by Cliff, Nigel
In a world of mysteries and miracles, spices were among the deepest secrets of the earth. Ambergris was credited with magical powers precisely because it was so outlandish, and the same went for other equally strange substances. Also among the apothecaries’ under-the-counter goods were “tutty,” or crusty deposits picked out of the chimneys of the East, and “mummy,” which was glossed in a leading drug handbook as “a kind of spice collected from the tombs of the dead”—a foul-smelling, pitchlike substance scraped from the heads and spines of embalmed corpses. One cherished commodity, solidified lynx urine, was believed to be a kind of amber or gemstone, while real gems and semiprecious stones were stocked alongside the rarer spices and were reputed to possess particularly strong curative powers. Lapis lazuli was prescribed for melancholia and malaria. Topaz soothed hemorrhoids. Jet, ground up and sprinkled around the house, induced menstruation and had the added benefit of warding off evil incantations. Crushed pearls were taken to stanch hemorrhages, to increase the flow of a nursing mother’s milk, and for the truly self-indulgent, to treat diarrhea. Lavish concoctions of gems and spices were the last resort if all else failed: the pampered elite could combat the winter blues by downing powdered pearls blended with cloves, cinnamon, galangal, aloes, nutmeg, ginger, ivory, and camphor, and ward off old age with an exquisite blend of pearl, sapphire, ruby, and coral fragments mixed with ambergris and musk—a mixture barely easier to digest than the cheaper alternative of viper’s flesh, cloves, nutmeg, and mace.
Gems, naturally, were for the rich, and a few doctors quietly expressed doubts that the exotic goods from the East were any more effective than common, or garden, herbs. But for those who could buy the best, the very fact that spices were borne across distant lands and seas from jungles and deserts unknown—and the sky-high prices they commanded—gave them a reassuring cachet of exclusivity. In an age that glorified conspicuous consumption, basking in a cloud of Eastern ambrosia was an essential ingredient of high living. Spices were the luxury goods par excellence of the medieval world.
The profits at stake were immense, and unscrupulous merchants, their sales patter heavy with the exotic Orient, were not above adulterating their goods by soaking them in water to add weight, hiding stale spices under fresh ones, or even adding shavings of silver, which was worth less than its weight in cloves. Their customers’ fury knew no bounds: in 1444 one adulterator of saffron was burned to death in Nuremberg, though more often it was the spices that were incinerated. The increasingly vociferous anti-spice lobby, though, had larger concerns than a little local larceny; what really outraged it was the scandalous waste of money. Moralists fulminated that spices—even “that damned pepper”—merely inflamed the senses, generated gluttony and lust, and were gone in a flash. The habit, they fumed, was turning doughty Europeans into effeminate wastrels. Most egregiously of all, the taste for Eastern luxuries was draining Europe’s treasuries of gold and funneling it into the grasping hands of the Infidel.
It was not that spices were seen as unholy; quite the reverse. The aromas of the East, the naysayers sternly warned, properly belonged to heaven and the saints and not to greedy mortals. Resins and spices had been used in religious rituals as incense, balms, and unguents at least since the time of ancient Egypt, and though the first Christians shunned perfumes as the whiff of the bathhouse, brothel, and pagan altar, the idea that fragrances summoned up the supernatural proved hard to dispel. Medieval Christendom believed that the bittersweet smell of spices was a breath of heaven on earth, a waft of the fragrant hereafter. The scent, it was said, clung to visiting angels and verified their presence, while devils could be detected by their telltale stink. Saints were also believed to smell miraculously spicy, and those who had endured a particularly gruesome death were held to enjoy a correspondingly fragrant afterlife. In the fifteenth century the corpse of St. Lydwine of Schiedam, who broke a rib while ice-skating as a teenager and was fated to live for another thirty-eight years while chunks of her body fell off and blood poured from her mouth, ears, and nose, was reported to exude an appetizing savor of cinnamon and ginger.
