An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage

  Around the Muslim Curtain

  In 1345 Jani Beg, the khan of the Golden Horde, laid siege to the port of Caffa on the Crimean peninsula. Genoese traders had purchased the city from the Golden Horde (the westernmost fragment of the collapsed Mongol Empire) in 1266 and it was their main trading emporium in the Black Sea. But Jani Beg disapproved of the use of the port for slave trading and tried repeatedly to take it back. Just as it looked as though he was about to succeed, however, his army was struck by a terrible plague. According to a contemporary account by Gabriele de Mussi, an Italian notary, Jani Beg’s troops loaded plague-ridden corpses into catapults and fired them into the city. The defenders threw the bodies over the walls of Caffa and into the sea, but the plague had taken hold. “Soon, as might be supposed, the air became tainted and the wells of water poisoned, and in this way the disease spread so rapidly in the city that few of the inhabitants had strength sufficient to fly from it,” de Mussi recorded. But some of the Genoese did manage to flee—and as they headed westward they took the plague with them in their ships.

  The plague, known today as the Black Death, spread throughout the Mediterranean basin during 1347, reaching France and En gland in 1348 and Scandinavia by 1349, and killing between one third and one half of the population of Europe by 1353, by some estimates. “A plague attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people,” noted a Byzantine chronicler. The exact biological nature of the plague is still hotly debated, though it is generally thought to have been bubonic plague, carried by fleas on black rats. It was known at the time as the “pestilence”; the term “Black Death” was coined in the sixteenth century and became popular in the nineteenth. No treatment could save victims once the plague took hold. There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a baffling series of dietary pronouncements. Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine; and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. “Olive oil,” they warned, “is fatal.”

  Among the long lists of foods to avoid, there were a few examples of foods that were meant to offer protection from the plague—chief among them spices, with their exotic, quasi-magical associations, pungent aromas, and long history of medical uses. The French doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and to carry various concoctions of pepper, rose petals, and other aromatics when going out. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio described people who “walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses.” This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden, a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.

  But as a means of preventing infection spices were, in fact, completely useless. Indeed, they were worse than useless; they were partly to blame for the arrival and spread of the plague in the first place. The Genoese port of Caffa was valuable because it sat at the western terminus of the Silk Road to China, and because spices and other goods from India, shipped up the Gulf and then carried overland to Caffa and other Black Sea ports, went around the back of the Muslim curtain. So Caffa allowed the Genoese to circumvent the Muslim monopoly and obtain eastern goods for sale to European customers. (Their arch-rivals, the Venetians, had by this time allied themselves with the Muslim sultans who controlled the Red Sea trade, and acted as their official European distributors.) The plague, which appears to have originated in central Asia, reached Caffa along the overland trade routes before being spread around Eu rope by Genoese spice ships.

  By the time the connection between the spice trade and the plague was noticed, it was too late. “In January of 1348 three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods,” wrote a Flemish chronicler. “When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared to touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith. Thus they were scattered from port to port.” Later that year a French writer in Avignon wrote of the Genoese ships that “people do not eat, nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear they may lately have arrived in the aforesaid ships . . . it has many times been observed that those who have eaten the new spices . . . have suddenly been taken ill.”

  The relative importance of the various land and sea routes between Europe and the East varied in accordance with the geopolitical situation in central Asia. Political unification under the Mongol Empire, for example, which encompassed much of the northern Eurasian landmass, from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east, made overland trade much safer, and volumes increased accordingly: In the thirteenth century it was said that a maiden could walk across the Mongol Empire with a pot of gold on her head without being molested. The establishment of Christian toeholds in the Levant during the Crusades provided other outlets for goods brought overland along the Silk Road or from the Gulf. Conversely, the breakup of the Mongol Empire in the early fourteenth century meant that the balance tipped back in favor of the Red Sea route, now controlled by the Muslim dynasty of the Mamluks.

  During the fifteenth century there was increasing concern in Europe over the extent of Muslim control over trade with the east. By 1400 some 80 percent of this trade was in Muslim hands. Their European distributors, the Venetians, were at the height of their powers. Venice handled around five hundred tons of spices a year, around 60 percent of which was pepper. The cargo of a single Venetian galley was worth a royal ransom. Various popes tried to ban trade with the Muslim world, but the Venetians either ignored them or won special dispensations to continue doing business as usual. Genoa, meanwhile, was in decline. Its Black Sea possessions were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks, a rising Muslim power that was encroaching upon the fast-shrinking Byzantine Empire. And between 1410 and 1414 there was a sudden spike in the price of spices—in En gland, the price of pepper increased eightfold—which painfully reminded everyone just how dependent they were on their suppliers. (The cause of this spike was probably the activities of Zheng He, whose unexpected arrival on the west coast of India disrupted the usual patterns of supply and demand and drove up prices.) All of this fueled a growing interest in the possibility of finding some new way around the Muslim curtain and establishing direct trading links with the East.

