During the medieval period, the layout of these markets was very different from today’s rows of tidy stands. Back then, a more centrifugal pattern prevailed. The “dirtiest” operations—animal sales and butchering—occurred around the periphery of the market. Food stands, scribes, metalsmiths, barbers, dentists, rug weavers, and potters plied their wares and trades closer in. The focal point of the festivities was more often than not occupied by the aristocrats of the commercial hierarchy: the spice merchants. During the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves were not workaday flavorings, but rather the world’s most sought-after commodities. Their sources and supply lines dealt wealth or poverty to nations; spices were as critical as oil and palladium are in the twenty-first century.
The most visible legacy of the wealth and splendor generated by the medieval spice trade still dazzles the eye today in Venice, whose grand palazzi and magnificent public architecture were built largely on profits from pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. A hundred pounds of nutmeg, purchased in medieval Alexandria for ten ducats, might easily go for thirty or fifty ducats on the wharves of Venice. Even after payments for shipping, insurance, and customs duties at both ends, profits well in excess of 100 percent were routine; a typical Venetian galley carried one to three hundred tons between Egypt and Italy and earned vast fortunes for the imaginative and the lucky. During the medieval period, a corpulent Croesus was called a “pepper sack,” not a thoroughgoing insult, since the price of a bag of pepper was usually higher than that of a human being.1 The historian Frederic Lane estimates that on the eve of the Portuguese penetration of the Indian Ocean in the last years of the fifteenth century, swift Venetian galleys hauled 3,500,000 pounds of spices annually, most of it loaded in Alexandria, across the Mediterranean.2
The massive trade in spices raises an obvious question: just how did the West pay for this voracious appetite? Before silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico flooded across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, Europe suffered from a severe shortage of coins with which to pay for imports. Further, the West fashioned few products that were desired in the Orient.
Before the modern era, the words “manufacturing” and “textiles” were virtually synonymous. Of Europe’s two major cloth products, linen competed only poorly with Indian cotton, and wool did not appeal greatly to the inhabitants of hot climates. True, the Mediterranean yielded huge quantities of red coral, and the Italians were especially skilled at producing fine glass, but the Eastern markets for these luxury products filled only a tiny corner of the medieval Western trade deficit.
Did the Europeans produce any other commodity that could be traded at Alexandria and Cairo for the spices they so intensely desired? Indeed they did: slaves to fill the insatiable appetite of the Muslim armies for soldiers. Between roughly 1200 and 1500, Italian merchants became the world’s most prosperous slave traders, buying humans on the eastern shores of the Black Sea and selling them in Egypt and the Levant. The cargo passed through the twin choke points at the Dardanelles (the ancient Hellespont) and the Bosphorus, guarded by the once mighty Byzantine Empire, which inevitably found itself in the gun sights of the two great Italian trading powers: Venice and Genoa.
Long-distance trade in the medieval period thus revolved around three stories: the spice trade, the slave trade, and the age-old struggle for mastery of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
Pepper and cinnamon came, respectively, from India and Sri Lanka, places that Europeans had at least heard of. Mace, nutmeg, and cloves came from the Spice Islands, which remained terra incognita until the fifteenth century.3 So remote were these fabled lands that even the Genoese and Venetian merchants who acquired the islands’ precious products at ports in Egypt, the Levant, and the Black Sea were unaware of their precise location. The very name Spice Islands, like the Tin Islands of Herodotus, informs us that everything else about them—their peoples, geography, and language—was unknown or ignored in favor of the single purpose they served for the West.
If the importance of these spices in the medieval period is difficult to comprehend, think of the snob appeal of today’s high-status items: the boxed Godiva chocolate, the BMW automobile, the Gucci shoe. Then surround the mystiques with a splash of uncertainty as to origin; all that we know about, say, the wonderful footwear is that it arrives on our wharves from somewhere in the East. In such an environment, a Gucci store is not simply a profitable business opportunity but a license to print money, and an established position anywhere along the shoe supply chain becomes a ticket to prestige and uncountable wealth. What would happen if these mythical consumers found out that the shoes came from an ordinary union-shop factory in Florence?