LONG AGO, EUROPEANS had traveled the spice routes. The Greeks had shown the way, and the Romans, after ousting Cleopatra from her throne, had established a regular trade between the east coast of Egypt and the west coast of India. As many as 120 huge freighters had sailed back and forth each year to satisfy the Roman penchant for piquant flavors and exotic perfumes, though even then purists were complaining about the vast trove of gold and silver that was being forked out for Eastern fripperies, a theme the satirist Persius took up in the first century CE:
The greedy merchants, led by lucre, run
To the parch’d Indies and the rising sun;
From thence hot Pepper and rich Drugs they bear,
Bart’ring for Spices their Italian ware.
By the third century the Arabs had taken over the sea routes, and the later rise of Islam had consolidated their control of the Eastern trade. As Europe’s fortunes revived, the merchants of Venice and Genoa had haggled in the bustling spice markets of Constantinople, built by imperial edict beside the palace gate so the aromas wafted upstairs, and during the Crusades the Christian ports of Syria and Palestine had done a roaring trade in spices and jewels, oriental carpets and silks. Yet Europe’s spice merchants were the last link in a long supply chain, and they were utterly in the dark about where their precious goods originated or how they were produced.
As usual, ignorance bred a heady swirl of speculation. Since spices clearly came from a blessed place, the reasoning went, the obvious location was the earthly Paradise. From a handful of classical authorities it was clear that spices were most abundant in India, so it followed that India must border Paradise. Even so, it was known that some spices came from other far-flung places, and the answer to that puzzle was found in the Bible. The book of Genesis revealed that the Garden of Eden watered four rivers, which had become identified as the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Nile. It had long been believed that all four gushed forth from a single giant spring at the center of the Garden, but even Europeans had come to balk at that mangling of geography, so it was decided that the rivers ran underground until they surfaced at their apparent source. Of the four, the Nile was the most venerated, and since it could hardly flow through the sea, it had become accepted that the African hinterland from which it issued must be connected to India. This neatly explained why spices were widely available in Egypt. A Frenchman who went there with the Seventh Crusade revealed that every night, the people who lived along the banks of the Upper Nile cast nets into the stream: “When morning comes, they find in their nets such things as are sold by weight and imported into Egypt, as for instance ginger, rhubarb, aloes, and cinnamon. It is said that these things come from the earthly Paradise, for in that heavenly place the wind blows down trees just as it does the dry wood in the forests of our own land, and the dry wood from the trees in Paradise that thus falls into the river is sold to us by merchants in this country.”
As to the means of harvesting the spices, Europe’s experts had plenty to say. It was well known that pepper grew on trees patrolled by poisonous snakes. “The pepper forests are guarded by serpents, but the natives burn the trees when the pepper is ripe and the fire drives away the snakes,” Isidore of Seville expounded in his encyclopedia. “It is the flame that blackens the pepper, for pepper is naturally white.” Some authorities declared that the whole grove had to be replanted after the blaze, which explained the high cost of the crop. Collecting cinnamon was equally labor intensive:
The Arabians say that the dry sticks . . . are brought to Arabia by large birds, which carry them to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices which no man can climb. The method invented to get the cinnamon sticks is this. People cut up the bodies of dead oxen into very large joints and leave them on the ground near the nests. They then scatter, and the birds fly down and carry off the meat to their nests, which are too weak to bear the weight and fall to
the ground. The men come and pick up the cinnamon.
The more cynical suspected Arab merchants of spreading tall tales to justify their prices, but the accounts were widely believed. So were the old reports that precious stones were only found in treacherous Indian gorges; since no man could climb down, the only way to retrieve the gems was to fling chunks of raw meat at them and send trained birds to fetch the glittering morsels. This particular thesis also convinced the Islamic world—it turns up in the tales of Sinbad, the sailor from Basra—and traveled as far as China. Over the centuries snakes were added to the ravines, some of which could kill with a mere glance. Alexander the Great, of course, had the answer: he lowered mirrors in which the snakes stared themselves to death, though he still fell back on the meat-and-birds strategy to retrieve the stones.
