When a Jewish family living in one of these nodes was ready to marry off a daughter, a suitor was sought from another of the nodes in order to strengthen the supply chain along the entire trade network.12 Sight unseen, a marriage would be arranged, with dowries and contracts for economic cooperation among the families established or renewed at the same time. Soon, a Jewish man would arrive in one of the nodes of the network. Most of the young women who married these traders would live their entire adult lives as if exiled from Jerusalem, exiled from their natal grounds, and exiled from their nuclear families.
One of the earliest offspring born among the six hundred well-to-do Sephardic families given asylum in Lisbon was Beatrice de Luna, who was later known throughout the world as Gracia Nasi.13 She would soon become the wealthiest woman in Europe, but more than that, she would come to embody every good and bad aspect of globalization. Gracia Nasi, her incestuous kin, and her colleagues achieved what Fernand Braudel called “success of a colossal scale.”14
At age eighteen, Doña Gracia (whom her Jewish friends called Hannah) married her paternal uncle, Francisco Mendes (Benveniste), who was twenty-eight years older than his bride. Francisco and his brother had already become “among [King João’s] most important merchants” in all of Portugal, so much so that the king himself admitted that they had “accumulated enormous wealth here.”15 Even that comment may be understated, for they were already wealthier than the king himself. In the last six years before Francisco died, he and his brother had amassed such an absurdly large fortune through trade with India that they made the largest deposit of silver—some nine thousand pounds—ever put into a bank in western Europe during that era.16
They were geniuses at maneuvering pepper, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves past their adversaries in various ports around the world. In particular, they had a stranglehold on the pepper trade from India to North Africa to southern Europe, where the spice was said to improve vision, eliminate liver ailments, cure dropsy, and mask the off flavors of rancid meats and oil. It was as if the House of Mendes could thread peppercorns through the eye of a needle, shipping and slipping them from the docks of Goa to the port of Alexandria, past Constantinople and Venice, and all the way to the warehouses in Lisbon and Antwerp. As vividly documented by food historian Michael Krondl, Venice, Lisbon, and Antwerp had already emerged as the greatest cities of spice in Christendom—or at least in Europe—and they provided the House of Mendes with both collaborators and competitors.17 From there, these sought-after spices reached kitchen tables, canteens, and cupboards of nearly every ethnicity in western Europe. According to Sephardic Jewish historian Andrée Brooks, the House of Mendes held hegemony over spice markets across Europe, which made Gracia Nasi and her in-laws “major players” in the global marketplace.18
By the time the widowed Doña Gracia had replaced her deceased husband, joining her brother-in-law, Diogo, at the helm of the Mendes trade network, the Mendes clan had cornered the trade in pearls and many of the most expensive aromatics in world commerce. To maintain control over these goods, the widow regularly bribed kings and military commanders with sums of money that dwarfed what any peasant made laboring continuously for twelve months; in fact, a single bribe might be fifteen to twenty times greater than what the House of Mendes annually tithed to the poor, or what another merchant might make over an entire year.19 Moving from Lisbon to Antwerp, the undisputed center of spice trade in northern Europe,20 Doña Gracia and her brother-inlaw allied their trading house with the Affaitadi Company and received Portuguese fleets of 40 to 130 spice ships twice a year. Eighty percent of what the ships delivered to the House of Mendes was pepper, with ginger, galangal, gallnuts, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cloves, cubeb, cumin, and camphor making up the rest of the cargo.21 Gracia Nasi began to use the profits from her spice sales to provide loans to warlords whose excesses chronically generated “cash flow” problems, and she soon had a number of kings, counts, and colonels at her beck and call. By maintaining a near-monopoly in the trading of four to five million pounds of dried spices into western Europe each year,22 Doña Gracia and her brother-in-law soon amassed a fortune larger than her dead husband could have imagined, eventually trading in every imaginable aromatic, from ambergris to wormwood.
