Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  They may have first specialized in transcontinental trade of just four aromatics: musk, camphor, aloe wood, and cassia cinnamon.2 For well over a century after the ban on Christian-Muslim trade in 800, the Radhanites were nearly solely responsible for every ounce of these four spices that reached southern Europe’s city-states. Soon, however, they added other spices along with perfumes, precious stones, jewelry, silk, furs, and swords to their inventory. Although only a few documents describing their activities have survived, it appears that the Radhanites also became more and more engaged in slave trade as time went on. They apparently had no qualms about moving female slaves and eunuchs among faiths, countries, or continents.

  The Radhanites were relatively few in number, but they moved extraordinary numbers of small packages of high-value goods through ports such as Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Beirut, and Alexandria, where other resident Jews harbored them during difficult times.

  Unlike more sedentary Jewish merchants, the Radhanites did not restrict themselves to working out of a few ports. Instead, particular individuals are known to have traveled from the Rhône Valley to Córdoba in al-Andalus, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Fez and Alexandria, then on to Baghdad, Basra, Cochin, and Canton. One Jewish traveler and trader who may have been a Radhanite descendant, Benjamin of Tudela, left Spain in 1165 and visited over three hundred cities in Europe, Asia, and Africa before he returned to Spain in 1177. Along the way, he stayed with Jews in Italy, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Persia, Egypt, and Morocco; all the while, his ties with other Jews from the Iberian Peninsula remained strong.

  Benjamin of Tudela’s travels along the spice routes came more than two centuries after the heyday of Radhanite dominance. Not long after 900, the Venetians and the Karimi broke the Radhanite monopoly on the movement of aromatics. There was a brief free-for-all among many players to regain control of the trade routes they had managed prior to the Radhanite reach, but it did not take long for the Karimi guild of traders to trump all others and gain exclusive jurisdiction over a vast trade network.

  Today, centuries after the Karimi traders were active, historians remain humbled by how little they know about this guild, which kept details of how its organization functioned secret. It appears that the term Karimi came from the Tamil language of the Indian subcontinent, where it was used for people involved in business affairs. But by 1150, an elite group of “merchants of pepper and of other spices” assumed the name. Although the primary residences of individual Karimi traders ranged from Spain to China, the members collectively purchased protection for their activities from both empires and pirates. As the affluence they derived from their control of trade eclipsed even that of the Radhanites and Phoenicians before them, they became what financial historian William Bernstein has called “the medieval world’s greatest source of concentrated wealth.”3

  The guild began as a small group of merchants—perhaps fewer than fifty individuals—a mix of Tamil, Hindu, Persian, Arab, and maybe even a few Egyptian Jewish entrepreneurs.4 But by the Mamluk era, which began around 1250, most of those newly selected to be in the guild were Arab Muslims who followed Islamic commercial, ethical, and social protocols exclusively. From then on, elite membership in the Karimi group was largely passed on from father to son, so that the funduqs (lodgings), based in strategically placed trade hubs, remained in the steady hands of specific family dynasties. This stability through time provided Karimi traders with a kind of collective-bargaining power that was unprecedented historically, much the same way that the oil-producing member nations of OPEC have controlled the price and supply of oil since the 1970s.

  It is probable that the Karimi families controlled much of the spice trade within their particular regions of origin, but their collective interests were transnational rather than tightly tied to any single political power. First, they had coalesced to secure control over sea trade in spices across the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean. They initially commanded most trade out of the ports of present-day Yemen and Egypt but later added the finest ports of India, Ceylon, and the Great Horn of Africa to their portfolio.

  Soon their networks had agents, shipbuilders, and merchant marine fleets that worked the seas from al-Andalus and the Maghreb in the far west to the coasts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar in the south. By 1415, they were using the prosperous port of Ceuta to obtain hundreds of thousands of pounds of melegueta and other Guinea peppers (grains of Selim, West African pepper) from the African continent, which they passed on to Arab, Italian, and Iberian merchants.5

  Because European Catholic merchants were still forbidden to trade directly with the Muslims in the Karimi guild, the remnants of the declining multiethnic convivencia in al-Andalus continued to facilitate the transfer of Karimi-controlled goods into western Europe. The Karimi guild also exerted considerable control across the overland routes by having its families or agents based in Mecca, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, and Smyrna. Later, it brought them direct access to China through the old port of Zayton and other harbors on the East China Sea.