The first real information about the origin of spices reached Europe during the long Mongol peace. The Mongols, who were not particularly hung up on faith, guaranteed security of travel to all comers across their empire, and to adventurous Europeans the prospect of penetrating Asia’s hidden places was irresistible. Missionaries led the way, and merchants soon followed. The Italians, as usual, were in the vanguard, and among them was a young Venetian named Marco Polo. In 1271 the seventeen-year-old Marco set out for Beijing, where he became the trusted envoy of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. He set out to survey the Great Khan’s lands, and after twenty-four years he returned to Venice laden with rich jewels and richer tales. Almost immediately he was imprisoned by the Genoese, who were then at war with Venice, and he whiled away the time by dictating his Travels to a fellow inmate.
Marco Polo’s Asia was remarkably free of monstrous races, he poured cold water on the fireproof salamander, and he reshaped the unicorn into the less graceful rhinoceros. He—or his amanuensis—was not immune to all the old stories; diamonds, the Travels explained, were eaten by white eagles enticed into snake-infested Indian crevasses by lumps of raw meat, then fished out of the birds’ excrement. Yet on the whole his was a practical businessman’s report—and that was what made it startling reading. The China he described was a peaceful and prosperous nation of vast wealth and extent, a realm of countless cities built on a colossal scale, each with thousands of marble bridges and harbors teeming with junks. Fifteen hundred miles off its coast—an overestimate that would greatly encourage a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus—was Japan, whose palaces were roofed with gold. Polo was the first European to report the existence of Japan and Indochina; he was also the first known to have reached India, and the first to pass on the information that many of its spices came from islands far to the east, the number of which he put at precisely 7,448.
The Mongols had never conquered India, and only a tiny trickle of Westerners made it to the subcontinent after Marco Polo. In 1291, shortly before he returned to an astonished Venice, two missionary friars visited India on their way to China, and they were soon followed by a third, an intrepid Dominican named Jordan of Sévérac, who spent much of his life single-handedly supporting the tiny Christian communities established by his predecessors. Both Jordan and his Franciscan counterpart Odoric of Pordenone wrote accounts of the marvels of India that were heavily embroidered to entice new recruits, but they also contained some fresh information. Odoric finally explained that pepper grew on vines and was dried by the sun; crocodiles stalked the groves, he added, but they were timid and ran away from a modest fire. Another Franciscan, named John of Marignola, who set out in 1338 as a papal envoy to China and wandered around much of Asia for fifteen years, described how pepper was harvested, and demystified the people with parasol feet by introducing the West to the umbrella.
Of all the new revelations, the most provocative was Friar Odoric’s report that pepper was as abundant in India as grain was in Europe; the crop, he surmised, grew only on the Malabar Coast, the monsoon-soaked shoreline of southwest India, but it took a man eighteen days to travel from one end of the plantation to the other. This was news to feed Europe’s mounting anger at the ruinous cost of its condiments. The more India became a real place to the West, the more the old awe at the inordinate rarity of spices was scoffed away in favor of new stories of their absurd abundance. Spices, polemicists began to claim, grew everywhere in the East and cost nothing; it was Christendom’s enemies who spread wild stories and manipulated the supply and price.
It was all too much for many people. Vast stretches of the lands Marco Polo described were completely unknown to the ancients and the Christian geographers alike, and his claims were not widely credited. His was only one of many competing voices, and other travel writers continued to peddle and embellish the old stories, in some cases without ever leaving home. The highly imaginative Travels of Sir John Mandeville, likely written in the mid-fourteenth century by a French physician from Liège, came complete with dog-men, apple smellers, and one-eyed giants and was far more popular with the reading public than was Polo’s sober report. “Mandeville” took in a large sweep of the Middle East, China, and India, with a detour to the mountain of Paradise with its gushing spring and its wall of flaming swords. The plausible guide insisted that the pepper plantations were, after all, infested with snakes, though they could easily be driven away with lemon juice and snails. Prester John, he added, was fabulously rich from his extensive pepper forests and from the emeralds and sapphires that sparkled in his rivers. His land was watered by a spring of marvelous flavors that cured any disease and preserved everyone at thirty-two years old, the exact age at which Jesus was crucified.
