrendous. A medieval system called encomienda gave Spanish colonists the right to demand the services of local workers on their lands. The doctrine, as it was practised in Europe, required that landowners release their serfs for a few days a week to look after their own crops. But in the distant colonies it was easy to ignore this crucial aspect of the contract, and encomienda gradually became a sanctioned form of slavery.
Officially, Spain condemned the practice, especially for
those natives who had converted to Christianity and, somehow, became more entitled to the rights of “humans.” Bartolomé de Las Casas had persuaded the Spanish monarch to pass new laws that were designed to protect the Indians from abuse, but Cortés successfully made the case that the colonists could not survive without this involuntary native labour pool. And the Spanish colonists believed that, when it came to work, the only incentive the natives understood was brute force.
The growing popularity of chocolate in Spain and later throughout Europe was associated, at least in part, with a widespread belief in its pharmaceutical benefits. Certainly the Indians of the Americas had long recognized the medicinal properties of cocoa and had prescribed it for many minor ailments. Cocoa butter helped heal burns. Spaniards in the New World believed that cocoa was a drug, while some accounts from the monks and conquistadors even suggest that it was a hallucinogen or even an aphrodisiac. King Philip’s personal physician thought cocoa had a calming effect and helped relieve a fever, while other doctors claimed it was a pick-me-up.
To this day, chemists debate chocolate’s pharmaceutical properties. Cocoa contains theobromine and caffeine, alkaloids that excite the central nervous system and dilate blood vessels. A morsel of good-quality chocolate can also contain serotonin—a mind-altering chemical believed to alleviate depression. And there’s also phenylethylamine in cocoa, often called the love drug because it’s believed to be a sexual stimulant. Other scientists (often funded by chocolate companies) claim that a piece of dark chocolate delivers as much antioxidant as a glass of red wine and might even contain epicatechin, thought to inhibit chemically induced cancers such as those caused by tobacco.
Sixteenth-century pharmacists prescribed chocolate to help emaciated patients gain weight, to stimulate digestion and elimination, to revive lethargic people from their sluggishness and to remedy bowel dysfunction. A cup of cocoa before bed was sure to rouse even the most flaccid libido.
Whether cocoa was a panacea or a placebo, whether food or drink or medicine, the market for cocoa beans was growing in Spain, and consequently so was the demand for cheap labour in the New World. The Spanish monarchy mildly protested the abusive labour practices to their governors and agents in the New World, but their sentiments were easily ignored in the distant colonies. Over time, all the good intentions in the world would melt like chocolate before the overarching economic imperatives of the day: Spain needed all the wealth it could generate in the New World to maintain its imperial position in the old one.
Prince Philip became King Philip II after his father stepped aside in 1556, and the high ideals of his teenage years began to fade in the harsh light of necessity. The wars continued, as did the taxes. The wealth generated in the New World served to fuel inflation, and the king didn’t have a clue what to do about it—except to crank out more wealth from the colonies in America and now, just across the Straits of Gibraltar, in Africa. Sugar, spice and cocoa were too important to the imperial economy to be compromised by naive principles.
It is difficult to estimate the death rate of the aboriginal population in the Americas at the time. There was no census taken before contact with the Europeans, but some statistics estimate that, by the seventeenth century, as much as ninety per cent of the population in parts of Mexico and the Americas may have been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, succumbed to smallpox, measles and venereal diseases, while countless others perished from overwork, abuse and war.
Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote a book about the excesses of the colonial class, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (which included the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico), based on his own observations in the New World. In it, he described acts of cruelty amounting to mass murder, and he warned that such atrocities as he had witnessed would not go unpunished by the God he believed to be defined by justice and compassion. Las Casas dedicated the manuscript to King Philip and petitioned the monarch to stop the barbarism.
Las Casas started a debate, if little else. Neither his monarch nor the princes in the Church he served were willing to take the kind of punitive action necessary to stop the colonial abuse. Neither Spain nor any other European country knew how to take advantage of the wealth of the New World without exploiting and trampling on the human rights of the native peoples. There was alarm at the evidence that those people were dying off in genocidal numbers—but mostly because of the obvious manpower shortage that would result. Luckily, there was a solution.
The traffic in African slaves to work in the Caribbean sugar plantations was already well established by the mid-sixteenth century. Now their labour was required to meet the growing shortages in Central America and Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were now diverted to the Spanish American cocoa plantations.
