The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  Pepper, as depicted in Garcia da Orta’s late-sixteenth-century herbal.

  Still, the long-distance trade wasn’t without its risks. Overseas were alien rulers who wanted to wring ever more revenue from the trade; foreign merchants demanding a fatter slice of the pie; and rivals from Genoa, Barcelona, and Marseilles bidding up the price. Once your cargo was loaded, you had to worry about shipwrecks, pirates, and, once again, the European competitors, who could be worse than the pirates. The merchant who not only wanted to make a profit but also to survive needed to keep one hand on the hilt of his sword as the other reached for his purse. In some ways, even to characterize the traders aboard Mediterranean galleys strictly as merchants is a little misleading. Rather, imagine highly organized, well-armed gangs prowling the sea, en route from port to port, seizing any opportunity that might present itself. Throughout most of history, whether a transaction ended up as looting or trade often depended on the strength of the opponent. The Venetians were always calculating whether to haggle or fight, but in either case, it was wise to be well armed if for no other reason than that the threat of harm might result in a better price. While fellow citizens of the Republic were generally considered off-limits for piracy, other Italians were considered fair game, especially if a precious cargo of spices or pearls was suspected on board. The situation on land was not much better, and while all sorts of treaties and legal statutes were supposed to regulate trade in the spice ports, there was always the possibility one side might not like the deal and pull their daggers. Even once the goods were in hand, they had to be locked up under vigilant guard. In part, this is why local authorities sometimes permitted or acquiesced in the erection of surprisingly elaborate fortifications for each trading “nation.”

  The Venetian semimilitarized vessels had a distinct advantage over the lightly armed merchantmen of the Byzantines. The rulers of the Eastern Empire put what resources they had into their navy, which was a strictly military outfit and did not meddle in trade, whereas the large, heavily armed crews of the Venetian ships were not only able to ward off potential attackers, they could attack at will, buying and selling all the while. Recognizing their naval prowess, Byzantine emperors hired Venetian navies on at least two occasions to fend off Norman incursions. As a reward, Venetians would enjoy tax-free status throughout the empire.

  It wasn’t just shipping that was subjected to Venetian attack, though. The poorly garrisoned coastline of the southern Aegean was a tempting target for the Venetian corsairs as well. As they passed through, the armed galleys would descend on undefended fishing ports at will, demanding provisions (if you were lucky) and kidnapping children and young adults to sell into slavery (if you weren’t). Technically, Christians were supposed to sell only nonbelievers into slavery, but this distinction was not always strictly observed. It isn’t that Venetians were any more rapacious than the others; they were just the most capable predator in a shark-infested sea.

  At first, the Venetians took over the export trade from Byzantium to the Adriatic; then, along with the Pisans and Genoans, they began to supply Constantinople itself; and finally, by the time of the First Crusade, Italians were doing most of the shipping inside the empire. The splendid old dominion of the eastern Caesars was having a tough time of it all around. Central authority had broken down to such an extent that most of the provinces were now run by regional strongmen who seldom bothered to send any tax revenue to the capital. In the East, Seljuk Turks had gradually consumed large chunks of what is now Turkey. By the late eleven hundreds, all that remained of the realm that had once controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean were the Balkans and fragments of coastal Turkey. As the once-great empire wasted away, Venetians moved in to feed off the carcass, swelling, in turn, the purses of the upstart republic. In 1204, Frankish and Venetian pilgrims, armed for the Fourth Crusade, arrived to deliver the fatal blow.

  COOKS AND CRUSADERS

  As you arrive in Venice today, the city that floats upon the sea presents a skyline of soaring cupolas and pointed bell towers. Every campo, every square, every neighborhood, is dominated by a church. Many are still graceful and limber, even though others are increasingly doddery and infirm. But still, with all those domes and steeples, you’d think the Venetians a religious lot. The truth is rather more nuanced. As far as the rest of medieval Europe was concerned, the Venetians were always on the verge of apostasy. They were particularly notorious for cutting deals with the Moor to maintain their trading privileges. The popes regularly excommunicated the entire town—though, admittedly, there was usually a political motive for this. In the Republic of Saint Mark, local clergy were strictly subordinated to the secular authorities. Here, the slogan was Veneziani, poi Christiani! (“Venetians [first], then Christians!”). As a result, many historians have attributed Venice’s involvement in the Crusades to purely mercenary motives; the whole bloody affair as little more than a hostile-takeover bid for the pepper business. But that’s just too pat. To discount religion from Venice’s strategy toward the Arab world would be as simplistic as it would be to remove the ideological component from America’s adventures in the Middle East. Sure, pepper (like oil today) was important, but that didn’t mean the Venetians weren’t dedicated Christians just like every other medieval European. Which isn’t to say that—much like fervent American Christians today—the Venetians let their religion get in the way of their business practices.