Such was the case with nutmeg, mace, and cloves during the medieval period. Certainly, Europeans had easy access to other appealing spices and herbs: saffron had been produced in Spain and England since it was first imported by Arab traders in the eighth century; pepper was easily available from India; coriander and cumin came from the Near East; and bay leaves, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, and oregano all originated in Europe. But nutmeg, mace, and cloves were far more desirable precisely because they were rare, expensive, and, above all, mysterious. Their gustatory appeal paled into insignificance compared with the message conveyed by their aroma and taste: here resides someone of wealth and status.
As had the Romans, Europeans became infatuated with spices. Physicians treated all manner of ailments with them, and Chaucer versified about fantasy forests filled with cloves to fumigate clothes chests and with nutmeg for flavoring ale. Spices and perfumes permeated gloves, hot beverages, liqueurs, and most of the recipes used in wealthy households. Historians have suggested that rare spices were originally valued because of their medicinal properties. For example, one authority points out that the contents of a medieval French spice store and a nineteenth-century American pharmacy would have been nearly identical.
But were these “drugs” effective? The placebo effect, one of the most powerful forces in the therapeutic armamentarium, derives in no small part from the exoticism of the ingredients or methods used. None of the spices mentioned in this chapter has any scientifically proven medicinal value, and those plant products that do are often quite common, such as the heart drug digitalis, from the lovely but lowly foxglove. Roman and Greek physicians prescribed the rare spice galangal “for the kidneys.”4 Precisely what medical conditions were meant by this? Whatever diseases these ancient medicos were treating probably had little to do with renal function.
It is more likely that rare spices found use as pharmaceuticals precisely because of their prestige. Superstitions die hard; even today, the rhinoceros has been hunted nearly to extinction because of the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of a powder made from its horn; such is the magic of rare animal and plant products that it is doubtful that the advent of Viagra will save the species.
Not all spices traveled eastward. Coriander, a modern favorite, is native to the eastern Mediterranean. It was well known to the Minoans and Egyptians by 1300 BC and reached China when the Han Empire opened the Silk Road a millennium later. Far more ominous was the eastward spread of another Mediterranean spice, the poppy seed, later to be cultivated in India under the watchful eyes of Europeans eager to improve their balance of trade by exporting the plant’s highly addictive extract, opium.
Unlike the Tin Islands of Herodotus, there really were Spice Islands. Cloves, the unopened flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum, a tall fir, until recently grew only in the volcanic soil of five tiny islands—Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan—in the north Moluccas, an island group in eastern Indonesia. Nutmeg and mace come from different parts of the fruit of Myristica fragrans, a tree that grew only on nine flyspecks—the Bandas—in the southern part of the Moluccas.
The Moluccans had been selling spices long before the Europeans arrived. First occupied by aboriginal peoples tens of thousands of years ago, the archipelago was subsequently enveloped about 2000–1000 BC by the
“Austronesian expansion,” in which tribes from China and Taiwan, equipped with double outrigger-canoes, peopled the shores of the Indian and Pacific oceans from Madagascar to Easter Island. Empowered by the local spice trade, the aboriginal inhabitants of Ternate and Tidore managed to maintain their identity and culture while the surrounding islands succumbed to the Austronesian tide.
The Spice Islands
These tiny volcanic “inner islands” grew only spices and coconuts and depended for their sustenance on the highly nutritious and productive sago palm produced on larger Moluccan “outer islands” such as Halmahera and Ceram. At first, this trade was purely an interisland affair, in which Bandanese plied the waters between the inner and outer islands in small craft and bartered sago for spices.
