by Tom Standage
The Periplus goes on to tell of the ports on India’s east coast and of the small vessels that traded between the east and west coasts. It also mentions the much larger ships that plied the Bay of Bengal between India and southeast Asia, which were probably Malay or Indonesian vessels. Given the size of Roman vessels, the fact that the size of these ships is remarked upon suggests that they were very large indeed. They would have carried goods from farther east, including nutmeg, mace, and cloves from the spice islands of Indonesia (the Moluccas) and silk from China.
Beyond this point the Periplus becomes rather vague. But it provides at least a glimpse, from the European perspective, of a vast trade network, the first connections of which had been established thousands of years earlier. Cardamom from southern India had been available in Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., Egyptian ships were bringing frankincense and other aromatics from the land of Punt (probably Ethiopia) in the second millennium B.C., and Pharaoh Ramses II was buried in 1224 B.C. with a peppercorn from India inserted in each of his nostrils. In a wave of expansion between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D., however, the spice-trade network came to encompass the entire Old World, with cinnamon and pepper from India being carried as far west as Britain and frankincense from Arabia traveling as far east as China. But the full extent of this network was generally unknown to its participants, since they were not always aware of the origins of the goods they traded. Just as the Greeks thought that the Indian spices that reached them via Arab traders actually originated in Arabia, so too the Chinese seem to have assumed that nutmeg and cloves came from Malaya, Sumatra, or Java, though these were in reality just ports of call on the way along the maritime trade routes from their true source farther east, in the Moluccas.
Spices also crossed the world by land. From the second century B.C. overland routes connected China with the eastern Mediterranean, linking the Roman world in the west and Han China in the east. (These routes were dubbed the Silk Road in the nineteenth century, even though they carried far more than silk and there was in fact a network of east-west routes, not a single road.) Musk, rhubarb, and licorice were among the spices traded along this route. Spices also traveled by land between the north and south of India, between India and China, and between southeast Asia and inland China. Nutmeg, mace, and cloves were available in India and China in Roman times but did not regularly reach Europe until the dying days of Roman rule.
The extent of this trade, and the amount spent importing exotic foreign goods, provoked some opposition in Rome. For one thing it was extravagant, which was not in keeping with the supposedly traditional Roman values of modesty and frugality. It also meant that large amounts of silver and gold were flowing east. Compensating for this outflow required that the Romans find new sources of treasure, either through conquest or by opening up new mines. And all of this was for products that were, strictly speaking, unnecessary and were sold at heavily marked-up prices.
As Pliny the Elder put it: “In no year does India absorb less than 55 million sesterces of our wealth, sending back merchandise to be sold to us at one hundred times its prime cost.” In total, he reported, Rome’s annual trade deficit with the east amounted to one hundred million sesterces, or about ten tons of gold, once Chinese silk and other fine goods were taken into account along with the spices. “Such is the sum that our luxuries and our women cost us,” he lamented. Pliny professed to be baffled by the popularity of pepper. “It is remarkable that its use has come into such favor, for with some foods it is their sweetness that is appealing, others have an inviting appearance, but neither the berry nor the fruit of pepper has anything to recommend it,” he wrote. “The sole pleasing quality is its pungency—and for the sake of this we go to India!”
Similarly, Pliny’s contemporary Tacitus worried about Roman dependence on “spendthrift table luxuries.” When he wrote these words around the end of the first century A.D., however, the Roman spice trade was already past its peak. As the Roman Empire declined and its wealth and sphere of influence shrank in the centuries that followed, the direct spice trade with India withered in turn, and Arab, Indian, and Persian traders reasserted themselves as the main suppliers to the Mediterranean. But the spices continued to flow. A Roman cookbook from the fifth century A.D., “The Excerpts of Vinidarius,” lists more than fifty herbs, spices, and plant extracts under the heading “Summary of spices which should be in the house in order that nothing is lacking in seasoning,” including pepper, ginger, costus, spikenard, cinnamon leaf, and cloves. And when Alaric, king of the Goths, besieged Rome in 408 A.D., he demanded a ransom of 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pieces of silver, 4,000 robes of silk, 3,000 pieces of cloth, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. Evidently the supply of Chinese silk and Indian pepper continued even as the Roman Empire crumbled and fragmented.
But during the period when direct trade with the east had thrived, it briefly brought the people of Eu rope into the vibrant Indian Ocean trade system. In the first century A.D., this trading network spanned the Old World, linking the mightiest empires in Eurasia at the time: the Roman Empire in Europe, the Parthian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Kushan Empire in northern India, and the Han dynasty in China. (Rome and China even established diplomatic contacts with each other.) Spices were just one of the things that traveled around this global network by land and sea. But since they had a high ratio of value to weight, could only be found in certain parts of the world in many cases, were easily stored, and were highly sought after, spices were exceptional in being traded from one end of the network to the other, as shown for example by the references in Roman sources to cloves, which grew only in the Molucca Islands on the other side of the globe. Spices brought a flavor of southeast Asia to Roman tables and the scent of Arabia to Chinese temples. And as spices were traded around the world, they carried other things along with them.