  By the time the Italian city-states became involved in the pepper trade during the waning years of the first millennium, the Mediterranean world was irrevocably split between the Christian North and the Islamic South. After Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies thundered across the Middle East and North Africa. They seized Iberia and Sicily. Their mounted horsemen surged deep into France, where they were finally checked by Christian knights at the battle of Poitiers in 732. In the aftermath, there was a more or less stable entente between the faiths for the next three hundred years. By the early years of the new millennium, however, an increasingly prosperous Europe was emerging from the slumber of the Dark Ages. One sign of this was a new imperial religiosity, a widespread desire to push back the borders of Islam. When, in 1095, Pope Urban II appealed for a crusade to liberate Jerusalem, men (and even some women) across Europe took up the cause by the thousands, donning the white tunic emblazoned with the red Crusaders’ cross.

  Lacking any navy to speak of, the Frankish knights of western Europe had to charter ships in order to get their men and horses to the Holy Land. Consequently, they turned to the nautically endowed Italian city-states. Genoa offered a measly 13 ships. Pisa was more generous, providing a flotilla of about 120 vessels. The Venetian authorities took close to a year to sort out the pros and cons of joining the holy war, but when they finally did, their 200 ships were to be the single largest contribution to the Crusader navy. There were certainly many Venetians who were swept up in the religious fervor of the time; nevertheless, there were also a good number who were more calculating in the matter. When the then-current doge, Vitale Michiel, exhorted his fellow citizens to join the jihad, he did not forget to add that the potential for gain was not merely of the spiritual variety. Under the terms of the deal, the Italian cities were supposed to get one-third of any territory captured in the Holy Land in payment for transport. Though the Italians never got quite as much as the contracts stipulated, they did get enough territory to set up commercial bases across the Levant.

  For the Venetians, the Crusades were undoubtedly an enormous strategic as well as financial windfall, whereas, for the rest of Europe, the consequences were ultimately to be more cultural than directly economic or even political. The Latin knights who disembarked, first in Byzantium and then in the Holy Land, were in for a culture shock. Only when confronted with the plush lodgings and refined cuisine of the East would most of them have realized just how dank and dismal were their drafty donjons and how dull their diet back home.

  In Constantinople, the great lords of Europe were fed spiced delicac
ies in the perfumed palace of the emperor, but even lesser souls were exposed to the decadent ways of Byzantium at inns and bathhouses across the great metropolis. The imperial capital was the kind of place where, on Easter Sunday, the ruler would parade to the world’s largest church, the Hagia Sophia, past a fountain “filled with ten thousand jars of wine and a thousand jars of white honey…the whole spiced with a camel’s load of [spike]nard, cloves and cinnamon,” an event reported by a Muslim hostage a century earlier.

  Meanwhile, in the boomtowns of Palestine, common Italian merchants lived better than Burgundian princes. Their salons were decorated with mosaics and marble and decked out with carpets of plush damask. Perfumed meats arrived on platters of silver, if not gold. Fresh water ran from taps, carried by the still-standing Roman aqueducts. Chilled wine flavored with the spices of the Orient filled delicate goblets and beakers.*5

  Many Crusaders would have spent as much as a year exposed to Constantinople’s spice-laced cooking, though, of course, this was nothing compared to the decades some would spend in Palestine—or Outremer, as they came to call it. Western European pilgrims came to the Holy Land by the thousands. There were those who settled so that they could live a step closer to paradise. Others found God in more earthly rewards. “Those who were poor [in France],” wrote the royal chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, “God has made rich here. He who had a few pennies possesses bezants [a gold coin] without number; he who held not even a village now by God’s grace enjoys a town.” But for every pilgrim made rich by conquest or trade, there were many more who spent their last penny to get here, and then they were stuck. Yet as numerous as they were, the Catholic immigrants remained a tiny minority among the indigenous Syrian Christian and Muslim population. What’s more, since most of the conquerors were male, they were desperate for local women to be their consorts, servants, and cooks—and they found them, whatever the means. If all else failed, the necessary help could be purchased at the slave market, though buying women slaves for sex was technically illegal. Fulcher describes the mutation he witnessed: “We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is here a Galilean or a Palestinian…. We have already forgotten the places where we were born…. Some have taken as his wife not a compatriot but a Syrian or an Armenian, or even a Saracen [that is, Muslim] who has received the grace of baptism.”