With a potentially unlimited labour pool assured and a seemingly infinite supply of sugar and cocoa, chocolate consumption expanded even further, crossing European borders and capturing the attention of markets throughout the continent. The privileged took their cocoa with them everywhere. It became a refreshment to enjoy during public spectacles, and it wasn’t just for pleasure. The grim business of the Inquisition was lightened by the availability of cocoa for the clerics and aristocrats as they witnessed the agonies of suspected heretics.
Europe remained unstable throughout the century and into the next. Intermarriage between the various dynastic households became a contrivance to effect some kind of unity. There was no guarantee of success and, indeed, a high likelihood of even worse national hostility resulting from domestic discord in unsuccessful unions of convenience. But intermarriage was, if not a sure vehicle for peace, a medium for new ideas and shared discoveries. And when the granddaughter of King Philip II of Spain—Anne of Austria—married Louis XIII of France in 1615, chocolate was part of the marital package.
The French court was as skeptical of the strange brew as they were of Anne—France had been at war with Spain for decades. And whatever the supposed virtues of chocolate as an aphrodisiac, it’s worth noting that Anne’s new husband didn’t consummate their marriage for years, preferring to spend his time in the company of young men (he was fourteen when they wed). But it was a new beachhead for chocolate, and Anne was not entirely alone in her affection for it. The king’s powerful advisor, Cardinal Richelieu—who effectively ran France at the time—was a habitual cocoa drinker.
While chocolate caught on slowly in France, it gained quick acceptance on the Italian peninsula. The powerful Medicis were early aficionados, having been introduced to it by Spanish aristocrats in Tuscany. While Italy was an entanglement of feuding statelets in the seventeenth century, there did seem to be a nascent national consensus on the merits of chocolate. Cosimo de’ Medici, fat and unhealthy from overconsumption of food, ran a corrupt and venal system that eventually fell into stagnation and ruin, but he was also a celebrated patron of the arts and science. Among his beneficiaries was a celebrated doctor and philologist, Francesco Redi.
We owe to Redi our modern understanding of how maggots materialize on rotting flesh—and, paradoxically, Redi was also responsible for many exotic innovations involving chocolate. With the maggot mystery solved (they are the larva of flies that are drawn to the decomposition), the food-infatuated Cosimo wanted some Italian refinements to the Spanish cocoa drinks. Cocoa was still classified as medicine, as was tobacco, and Cosimo saw chocolate’s unlimited potential as a sensual experience. Redi cooked up batches of chocolate mixed not only with spices but also with perfumes, including ambergris, a rare and valuable musk oil derived from the excretions of sperm whales. He served up his concoctions to enthusiastic approval in the Medici court. In a flourish of artful chauvinism, Redi revised the history of chocolate to modestly include his own inventive role: “Chocolate was first introduced from America by the court of Spain, where it is made in all perfection. And yet to the Spanish perfection has been added, in our times, in the court of Tuscany, a certain I know not what of more exquisite gentility, owing to the novelt
y of divers European ingredients; a way having been found of introducing into the composition fresh peel of citron and lemons, and the very genteel odour of jasmine, which together with cinnamon, amber, musk and vanilla has a prodigious effect upon such as delight themselves in taking chocolate.”
Cocoa made its inevitabe journey up the Thames, arriving in London almost simultaneously with tea and coffee—along with a new spirit of democracy coloured the erstwhile elitist beverage. England was giving birth to a “middle class,” an extension of a merchant culture nurtured in the expanding world of trade and travel whose members enjoyed many of the privileges and pleasures once exclusively reserved for royalty. Unlike in France and Italy, where chocolate was principally served in snobby salons, English cities opened public coffee and chocolate houses, where the stimulating brew was more or less slopped together and served quickly while men gambled, bantered and debated the state of the economy and politics.
On the continent, chocolate would continue for a long time to be part of the royal prerogative. The son and successor to the sexually unsatisfied Louis XIII, the ultimately more famous Sun King, Louis XIV, didn’t like chocolate, but his wife, the Spanish Maria Theresa, was, predictably, a cocoa addict. Under her influence, the elixir grew in popularity in the French court, especially among women. A typical cocoa drink usually included vanilla extract—which had to be very fresh and oily—cinnamon, cloves, pepper and, of course, sugar. French servants presented the hot drinks in delicately painted porcelain cups perched on recessed saucers that were designed and made exclusively for sipping chocolate. And while the ladies and gentlemen of the court quaffed their cocoa, they naturally talked and debated every issue of their time.