It was in the ports of Portugal that I began to feel profound estrangement from the legacy of trade in aromatics originally associated with the desert homelands once shared by Jewish and Arab spice traders. Perhaps I had expected too much from this small country: it had long ago made an enormous fortune off of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, sandalwood, and spikenard, so I imagined that it might still feature such luxuries. It has indeed remained a hub for finance, as it had been during the time of Gracia Nasi, but most of its transnational trade income today is generated by what is euphemistically called “the tertiary sector”: refineries, steel mills, textile finishing, and money lending. Because it is located in such a stunning site along the Atlantic shore, Lisbon has burgeoned into one of the largest ports on the open Atlantic coast of Europe. Much of it is for repackaging goods grown or mined or manufactured elsewhere. As I looked out over one after another of the country’s drab industrialized harbors—the ones that some scholars claim to be descendants of the pivotal ports of the Age of Discovery—I sensed that they had lost most of their originality, dynamism, and aesthetic value over the centuries.
Gracia Nasi, aka Beatrice de Luna, Lisbon’s native daughter whom Sephardic Jews now call “a hero in any age and a role model for today,”23 was by most accounts an egomaniac who connived her sister and niece out of their inheritance, who had a relationship with her son-in-law that lacked civil boundaries, who infuriated rabbis, and who manipulated and bribed sultans and popes to ensure that her economic empire continued to grow exponentially during an era when most of Europe was being devastated by famine. She lived as if she were above any societal rules—a woman without a country, one who shifted her name, her dress, her religion, and her political alliances without a moment’s notice—while creating monopoly after monopoly for one spice after another.
The House of Mendes became the first transnational corporation to be free of any taxation; to pressure governments into giving them exclusive rights to transfer certain goods; to perform as if it were above the law of any country in which it worked; and to send heads of state and leaders of faiths scurrying for cover whenever Doña Gracia determined through her extensive intelligence network that they were attempting to constrain her.
As Andrée Brooks paraphrased one of Gracia Nasi’s Jewish contemporaries, Rabbi Joshua Soncino, conversos such as those in the Mendes-Nasi clan had become “money-grubbing, amoral people.”24 If she were alive today, rather than being treated by her Jewish contemporaries as a hero or role model, she would be regarded by youthful activists in the Occupy movement as emblematic of the 1 percent responsible for the concentration of wealth in too few hands.
Gracia Nasi had become so adept at employing usury to gain political and economic favors that both her competitors and her debtors reacted to her rise in power with a mixture of fear and jealousy. When she refused to let her daughter marry a Christian nobleman from Iberia—perhaps out of revulsion that her pure Jewish bloodline would be mingled with that of an “old Christian”25—the royalty in western Europe became convinced that she was a practicing Jew who had never really converted to Catholicism.26 She decided to leave the Christian-dominated world she had lived in since birth, eventually relocating in Constantinople after sojourns in Venice and Ancona.
Because members of the European elite looked the other way when Gracia Nasi’s spice smugglers were close at hand, they also overlooked that she had used her fortune and her European network of merchants to help hundreds of Jews and Muslims escape the Spanish Inquisition. Ironically, Isabella and Ferdinand nearly depleted their coffers, first by funding the Reconquista and then by bankrolling Columbus’s attempt to reach the spices of the Indies by sailing west, while the Mendes spice dynasty, from a Spanish family of Jewish m
erchants that Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled from their kingdom, quickly became both wealthier and more powerful than the repressive monarchs.
After Gracia Nasi unseated her family’s spice business from the Iberian Peninsula, she had the means to employ many of the conversos she had delivered from the hands of the inquisitors. By the time she arrived in Constantinople in 1553, she had placed a good number of them in strategic locations around the world so that they could retrieve aromatics and other goods from ever-more-distant lands. Some of them continued to work the ports of Spain and Portugal clandestinely, pulling smuggled goods out of the ballast of ships arriving from India, Africa, or the New World. These goods were quickly shuttled over to Morocco, and from there they traveled from one port to the next, brokered by Sephardic Jews at each stop, until they reached Constantinople, the last hub of the House of Mendes.