  The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is sometimes portrayed as the event that ultimately triggered the European age of exploration, but it was merely the most prominent in a series of events that finally choked off the land route to the East altogether. The Ottoman Turks had already conquered Greece and most of western Turkey by 1451, and they regarded Constantinople, by now the last significant holdout of the old Byzantine Empire, as “a bone in the throat of Allah.” Once it had fallen they imposed huge tolls on ships entering and leaving the Black Sea, and then went on to take the Genoese ports around its coast, including Caffa, which fell in 1475. Meanwhile the Ottomans’ Muslim rivals, the Mamluks, took the opportunity to raise the tariffs on spices passing through Alexandria, causing prices in Europe to increase steadily during the second half of the fifteenth century. It was not simply the fall of a single city, in short, but the slow crescendo of concern over the Muslim spice monopoly that prompted Eu ro pean
explorers to seek radical new sea routes to the East.

  6

  SEEDS OF EMPIRE

  After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood.

  —VOLTAIRE, 1756

  “I BELIEVE I HAVE FOUND RHUBARB AND CINNAMON”

  In June 1474 Paolo Toscanelli, an eminent Italian astronomer and cosmographer, wrote a letter to the Portuguese court in Lisbon outlining his unusual theory: that the fastest route from Europe to India, “the land of spices,” was to sail west, rather than trying to sail south and east around the bottom of Africa. “And be not amazed when I say that spices grow in lands to the west, even though we usually say the east,” he wrote. Toscanelli described the riches of the east, borrowing heavily from Marco Polo’s account, and helpfully included a nautical chart showing the islands of Cipangu and Antillia in the ocean on the way to Cathay (China), which he estimated to be 6,500 miles to the west of Europe. “This country is richer than any other yet discovered, and not only could it provide great profit and many valuable things, but it also possesses gold and silver and precious stones and all kinds of spices in large quantities,” he declared. The Portuguese court ultimately ignored Toscanelli’s advice, but Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor living in Lisbon at the time, heard of his letter and obtained a copy of it, possibly from Toscanelli himself.

  Columbus, like Toscanelli, was convinced that sailing west was the fastest route to the Indies, and he spent years amassing documents that supported his case, performing calculations, and drawing maps. The idea had solid intellectual foundations—the ancient authorities Ptolemy and Strabo had alluded to it—and Columbus also drew inspiration from Pierre d’Ailly, a fourteenth-century French scholar whose “Description of the World” declared that the journey from Spain to India, sailing west, would take “a few days.” But the backing of Toscanelli, one of the most respected cosmographers of his day, gave the theory added weight.

  Building on the calculations of Ptolemy, who had overestimated the size of Eurasia and underestimated the circumference of the Earth, Columbus cherry-picked figures from various authorities to convince himself that the Earth was even smaller and Eurasia even bigger, thus shrinking the intervening ocean. He used an estimate from al-Farghani, a Muslim geographer, for the circumference of the Earth; but he failed to appreciate the difference between Muslim and Roman miles and ended up with a figure that was, conveniently, 25 percent too small. Then he used Marinus of Tyre’s unusually large estimate of the size of Eurasia, and added on Marco Polo’s reports of Cipangu (Japan), a large island said to be hundreds of miles off the east coast of China, which further reduced the width of the ocean he would have to cross. In this way Columbus calculated the distance from the Canary Islands (off Africa’s west coast) to Japan to be slightly over two thousand miles—less than a quarter of the true figure.

  Convincing a patron to back his proposed expedition proved difficult, however. This was not, as is sometimes suggested, because the panels of experts appointed in the 1480s by the Portuguese and Spanish courts to evaluate Columbus’s proposal disagreed with his contention that the Earth was spherical; that was generally accepted. The problem was that his calculations looked fishy, particularly since they relied on evidence from Marco Polo, whose book describing his travels in the East was widely regarded at the time as a work of fiction. Portugual was, in any case, pursuing its own program of exploration down the west coast of Africa, and was unwilling to abandon it (which is why Toscanelli’s letter also fell on deaf ears). So both panels of experts said no. But Columbus’s fortunes changed when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, fresh from their victory at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, decided to back him after all. Columbus may have swayed them by suggesting that the proceeds of his expedition could fund a campaign to recon-quer Jerusalem. He certainly presented his voyage as an unashamedly commercial venture, and the documents defining the terms of the expedition granted him “a tenth of all gold, silver, pearls, gems, spices and other merchandise produced or obtained by barter and mining within the limits of these domains.”