Old World trade networks of the first century a.d. linked the Mediterranean in the west with China and the spice islands in the east.
FREIGHTED WITH MEANING
Goods are not the only things that flow along trade routes. New inventions, languages, artistic styles, social customs, and religious beliefs, as well as physical goods, are also carried around the world by traders. So it was that knowledge of wine and wine-making traveled from the Near East to China in the first century A.D.; and knowledge of noodles traveled back in the other direction. Other ideas soon followed, including paper, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder. Arabic numerals actually originated in India, but they were transmitted to Europe by Arab traders, which explains their name. Hellenistic influences are clearly visible in the art and architecture of the Kushan culture of northern India; Venetian buildings were decorated with Arab flourishes. But in two fields in particular—geography and religion—the interplay between trade and the transmission of knowledge was mutually reinforcing.
One of the things that makes spices seem so exotic is their association with mysterious, far-off lands. For early geographers in the ancient world, attempting to put together the first maps and descriptions of the world, spices often marked the boundaries of their knowledge. Strabo, for example, referred to “the Indian cinnamon-producing country” which lay “on the edge of the habitable world,” beyond which the earth was, he said, too hot to allow humans to live. Even the more worldly author of the Periplus had little idea what happened east of the mouth of the Ganges: there was a large island, “the last place of the habitable world” (possibly Sumatra), after which “the sea comes to an end somewhere.” To the north was the mysterious land of “Thina” (China), the source of silk and malabathrum (cinnamon) leaves.
Traders and geographers depended on each other: Traders needed maps, and mapmakers needed information. Traders would visit geographers before setting out, and might then share information on their return. Knowing how many days it took to travel from one point to another, or typical itineraries of particular routes, made estimates of distance possible, and hence the construction of maps. In this way geographers learned about the la
yout of the world as an indirect result of the trade in spices and other goods. This is also why so much information about spices comes from the early geographers. Neither they nor the traders wanted to reveal all their secrets, but some give and take made sense for both parties. Merchants worked hand in hand with mapmakers, culminating in the map compiled in the second century A.D. by Ptolemy, a Roman mathematician, astronomer, and geographer. It was surprisingly accurate by modern standards and formed the basis of Western geography for more than a thousand years.
The interdependence between geography and trade was pointed out by Ptolemy himself, who noted that it was only due to commerce that the location of the Stone Tower, a key trading post on the Silk Road to China, was known. He was well aware that the Earth was spherical, something that had been demonstrated by Greek philosophers hundreds of years earlier, and he agonized about how best to represent it on a flat surface. But Ptolemy’s estimate of the circumference of the Earth was wrong. Although Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician, had calculated the circumference of the Earth four hundred years earlier and arrived at almost exactly the right answer, Ptolemy’s figure was one-sixth smaller—so he thought the Eurasian landmass extended farther around the world than it actually did. This overestimate of the extent to which Asia extended to the east was one of the factors that later emboldened Christopher Columbus to sail west to find it.
Ptolemy also believed that the Indian Ocean was landlocked, despite reports that it could be reached from the Atlantic by going around the southern tip of Africa. (Herodotus, for example, told of Phoenicians who had circumnavigated Africa around 600 B.C., taking around three years to do so and finding the seasons strangely reversed as they headed south.) Arab geographers realized that the idea of a landlocked Indian Ocean was wrong during the tenth century. One of them, al-Biruni, wrote of “a gap in the mountains along the south coast [of Africa]. One has certain proofs of this communication although no one has been able to confirm it by sight.” Al-Biruni’s informants were undoubtedly merchants.
Religious beliefs were another kind of information that spread naturally along trade routes, as missionaries followed routes opened up by traders, and traders themselves took their beliefs to new lands. Mahayana Buddhism spread along trade routes from India to China and Japan, and Hinayana Buddhism spread from Sri Lanka to Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. Tradition has it that Thomas the Apostle took Christianity to India’s Malabar coast in the first century A.D., arriving on a spice-trader’s ship in Cranganore (modern Kodun-gallur) in 52 A.D. But trade’s most striking religious symbiosis was with Islam. The initial expansion of Islam from its birthplace on the Arabian peninsula was military in nature. Within a century of the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., his followers had conquered all of Persia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria, Egypt, the rest of the northern African coast, and most of Spain. But the spread of Islam after 750 A.D. was closely bound up with trade: As Muslim traders traveled outward from the Arab peninsula they took their religion with them.