Like the Chinese silk imported into Rome, nutmeg and mace were probably known to the Romans—Pliny seems to have described them in Historia Naturalis. Similar also to silk, their source lay well beyond the horizon of Western knowledge, and the supply chain that first brought them to the Middle East and Europe was long, dangerous, indirect, and, of course, ridiculously expensive.5
As the export markets for nutmeg and mace expanded during the ancient and medieval periods, the spice-producing islands prospered to the point that they dominated most of the Moluccan archipelago. Ternate, for example, ruled the much larger island of Ceram until well after the arrival of the Dutch. The aboriginal Bandanese, though skilled at growing spices, did not trade them much beyond their home islands. It would be the descendants of the lighter-skinned, seafaring Austronesians, particularly the legendary Bugis from the large island of Sulawesi (about halfway between Java and the Spice Islands), who carried the spices far beyond the Moluccas to Java and Sumatra, from where they eventually arrived in China, India, and finally, Europe.6
Mace, the product of the thinner, outer layer of the fruit, was more precious than the more voluminous nutmeg-yielding core. During the early period of Portuguese rule, the Bandas yielded about a thousand tons of nutmeg per year, but only about a hundred of mace; consequently, mace was about seven to ten times as expensive as nutmeg. Occasionally, this price differential led to odd market behavior, some merely ironic, such as the burning of nutmeg by the Bandanese to increase its price, and some ridiculous, such as the famous (and probably apocryphal) order by the Dutch East India Company to its governor of the East Indies to grow only mace.7 (Today, the situation is reversed, with nutmeg the more soughtafter ingredient, and mace reserved for light-colored offerings in need of a fruity flavor, such as pound cake or cream soup.)
Occupying the middle ground between pepper and the Spice Islands flavorings was cinnamon, since its source in Sri Lanka hovered just at the eastern edge of the world known to the Romans. It first appeared in the capital at the height of the Empire and occupied the apex of culinary and aromatic luxury. Its flower juice sold for 1,500 denarii per pound—approximately its weight in gold. Those of more modest means settled for cinnamon oil, a relative bargain at only one-fourth of that price.8 Still, Westerners would not be reliably informed about the cinnamon trees of Sri Lanka until Ibn Battuta described how Indian traders casually picked up their precious bark from beaches strewn with them.9
The same principle operated in reverse for China, which treasured items that were relatively common in Europe, such as ivory and incense, but whose provenance in Africa and Arabia was wrapped in the mystique of distance. By the same token, cloves from the relatively close Moluccas were considered less exotic by the Chinese, who used them as breath mints as early as the Han Dynasty: “They have the property of removing smells from the mouth, and high officials at Court put cloves into their mouths when they have to lay matters before the Emperor.”10
The decay of the Roman Empire attenuated the supply of pepper and raised its prices. At the apex of the empire, a pound of gold bought almost three hundred of pepper, whereas by the beginning of the fourth century, it bought only ninety, and probably even less when Alaric ransomed Rome for a ton and a half of it. No matter how scarce and expensive pepper became, its flow to Europe was never to be interrupted, even during the depths of the Dark Ages.11
When the forces of Islam snapped shut Bab el Mandeb almost immediately after Muhammad’s triumphant return to Mecca in the early seventh century, Greek ships could no longer sail east toward India’s Western Ghats on the warm and turbulent southwest monsoon. While pepper still flowed easily westward through Muslim hands, knowledge of the East ceased. India, which had been well known to Greek and Roman geographers such as Strabo, Ptolemy, and Pomponius Mela, and whose ambassadors had fawned over Augustus, faded below the horizon of reality and into a sea of myth—a land of mountains of emeralds and gold guarded by fabulous dragons and flying monsters. During the nine centuries between the victory of the Prophet and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama, a European could not so much as dip an oar into the Indian Ocean.
For nearly a thousand years after nutmeg, mace, and cloves first appeared in the West, both Europeans and Muslims remained clueless as to their actual source. Writing in the tenth century, the Arab historian Ibn Khurdadhbih listed cloves and nutmeg among the produce of India, an error of only four thousand miles. Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and the Chinese (from whom the two travelers likely obtained much of their knowledge of the spice trade) all thought that the flavorings came from Java. Getting warmer: the Spice Islands were in fact about a thousand miles east-northeast of Java.12
The two major sea routes, via the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, from India and the Moluccas to Baghdad and Alexandria, were under the control of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. The Abbasids ruled the Middle East until about AD 910; before that date, the safer Gulf route, Sinbad’s Way, was greatly favored, but afterward, the primacy of the Egyptian Fatimids and Mamluks made the Red Sea the main thoroughfare for spices arriving from India and the Moluccas.