  His three ships headed west from the Canary Islands on September 6, 1492, and encountered land, after an increasingly anxious voyage, on October 12. Columbus was certain that riches were in his grasp as soon as land was sighted. His log refers repeatedly to “gold and spices” and details his attempts to get the local people to tell him where to find them. “I was attentive and took trouble to ascertain if there was gold,” he wrote in his log on October 13, after meeting a group of natives. Two weeks after arriving, having visited several among what he took to be the 7,459 islands that Marco Polo claimed lay off the eastern coast of China, he wrote in his log: “I desired to set out today for the island of Cuba . . . my belief being that it will be rich in spices.” Columbus failed to find spices on Cuba, but he was told that cinnamon and gold could be found to the southeast. By mid-November he was still maintaining in his log that “without doubt there is in these lands a very great quantity of gold . . . stones, precious pearls and infinite spicery.” In December, lying off the island he had named Hispaniola, he recorded that he could see on the shore “a field of trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit . . . believed to be spices and nutmegs.”

  Given that Columbus communicated with the local people using sign language, he could interpret their signs in almost any way he chose. Just as conveniently, there were several plausible explanations for his failure to find any spices. Perhaps it was the wrong season; his men did not know the correct harvesting and processing techniques; and of course Europeans did not know what spices looked like in the wild anyway. “That I have no knowledge of the products causes me the greatest sorrow in the world, for I see a thousand kinds of trees, each one with its own special trait, as well as a thousand kinds of herbs with their flowers; yet I know none of them,” wrote Columbus. He also suffered from bad luck, it seemed: One crew member said he had found mastic trees, but unfortunately he had dropped the sample; another said he had discovered rhubarb but could not harvest it without a shovel.

  Columbus departed for Spain on January 4, 1493, having amassed a small amount of gold through trading with the local people. He also carried back samples of what he took to be spices. After a difficult voyage he arrived back in Spain in March 1493, and his official letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, reporting his discoveries, became a bestseller across Europe, with eleven editions published by the end of that year. He described exotic islands with lofty mountains, strange birds, and new kinds of fruit. On the island of Hispaniola, he wrote, “there are many spiceries, and great mines of gold and other metals.” He explained that delivery of the riches of these new lands could start right away: “I shall give their highnesses spices and cotton at once, as much as they shall order to be shipped, and as much as they shall order to be shipped of mastic . . . and aloes as much as they shall order to be shipped; and slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped, and these shall be from idolatrous peoples. And I believe I have found rhubarb and cinnamon.”

  Judging by the triumphant tone of his letter, it seemed that Columbus had achieved his objective of finding a new route to the riches of the east. Although the islands he visited did not match the descriptions of China and Cipangu from Marco Polo’s account, he was confident the mainland was nearby. What better proof than the presence of cinnamon and rhubarb, which were known to originate in the Indies? But opinion in the Spanish court was divided. The twigs that Columbus claimed were cinnamon did not smell right and seemed to have gone bad in the course of the return voyage. His other samples of spices were similarly unimpressive, and he had only found a small quantity of gold. Skeptics concluded that he had found nothing more important than a few new Atlantic islands. But Columbus claimed to be closing in on the source of the gold, so a second, much larger expedition was dispatched.

  The second expedition only perpetuated the confusion over the presence of spices. Writing home to Seville from Hispani
ola in 1494, Diego Álvarez Chanca, who acted as Columbus’s doctor on the voyage, explained the situation. “There are some trees which ‘I think’ bear nutmegs but are not in fruit at present. I say ‘I think’ because the smell and taste of the bark resembles nutmegs,” he wrote. “I saw a root of ginger, which an Indian had tied round his neck. There are also aloes: it is not of a kind which has hitherto been seen in our country, but I am in no doubt that it has medicinal value. There is also very good mastic.” Not one of these things was really there; but the Spanish really wanted them to be. “There is also found a kind of cinnamon; it is true that it is not so fine as that which is known at home,” wrote Chanca. “We do not know whether by chance this is due to lack of knowledge of when it should be gathered, or whether by chance the land does not produce better.”

  Columbus threw himself into exploration, hoping to show that he had found the Asian mainland. He claimed to have found the footprints of griffins and thought he detected similarities between local place names and those mentioned by Marco Polo. At one point he got every sailor in his fleet to swear an oath that Cuba was bigger than any known island, and that they were very close to China. Any sailor who refuted these claims was threatened with a large fine and the loss of his tongue. But doubts grew as Columbus returned from each of his voyages with a few lumps of gold and more of his dubious spices. He fell back on religious justifications for his activities—the natives could be converted to Christianity—though he also suggested that they might make good slaves. His settlers became increasingly rebellious. Columbus was accused of mismanagement of his colonies, and of having painted a misleading picture of their potential. At the end of the third voyage he was sent back to Spain in chains and was stripped of his title as governor. After a fourth and final voyage, he died in 1506, convinced to the end that he had indeed reached Asia.