Arab trading quarters in foreign ports quickly converted to Islam. The African empires that traded with the Muslim world across the Sahara (such as the kingdom of Ghana, and the Mali Empire that replaced it) converted between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Islam also spread along trade routes into the cities of Africa’s east coast. And, of course, it was carried along the spice routes of the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India and beyond. By the eighth century Arab traders were sailing all the way to China to trade in Canton—a direct trade facilitated by political unification brought about by the rise of Islam in the west and the emergence of China’s Tang dynasty in the east. But the voyage was a particularly hazardous one. Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, a Persian writer, tells of a captain, Abharah, a legendary navigator who made the voyage to China seven times and lived to tell the tale, but only just: He was shipwrecked on one of his voyages and escaped as the only survivor from his ship.
This is the swashbuckling period depicted in the tales of Sinbad (or Sindbad) the Sailor, of great oceanic voyages, returning home a rich man, spending the spoils, and then becoming restless for adventure and setting out again. Sinbad’s tales draw upon the real experiences of Arab traders who plied the Indian Ocean. The direct trade with China ended in 878 A.D., however, when rebels opposed to the Tang regime sacked Canton and killed thousands of foreigners; thereafter merchants from Arabia only went as far as India or southeast Asia, where they traded with Chinese merchants. But Islam continued to spread along the trade routes and eventually took root right around the Indian Ocean, reaching Sumatra in the thirteenth century and the spice islands of the Moluccas in the fifteenth century.
Trade and Islam proved to be highly compatible. Being a merchant was regarded as an honorable profession, not least because Muhammad himself had been one, making several trips to Syria along the overland routes that carried spices from the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean. As Islam spread, the common language, culture, laws, and customs within the Muslim world provided a fertile environment in which trade could prosper. Visiting Muslim traders were more inclined to do business with coreligionists in trading centers; and once a major trading city in a particular region converted to Islam, it made sense for other towns nearby to follow suit, adopting Muslim laws and the Arabic language. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in the late thirteenth century, noted that the island’s northeast tip was “so much frequented by Saracen [Arab] merchants that they [had] converted the natives to the Law of Mahomet.” Even if some merchants initially converted for reasons of commercial expediency, Islam’s rapid spread suggests that they, or at least their descendants, soon became entirely sincere in their embrace of the new religion. Trade spread Islam, and Islam promoted trade. It is worth noting that at the end of the twentieth century, the two countries with the largest Muslim populations were Indonesia and China—both far beyond the realm of Islam’s military conquests.
Two historical figures illustrate Islam’s reach and unifying power. The first is Ibn Battuta, a Muslim from Tangiers who is often referred to as the Arab Marco Polo. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he set out to make the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, where he arrived the following year, having visited Cairo, Damascus, and Medina along the way. But rather than return home directly, he decided to do some more traveling and embarked on what turned into a twenty-nine-year, 73,000-mile journey around much of the known world. He visited Iraq, Persia, the east coast of Africa, Turkey, and Central Asia and traveled across the Indian Ocean to southern China. He then returned to North Africa, from where he visited southern Spain and the central African kingdom of Mali. It was an amazing journey by any standard, but what is particularly remarkable is that for most of his travels, Ibn Battuta remained within the Muslim world, or what Muslims call dar al-Islam (literally, “the abode of Islam”). He served as a judge in Delhi and the Maldives, was sent by an Indian sultan as an ambassador to China, and when he visited Sumatra in 1346, he found that the local sultan’s jurists were members of his own Hanafi school of legal thought.
The second figure is Zheng He, the admiral of China’s extraordinary armada of treasure ships. Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven official voyages, each lasting two years, that traveled far into the Indian Ocean. His fleet of 300 ships, manned by 27,000 sailors, was the largest ever assembled, and it was to remain unsurpassed in size for another five hundred years. Zheng He’s instructions were to demonstrate China’s wealth, might, and sophistication to other nations, establish diplomatic links, and encourage trade. Accordingly, he sailed via the spice islands of southeast Asia to the coast of India, up the Persian Gulf, and as far west as Africa’s east coast. Along the way his ships gathered curiosities, traded with local rulers, and collected ambassadors to take back to China. Zheng He was China’s ambassador to the outside world; perhaps surprisingly, he was also a Muslim. But that made him ideally qualified to navigate the ports, markets, and palaces of the kingdoms around the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, however, his efforts cam
e to nothing. Although he established China as a powerful presence in the Indian Ocean, internal rivalries within the Chinese court led to the disbanding of the navy, in part to settle political scores, but also so that resources could be diverted instead to protecting the empire from land-based attackers from the north.
If the world’s spice-trading networks were the communications networks of their day, linking up far-flung lands, then Islam was the common protocol on which they operated. But although trade flourished in the Muslim world, the rise of Islam had the effect of cutting Europe off from the Indian Ocean trade system. Once Alexandria fell to Muslim troops in 641 A.D., spices could no longer reach the Mediterranean directly: Europeans were relegated to a commercial backwater by a “Muslim curtain” that blocked their access to the east.