With the downfall of the Mongols the overland routes became unsafe and eventually impassable, and virtually all travel between the two continents ceased. Europe’s tantalizing glimpse of the East was soon a dim memory, and it became harder than ever to tell fact from the fantasies supported by centuries of tradition. It was painfully clear, though, that with the Turks entrenched in Constantinople, any hopes Europe had of infiltrating the spice trade had receded further than ever. This was no epicurean’s lament; the predicament posed a dire threat to Europe’s economy, its political structures, and even its faith. As prices rose sky-high and demand barely wavered, the obsession with keeping up appearances left the privileged classes—including several royal courts—facing the real possibility of severe financial embarrassment. Even worse, the prospect of an ever richer Islamic world pushing on an impoverished Europe’s doors seemed to spell Christendom’s doom.
The European powers that appeared to have most to lose from the new order of things were Venice and Genoa. For centuries the two maritime republics had vied for control of trade with the East. One late-fifteenth-century visitor to Venice was astonished to discover that the whole world seemed to be doing business there: “Who could count the many shops,” he marveled, “so well furnished that they almost seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades, and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every color and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries, and drugs, and so much beautiful wax! These things stupefy the beholder.” The wealth of both cities depended on a regular supply of Asian luxuries, and the supply had dried up.
Yet as Venice’s councilors met inside the newly completed Doge’s Palace, its architecture inspired by the mosques, bazaars, and palaces of the East, they scented an opportunity, not a disaster. The city’s merchants still had deep contacts within the Islamic world, and since Muslim control of the trade routes was all but complete, the rest of Europe had even less chance of competing with them than before. Half afloat on its lagoon, Venice had always been tenuously anchored to Europe; to its neighbors its power had a cold, hard sheen, and its religious scruples came a distant second to trade. “Siamo Veneziani, poi Cristiani,” its people were fond of saying; “First Venetians, then Christians.” Within months of the conquest of Constantinople the republics were back, buying their luxuries from the Ottomans and passing on the inflated tariffs to their customers. The entente did not last—Mehmet’s co
nquering gaze soon turned on Venice’s overseas colonies, and despite itself the republic was plunged into its own Crusade—but for all the Ottomans’ triumphs they were not the only game in town. Mehmet was marching toward war with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, and the Egyptians dispatched a series of dazzling embassies to Italy in a deliberate attempt to cut their fellow Muslims out of the market. One deputation arrived in Florence bearing balsam, musk, benzoin, aloeswood, ginger, muslin, Chinese porcelain, purebred Arabian horses, and a giraffe. Another reached Venice, and the republic soon switched much of its trade to the ancient Egyptian port of Alexandria.
To the rest of Europe, the situation was a scandal. Italy’s merchants were conniving with Muslims to corner the spice trade, and their fellow Christians were paying the price. As so often, necessity was the mother of invention; with Islamic states once again lined up along Europe’s land borders, the notion of reaching the East by sea no longer seemed quite so ridiculous.
It was still such a radical idea that few gave it a passing thought, but it was not entirely new. Back in 1291, as the last Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land had fallen to the Egyptians, two Genoese brothers had put into action a heroically suicidal plan. Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi had equipped two oared galleys for a ten-year voyage and had set out with the intention of reaching India by sailing around Africa. They rowed across the Mediterranean and out through the Pillars of Hercules and were never heard from again, though persistent legends held that they circumnavigated Africa before being taken prisoner by an unexpectedly hostile Prester John. No one would attempt the same feat until Vasco da Gama set sail two centuries later, but the notion that the seaborne trade of the East was the key to undermining Islam gradually became an article of faith, and it kept resurfacing in the reams of propaganda that flew from the pens of Crusading revivalists.