It is interesting to note that most of the New World’s treasures did not enter into European commerce and cultural diffusion through Spain. Instead, they came in through Turkey. The long-term contribution of Catholic Spain and Portugal to the Columbian Exchange—a circulation of crops and livestock that was just one more phase in an already wellarticulated process of globalization—has been overrated.27 The Canary Islands, not Spain itself, offered most of the seeds, fruits, and livestock breeds that were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean.28 Maize became known in parts of Europe as grano turco, the Turkish grain, and New World tobacco was called Turkish tobacco. Sunflowers, squashes, and chiles followed a similar trajectory. Whatever culinary curiosities and aromatics were brought back from distant lands, it is probable that the House of Mendes was responsible for introducing them to and controlling their trade within Europe. While Ferdinand and Isabella focused on the gold and precious metals arriving from the Americas, something far more precious and lasting in its influence was slipping through their hands and making its way to Turkey and from there into eastern Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and beyond. At the onset, Gracia Nasi’s network had more to do with moving those novelties into the marketplace than did a hundred Catholic kings, cardinals, and popes.
• • •
• CORIANDER • CILANTRO
The tan, ribbed seeds of coriander (Coriandrum sativum) have a citruslike aroma complemented by notes of sage and freshly cut grass. Their pyrazine-rich flavors are warm and somewhat nutty, with floral undertones that have been likened to lemon or orange blossoms. Although the flat parsleylike leaves of the coriander plant are known as cilantro in much of the world today, they have an entirely different flavor, which some people, perhaps by genetic disposition, find agreeable and others repugnant. I once took an Italian member of Slow Food International to the Grand Canyon, where she could smell the fetid aliphatic aldehyde fragrance of cilantro rising from a Mexican restaurant more than two hundred yards away. She and many others insist that cilantro leaves exude a soapy smell that they liken to burnt rubber or stinkbugs (see linguistic evidence, below). Others find the aroma to be divine.
Curiously, manna is likened to coriander seeds in the Bible. Coriander was apparently first sown as a spice crop in the Anatolian region of present-day Turkey and spread to the Levant, Egypt, Armenia, southeastern Europe, and southern Russia early on. It is specifically named and described as a medicinal plant in an Egyptian papyrus dating from 2500 to 1550 BCE. It was also listed with just a handful of other spices for stews in some of the earliest surviving recipes, inscribed in Akkadian script on clay tablets found in Mesopotamia. The library of the seventh-century Assyrian king Ashurbanipal housed documents describing the cultivation of coriander. In my own experience of cultivating the plant for many years, I find that it is the only leafy green that will yield a harvest year-round in my warm, semiarid climate.
The oldest name for coriander may be linked to a number of contemporary terms: kisnis in Western Turkic, geshniz in Farsi, gashnich in Tajik, kashnich in Uzbek, kishniz in Urdu, and kinj in Armenian. This suggests Turkic or proto-Farsi diffusion of the term across Central Asia and into the Indian subcontinent. The Farsi or Persian name was used in parts of China, which lends support to the hypothesis that the plant was introduced to China through Parthian or Sogdian spice trade before the founding of Islam. It is described in a chapter on leafy vegetables in a Chinese agricultural manual from the fifth century CE, indicating that cilantro greens, not just the ground seeds, were already valued.
The Arabic term kuzbarah is at best distantly related to these Central Asian names but may possibly be linked to Asian terms such as the Sanskrit kustumbari, Akkadian kisburru, Telegu kustumburu, Gujarati kothmir, and Urdu kothamir.