A smaller portion of the spice traffic went overland, but the Silk Road, fractured among hundreds of warring tribes and principalities, required political stability over its entire length in order to compete with the Indian Ocean routes. This almost impossible trick was turned just once during the premodern period—by the Mongols during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Even then, the khans, no strangers to maritime trade and power, directed a good deal of their long-distance traffic south through the Persian highlands to their Gulf port at Tabriz, from which China and the Spice Islands could be reached by ship with relative ease.
Needless to say, all three of these routes—via the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Silk Road—were well outside the control of the great Italian merchant states, Genoa and Venice. As the chauvinistic inhabitants of Christendom grew ever more fond of Oriental flavorings, they found themselves faced with the uncomfortable fact that wherever there were spices, there were infidels.
Nowhere was the Muslims’ commercial advantage over Europe more glaring than in the China trade. Even during the period when they had free passage through the Indian Ocean, the Greeks and Romans never had direct knowledge of the nation that produced silk. Likewise, for the medieval European, China might just as well have been on another planet—this in a period when the Middle Kingdom hosted large Arab and Persian merchant colonies. Nor was the situation for the Europeans much better in the Mediterranean, which was battered by a rising tide of Muslim influence: at its eastern end, Arab armies conquered Jerusalem and the Levant coast within two years of Muhammad’s death in 632, then vanquished the Byzantine navy at the Battle of the Masts shortly thereafter.
Notwithstanding the high-water mark of Muslim power in the Mediterranean in the ninth and tenth centuries, Italian ships from Salerno, Amalfi, and Venice were able to make the first substantial challenges to the Muslim dominance of world trade. As the first millennium ended, Europe grew slowly more prosperous and powerful. The Italians, now led by the Venetians and Genoese, exchanged Western goods for spices in Alexandria, Cairo, and Tyre, and supplied the thin edge of the wedge with whi
ch the West would prise long-distance commerce from the grip of Muslims in the Levant. Between 1072 and 1091, the Normans overran Palermo, Malta, and then the remainder of Sicily; meanwhile, the Spanish recaptured Toledo. These victories emboldened the Christians and set the stage for an event that reverberates to the present day; in 1095, Pope Urban II convened the Council of Clermont, at which the assembled temporal rulers of Christendom pledged to regain the Holy Land. By 1099, Jerusalem was in the hands of the First Crusade, which completed its sacred mission by slaughtering nearly every Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian man, woman, and child inside the city’s gates.
Truth be told, the crusaders had gotten lucky—the Seljuk Turks and Fatimid Egyptians had been fighting over Jerusalem for decades before the arrival of the Christians, and at that moment, both Muslim nations were so weakened by the struggle and by internal dissension that neither could dislodge the infidels. Much of the Holy Land remained under Christian rule until 1187—nearly a century after the crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem—when Saladin inflicted a disastrous defeat on the forces of Guy de Lusignan at the Battle of Hattin, then captured Jerusalem three months later. In contrast to the slaughter wrought by the crusaders of 1099, Saladin spared the civilian population of the city. Acre soon fell as well, leaving only a rump Christian force huddled in the fortress of Tyre, whose famous ramparts briefly protected the crusaders, just as its ancient walls had temporarily held off the forces of Alexander 1,500 years earlier.
On hearing the news of Jerusalem’s fall, Pope Urban III was said to have died of shock. That his successor, Gregory VIII, would call for a Third Crusade was a foregone conclusion; it set sail two years later. The Venetians participated enthusiastically, particularly in the recapture of Acre (near modern Haifa), with its large Venetian quarter. However, despite (or perhaps because of) its most famous participant, Richard Coeur de Lion, the Third Crusade failed to retake the Holy City from Saladin.
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