  The guild had within its ranks its own equivalents of Aristotle Onassis, Edward H. Harriman, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—men outside of royalty but critically positioned to control the transactions and transportation involved in regional and international commerce. Unlike the Jewish businessmen who played complementary roles during the same era, the Karimi merchants did not engage in money lending, tax farming, banking, or commodity wholesaling. Perhaps the single richest man in the preindustrial world was not a banker or a king but the Karimi merchant Yasir al-Balisi, whose fortune reached 10 million dinars, the equivalent of 500 million U.S. dollars in today’s currency.6 Many Karimi families amassed fortunes of 1 million dinars (50 million dollars) over the space of one to three generations.

  Thirteenth-century spice trader Muhammad bin Abd al-Rahman b. Ishmail al-Jaziri began his career with less than five hundred dinars and increased his assets a hundredfold by his death in 1302, a result of personally brokering the transfer of goods from the Karimi base at Souk al-Atarrin in Alexandria, to Cairo, Mecca, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, and Muscat. In addition, he traveled to Zayton three times to maintain his business interests there.7 When not physically present in one of these ports, he could use Karimi banking institutions to make loans or transfer funds from the Middle East to the Land of the Rising Sun (the Far East) or to the Land of the Setting Sun (the Maghreb).

  On the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilians and other Spanish-speaking Christians, perhaps feeling that their roots were deeper and more genuine, began to treat the Arabs and Jews with ever greater suspicion. From the view of Spanish Catholics, the Muslims and Jews of al-Andalus were growing more intellectually and culturally influential and more politically and economically powerful. The Jewish bankers and moneylenders became easy targets for fear-mongering Spanish Catholics. And ever since the beginning of the Crusades in 1095, Spanish Catholics had become increasingly ambivalent about the Arab and Berber Muslims who lived on their southern doorstep. Once the Sublime Ottoman State had captured the trading hub of Thessaloníki from the Venetians in 1387, both Catholic and Orthodox Christians became worried that they were on the verge of another Islamic surge into Europe.

  Two years later, in 1389, when Ottoman troops won the Battle of Kosovo, it was clear that the Vatican’s worst fears had become reality. The Ottoman Empire had begun to expand into Europe from the East, and the independent state of the Nasrid dynasty based in Granada had gained complete control of all maritime trade going through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  And yet, it was not some potential political or military power that Jews and Muslims might ultimately harness against them that the Spanish Catholics feared. Instead, it was the pervasive and effective control that these immigrants had exerted over nearly every aspect of trade between the “Spanish” city-states and almost every other cluster of city-states and empires in the world at that time, exercised through their unparalleled mastery of the science of navigation.

&nbs
p; The kings and queens of Castile, Aragon, Catalan, and Genoa were particularly distraught when the Ottoman Empire cut off Silk Road trade to Europe through Constantinople in 1453, and they remained frustrated by the tight Muslim control of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Castilians tried in vain to gain control of the Strait of Gibraltar several times. In fact their king, Alfonso XI, had succumbed to the Black Death while attempting to take the strait by siege in 1349. Instead, it remained under Muslim Berber control until 1462, even though Islamic Spain had dwindled to a tenth of its former size by that time.8 More important, no Islamic army ever invaded Spain again after that era.

  It is not always easy for a culture of one faith to remember its intellectual, spiritual, and even economic debt to cultures of other faiths. Despite the fact that Catholic families’ own fortunes could not have been accumulated without Muslim and Jewish scholarship in Iberian universities and Jewish and Muslim business prowess in trade with Africa and the Middle East, the Catholic cousins known as Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile saw little reason to invest any more in these intellectual and financial engines. By the time they had married and joined forces to reunite the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, they had already begun to extract enormous tribute taxes from the Jewish, Arab, and Berber merchants who brought in great quantities of spices and other goods from North Africa. The very wellspring of their power became a moot point to Ferdinand and Isabella. When they seized the keys of the Alhambra from the last Islamic emir of al-Andalus, the bumbling Boabdil, he supposedly lamented to Ferdinand, “Allah must love you well, for these are the keys to his paradise.”9

  An eight-hundred-year legacy of innovation engendered by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim interaction on the peninsula had finally been broken. Most Muslims departed immediately. The Sephardim had likely maintained some presence in Iberia for longer than that, but their status too was destined to change.