  Whether they liked it or not, the Europeans ate a largely Arab, Middle Eastern diet. No doubt, many were nauseated by the local cuisine and, much as some homesick Americans resort to McDonald’s when in Rome, stuck to a western European diet of thick beer, plain meat, garlic, and beans. But less conservative palates would surely have thrilled to the new ingredients and flavor combinations. The local cuisine was closely related to what they had tasted in Byzantium—after all, the region had been a part of the Eastern Roman Empire for centuries—but it must also have echoed the kind of sophisticated food that was dished up in Baghdad and Alexandria. Baghdad, in particular, was the foodie capital of its day, where (much like today) cookbooks were written as much to be read and discussed as to be utilized for their directions. At a time when European dukes and counts were satisfied with great, gristly haunches of grilled venison, the connoisseurs of the Arab capital could dine on pasture-raised mutton and tender chicken redolent of imported Asian spices; they could pick and choose among a wide assortment of freshly baked breads and nibble on confections crafted of local fruits and imported sugar. These delicacies could even be cooled with ice that was carried from distant mountains, something that hadn’t been seen in Europe since Roman times. In Baghdad, a host was judged by the diversity of ingredients and the variety of preparations rather than crude quantity. The Arabic cookbooks of the time give us recipes aromatic with spices layered over a distinctly sweet-and-sour taste. To give just one representative example, an Egyptian fish stew called sikba was seasoned with pepper, “perfumed spices,” onion, saffron, and sesame oil as well as honey and vinegar to give it the requisite tang. Of course, the Arab cooks in Palestine could hardly have been up to the standards of a caliph’s court, but they surely had some idea of what the Muslim gentry were eating.

  However, the pilgrims who made it as far as Jerusalem didn’t always get to taste the best local cooking. We can infer this from the name given to the central market where Westerners got their takeout. They called it the Malquisinat, or “Place of Bad Cookery.” Presumably, the food was better in the Crusaders’ quarters, where Western residents of the city would typically employ local women to do their cooking. Arab cooks were in high demand, at least according to Usmah ibn Munqidh, a Muslim warrior and courtier who seems to have been a regular visitor in the occupiers’ homes. He writes that some Franks—though apparently not the majority—had become acclimated to local customs. During the course of a social call at the home of a soldier of the original Crusader generation, Usmah was offered lunch. “The knight presented an excellent table with food extraordinarily clean and delicious. Seeing me abstaining from food, he said, ‘Eat: be of good cheer! I never eat Frankish dishes, but I have Egyptian women cooks and never eat except their cooking.’”

  So, clearly, in spite of the antagonism between the faiths, the mounted, mailed, malodorous invaders holed up in their fortified Jerusalem residences must have had at least an inkling of how the other side lived. For they, too, hired couriers to bring snow from the mountains of Lebanon—a two-to three-day run—in order to chill their wine in the heat of summer. They, too, sprinkled their food with sugar. (This luxurious “spice” had been cultivated in well-watered enclaves of the Holy Land for generations and exported to Europe in minuscule quantities.) And apparently, the Crusaders even started to bathe! In imitation of local ways, the Frankish women are known to have gone to the baths three times a week, and it is supposed that men, who were less constricted, might have gone even more often.

  Moreover, for Europeans, their culinary education wasn’t limited just to the Holy Land. After all, Muslims ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula well into the twelfth century (Islamic Granada held out even longer, until it was conquered in 1492) as well as Sicily for more than two hundred years. In their day, Moorish Palermo and Córdoba were the largest cities in Europe and accordingly major outposts of Muslim culture and cuisine.*6 And as Usmah’s memoir shows, relations between the two confessions were not always combative. Especially in Spain, Christians and Muslims (and Jews) lived together in relative harmony for centuries. The dominant culture of these western caliphates was naturally Arabic and drew inspiration for its music, literature, and food from Baghdad and points east. The introduction of oranges, lemons, eggplant, and other fruits and vegetables to the West is generally ascribed to Arab intervention. Pasta as we know it seems to have been invented in Moorish Sicily. Arabic recipes soon insinuated themselves into Italian compilations, while these were, in turn, disseminated north. Culinary ideas flowed across Europe in much the way that Gothic art and architecture spread across the continent. In the same way that the Arabic arch was incorporated into Western cathedrals and then transformed into an indigenous art form, the Middle Eastern way with spices was adapted to the European kitchen. John of Salisbury, a twelfth-century English Crusader and scholar, gives us some sense of the new culinary melting pot when he criticizes a dinner he was served at the house of a merchant in the southern Italian province of Apulia. The menu reportedly included “the finest products from Constantinople, Babylon, Alexandria, Palestine, Tripoli, Syria, and Phoenicia,” but then the priggish pilgrim has to add, “as though the products of Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Campania were insufficient to adorn such a refined banquet.”

  Needless to say, the Arabic influence wasn’t limited to food and architecture. The Middle East had plenty to teach the Western barbarians about mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. Most medieval nutritional theory came straight from Arabic writers, who had, in turn, picked up the earlier Greek medical tradition. The scholars in Baghdad, however, altered the old system to suit their taste
and culture, giving their dietary advice a distinctly Arab accent. It is no coincidence that medieval dietitians in Bologna and in Paris would suggest the same ingredients (expensive Eastern imports such as spices, sugar, dried fruit, citrus, almond milk, and rose water) as their Muslim sources.