Virtually all of the great Greek and Roman scholars interested in natural history and agriculture wrote about this crop: Aristophanes, Theophrastus, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny, and Columella. Their enthusiastic promotion of coriander may have played a role in its widespread dispersal under the Greek term koriannon (from koris, or “stinkbug”) and the Latin term coriandrum. The names for coriander in most Western European languages can be traced back to these cognates. The terms cilantro and culantro used throughout Latin America are also derived from these same roots; however, the latter name is also applied to Eryngium foetidum, an herb with a distinctive aroma commonly used in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.
Today, coriander seeds are essential ingredients in Indian curries and garam masala, Yemeni zhoug, Ethiopian berbere, Moroccan ras el hanout, and baharat mixes throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The leaves also enter into a few mixtures, such as the green curry paste of Thai cooking and certain Mexican moles.
Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 7, 2013.
Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.
• SIBĀGH •
Abbasid and Andalusian Dipping Sauce
According to scholar Lilia Zaouali, sibāgh, or dipping sauces, “occupy a place of the first rank in classical Islamic cuisine.” In this version, a sort of fruit-andspice pemmican is stored until needed, then reconstituted with vinegar to serve as a sauce or marinade. Related to ceviche, a dish in which a sauce is used to “cook” meat, poultry, or fish, sibāgh can be likened to a Spanish or Mexican picadillo. Makes about 30 disks.
5 cups pomegranate seeds
5 cups raisins from Muscat grapes
1 tablespoon black peppercorns, crushed
1 tablespoon cumin seeds, crushed
Cider vinegar for rehydrating
In a large, wide wooden bowl, combine the pomegranate seeds and raisins and crush them together with a pestle. Add the peppercorns and cumin and mix well. Using your hands, knead the mixture into balls about 2 inches in diameter. Flatten each ball with the pestle into a disk 3 to 4 inches in diameter.
Arrange the disks on a wire rack and cover lightly with a piece of parchment paper, cheesecloth, or fine-mesh screen to deter insects. Place the rack outdoors in a hot, well-ventilated spot, preferably out of the direct sun, until the disks are completely dry. Check the disks daily; the timing will depend on the intensity of the heat and the amount of humidity in the air. Or dry the disks in an oven set at the lowest temperature or in a dehydrator. Transfer the dried disks to an airtight container and store in a cool, dry place.
When in need of a marinade (or sauce) for kebabs, place a disk in a wooden bowl, add about 1 tablespoon vinegar, and mash with a wooden spoon until the ingredients are rehydrated and a marinade (or sauce) forms. Add more vinegar as needed to achieve the desired consistency. Place skewers threaded with lamb, onion, eggplant, and fruit in the marinade and let them sit while you light coals for grilling. When the coals are ready, grill the skewers over the fire.
Zaouali, Lilia. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Berkeley: University of C
alifornia Press, 2007, pp. 129–30.
CHAPTER 9
Building Bridges between Continents and Cultures
I have come to search for the old stone bridges of Zayton, an ancient harbor on the East China Sea now hidden within the concrete and steel structures that form the modern city of Quanzhou. My friends and I are being chauffeured around the sprawling metropolis by an impetuous Chinese taxi driver who becomes sullen when we ask him to leave the paved streets between the skyscrapers to search among industrial dumps for the bridges and the harbor they once supported. We see some egrets flying up to the right of us and decide to shadow them, hoping that they indicate that wetlands are close enough to prevent the taxi driver from expelling us from his vehicle before we arrive.
On a dirt road otherwise used only by dump trucks hauling rocky fill to a construction site, we meander between piles of rubble while the driver curses. At last, we catch a glimpse of a low bridge stretching over shallow wetlands choked with cattails, water hyacinths, tamarisks, and giant cane reeds. Above the cattails, we see single mothers pushing their infants in strollers along the bridge. Young men are jogging on it, teenagers are necking in the half-hidden niches of its way stations, and the elderly are practicing their tai chi on the open planks. All of this is taking place on an ancient bridge over troubled waters in which mirrorlike pools of motor oil reflect the high-tension lines marring the sky.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 25