  At first, Ferdinand and Isabella feigned respect for the defeated Muslims, bedecking themselves in Arab garb as they climbed the hills of Granada to take possession of the magnificent Alhambra in February of 1492. They immediately asserted that Muslim and Jewish merchants would still have access to their mosques and synagogues, markets and maritime trade routes. Further, they magnanimously blessed those who chose to immigrate across the strait to Ceuta or Fez and invited them to take their belongings with them. Boabdil, also known as el Zogoybi (The Unfortunate), took them up on the amnesty offer, leaving his token fiefdom in the cool highlands of Alpujarras for the desert heat of Fez and taking eleven hundred servants and former soldiers along with him.

  But as early as 1481, when the first Inquisition in Spain began, Ferdinand had confided to the pope that he intended to forcibly expel all Muslims and most Jews from the peninsula. On March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, an edict that forced the expulsion of all unconverted Jews and Muslims left in their kingdoms on the peninsula. If this edict was not enough to drive a stake into the heart of the convivencia, Ferdinand and Isabella called on Fray Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, a former Franciscan hermit, then the minister general of the Catalan order in Spain, to begin the new Inquisition as its inquisitor-general. Cisneros also served as Isabella’s confessor, giving him unprecedented political access to the queen. In 1499, while visiting the once-great haven of tolerance now known as Granada, Cisneros cranked up the level of xenophobia among Spanish Catholics to what was likely an altogether unprecedented level. The fearful prelate wrote, “Since there are Moors [everywhere] on the coast, which is so near to Africa, and because they are so numerous, they could be a great source of harm [to us] were times to change.”10

  FIGURE 15. The Capitulation of Granada, by Francisco Pradilla Ortiz, 1882, depicts the surrender of Boabdil (Muhammad XII) to Ferdinand and Isabella.

  Once the Inquisition got rolling, less than 1 percent of the Jewish and Muslim families chose to remain in Spain, and many left the peninsula for good. Estimates vary widely, but somewhere between 180,000 and 800,000 practicing Jews and Muslims departed from southern Spain as quickly as they could. Even those Jews and Muslims who had converted began to flee for their lives, for any minor suggestion that they had retained their former faith might lead them to being burned at the stake. Cisneros initiated indictments that resulted in over 125,000 Iberian residents of Jewish, Berber, and Arab descent being investigated for crimes of belief. By 1533, some forty-four thousand judgments had been made. No fewer than twenty-two hundred Jews and Muslims were executed for maintaining family rituals that suggested Judaic or Islamic beliefs. But thousands more were killed without trial by Christian vigilantes, and untold numbers died of disease while in captivity, awaiting trial. In later years, some scholars estimated that the numbers of Muslims who were killed or died in prison may have been double that of the Jews. But regardless of scholarly debates over the correct numbers, both Jews and Muslims suffered greatly during this horrific era in ways that no statistic can relate.

  The minuscule proportion of “former” Jews and Muslims who stayed in Iberia were careful to abandon any residual outward trappings of their earlier faiths, especially their deeply seated food habits. The Catholics not only forced these conversos (former Jews) and moriscos (former Muslims) to eat pork but also replaced the once-abundant flocks of sheep and goats of the Andalusian countryside with sounders of swine. Worse yet, the Spanish Catholics nicknamed the Jewish conversos marranos (hogs) to remind them that they now must acquire a taste for pork. Kashrut and halal butchering rituals could no longer be performed. The derogatory term marrano was also used by the Jews who fled Spain for their brethren who had abandoned their faith and ancient food taboos.

  The baking and eating of pan de semita (unleavened bread made with bran or sesame) and capirotada (a bread pudding made with fruit and nuts)—long associated with Passover and Ramadan fasts—were officially banned. Before they died (in 1516 and 1504, respectively) Ferdinand and Isabella had extended their ethnic cleansing campaign to scour away all questionable foods from the root cellars, larders, kitchens, and feasts of the converts.

  The very foods that had long reinforced their links with the Middle East could no longer be eaten by Sephardic Jews, Berbers, and Arabs anywhere in Spain.11 Most of the spices long treasured by Spanish Jewry and Muslim clans like the Banu Umayyah, especially the warm, sunny spices from the Middle East brought to Spain by Ziryab, suddenly vanished from the Iberian landscape.

  Naively perhaps, I went looking for these spices and other seasonings on my first trip to Andalusia, frequenting farmers’ markets in Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, and other towns. I liked the fruits I found there, especially the many apricot and plum varieties, the medlars and quinces. I found it curious to see so many pata negra hams hanging from hooks and very little mutton or goat meat. I asked for fresh spices, but when meager amounts were presented to me, they were not nearly as fresh, as numerous, or as sought after by local shoppers as what I had seen in Moroccan souks some weeks earlier.

  I compared medieval recipes from al-Andalus with those offered in contemporary Andalusian cookbooks. Coriander, historically the most frequently used seed spice in al-Andalus, is rarely used in the region’s current portfolio of traditional recipes. The use of saffron in recipes has been reduced to roughly one-third of the frequency it enjoyed in medieval al-Andalus. The use of cassia cinnamon has declined, as well, as has the regional demand for cloves, ginger, rue, rose water, and almonds. Only black pepper and garlic have increased in the frequency of use over the centuries, and after the colonization of the Americas, red chiles quickly eclipsed the use of the less piquant melegueta pepper from Africa.

  At the start of August 1492, the mountain roads winding down to the Mediterranean coast from the uplands of Andalusia were swarming with Jews and Muslims carrying loads on their backs and pulling small carts. They had left most of their belongings with their converso and morisco kin who had stayed behind in Seville, Córdoba, and Granada. Those who remained would become the ancestor
s of the one out of every ten contemporary Spanish Catholics who carry the genes of Berbers and Arabs, or the one in five today who carry the genes of Jews. Those Muslims and Jews who were simply unwilling to feign allegiance to another faith now had to find boats to carry them away.

  Unfortunately, the major ports in Spain directly across the sea from Morocco had more refugees than berths on ships to take them across. The harbors of Cádiz and Málaga, in particular, were swamped with desperados ready to join the diaspora. Many of those who did ship out across the strait would die of famine later that year.

  Not knowing that, of course, some of those rejected from Cádiz headed to the small port of Palos de la Frontera in the first days of August 1492. About that same time, a Genoese navigator named Cristóbal Colón—Christopher Columbus—came out of the nearby Franciscan monastery of Rábida to greet two men, Luis de Torres and Juan Rodríguez Bermejo de Triana, who would soon be traveling with him. Columbus believed that Luis de Torres, a converso born Yosef ben Ha Levy Haivri, would be of great value to him as a translator when they reached the distant lands of the Indies, for he spoke Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Portuguese. The second man, known also as Rodrigo de Triana, was the son of a famous morisco maker of trade pottery and a Sephardic Jewish woman renowned for her beauty. Bermejo de Triana was recognized as having a sharp eye for detail, so Columbus would employ him as a lookout to climb the mast of the Pinta, one of the three ships he would soon sail out of Palos.

  As three small ships sailed westward from Palos on August 3, 1492, no one could have known that Islam would never regain its former grandeur or territorial reach anywhere in Europe. For a while, Jews fared somewhat better in northern Europe but, like the Muslims, they became the ghosts of Spain, their imprints everywhere but their bodies absent.

  The Sephardic Jews who left Spain for good treaded water around Lisbon briefly before reassembling in small refuges in the trading centers of Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Fez, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo, Smyrna, Goa, Pesaro, Pera, Tiberias, Constantinople, Ancona, Thessaloniki, and Venice. These Sephardic enclaves did not serve so much as self-contained communities as they did nodes within a network of trade that had diffused across three continents, and interacted with European, African and Asian merchants of many cultures.