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

by Michael Krondl

  “On the other hand,”—he takes a final swig of Prosecco as the distant bell of San Marco rings midnight—“there is this feeling of resistance. The Venetian has become more determined to go on existing, fino alla fine—until the bitter end.”

  THE CARAVEL

  From across the pier, the Vera Cruz seems no bigger than a toy sailboat, her masts no more than two chopsticks poking the air; she looks like a little dinghy next to the hulking freighter chained up at the adjacent berth. Up close, the small craft is about the size of a Greyhound bus with masts and spars rendered of modest tree trunks crocheted together by a web of fasts and stays. She lies bound to an anonymous concrete jetty on the Lisbon waterfront, her black hull glum now that her sails have been furled. Yet even when her triangular sheets are raised and puffed out with the ocean breeze, there is still something awkward and even homely about this ancient sailing ship, this caravel. It seems all too incredible that sailors from such a little country, navigating unassuming vessels like the Vera Cruz, crisscrossed the Atlantic to scout the path for a sea route to the spice coast of Malabar, that these short and sinewy seamen were the leading edge in Europe’s conquest of the world.

  When the Venetians, the Genoese, and even the independent Catalans went sailing to procure their aromatic cargo in the Middle East, they traveled over routes that had been amply documented for a couple of thousand years. The winds, the shoals, the rocky shores were the same as Odysseus had endured on his long trip home. But when the Portuguese pointed their prows south and east into the Atlantic gales, it was another matter altogether. Experts debated whether it could even be done. There was concern that great beasts would swallow ships whole; that sailors, as they entered the torrid zones to the south, would be incinerated; that the vessels, as they rounded the curve of the earth, would simply fall right off into oblivion. In fact, the real-life obstacles were probably worse. Yet in spite of all of this, thousands went willingly to die of scurvy and of thirst, to perish on alien rocks and on foreign spears. Historians have filled many exhaustively footnoted volumes with their explanations of why this chronically impoverished fleck of a nation achieved so many improbable feats. And their theories have great merit, I’m sure. Still, I figured if I wanted to make sense of it all, I would do better to ask a sailor.

  To get to the Vera Cruz dock, I had to dodge the thick morning traffic that sputtered fitfully along Avenida Infante Dom Henrique (named, appropriately enough, after Prince Henry “the Navigator,” who is popularly credited with encouraging the voyages that eventually led the Portuguese past the Cape of Good Hope). Across the asphalt and past the chain-link fence, a dusty trailer serves as the command center of Aporvela, an organization that might be described as a sailing club for time travelers, navigating ships that haven’t seen salt water for five hundred years. Inside the cramped trailer, Hernâni Xavier greeted me in his office, hemmed in by high shelves crammed and spilling over with charts and books. He rose from his old office chair, looking more like the Portuguese Ford executive he used to be rather than the sailor he has become. “My original plan was to join the codfish fleet, but then I met my wife…,” he would later tell me, dismissing the memory of corporate servitude with a shrug. Even while he was with the automobile company, he began making antique ship models—first plastic, then wood, and finally this: he points out the window to the black hull. Hernâni is squat, burly, and dead serious, much like the caravel itself. He knows just about everything there is to know about the little ships and a great deal about naval history in general. “I have fourteen thousand books on history, sailing, and navigation,” he notes, pushing a wayward volume back into its place.

  Hernâni’s stubborn humorlessness seems to break down only when he espies the vast horizons of my ignorance. To make it simpler, he draws me pictures to explain the difference between a round ship (the one with square sails) and a caravel (with triangular sails) and then draws a simple chart to explain how the caravels could practically sail into the wind, where the square-rigged ships had to tack back and forth a dozen or more times. This is how the caravels could skim south along the African coast all the way to the Cape of Good Hope. He pulls out his pencil again to draw a diagram to show why the much larger square-rigged pepper ships had to go all the way to Brazil in order to make the same journey.

  “But you must see the caravel to understand.” He summons me to follow him across the ramshackle waterfront. “It was exactly to have a glimpse of how it worked, how it stood on the sea, how it was navigated—because none of this was known—that thirty years ago, we founded Aporvela to study this.” A curt motion indicates the tethered black hull. Up close, the vessel’s deck gleams with finely polished wood, but even standing on deck, you feel cramped. The original crews consisted of some dozen sailors, if for no other reason than that there wasn’t enough room to store food for more. Hernâni indicates the shallow hold. “The Vera Cruz draws only 330 centimeters [about 11 feet], so it could go up the African rivers.” But, because of space considerations, that same shallow hold meant that they could bring back only the most precious African cargo. In the fifteenth century, that meant gold, melegueta pepper, and slaves. “We didn’t capture the slaves,” Hernâni reassures me; “we traded for them with the natives”—a distinction I find even more technical than his explanation of fifteenth-century rigging.

  The Vera Cruz, Aporvela’s re-creation of a fifteenth-century caravel.

  The very first caravel built by Aporvela, the Bartolomeu Dias, was financed by the Portuguese community in South Africa to commemorate Dias’s famous trip round the Cape of Good Hope. Naturally, the club’s volunteer sailors had to sail it there. “Up until then, there were only theories. Now we built one, we navigated it, so we know how the maneuver of the sail was.” Then two more ships were built. Hernâni’s attention to the practical details is reminiscent of the early Portuguese navigators, who got to where they were going by trusting the experience of their weathered companions, while other explorers (a certain Genoan comes to mind) trusted armchair geographers whose ideas of the world came from Ptolemy and Mandeville.

  Aporvela’s weekend mariners have sailed their feisty vessels from the Baltic to Brazil, to South Africa, to the Azores. Hernâni Xavier allows himself a hint of a smile. “In all, we’ve sailed them over seventy thousand miles!”

  You have to wonder how many of those first sailors risked life and limb just because they were similarly curious and obsessed. Perhaps more than historians would have us believe. Human beings often behave in ways that make more rational types question their reason. But even reasonable people must have been swayed by the wealth that was off-loaded on Lisbon’s docks—at first, in a precious trickle of African gold in the fourteen hundreds and then in a fabulous flood of Indian spice in the following century. So when you add up the curious, the bored, the impoverished, and the greedy, it’s no wonder that there were plenty of men willing to board the little caravels to gamble their lives on the treacherous seas.

  Portugal, then as now, was a poor, small country situated at the western extremity of Europe. It takes up no more than 15 percent of the continent’s westernmost peninsula, but even that sliver has little to recommend it when it comes to making a living. The sharp cliffs that rise from narrow valleys make lovely backdrops in tourists’ snapshots, but try tilling the soil. Getting from place to place used to be a wretched affair. It is only quite recently that a decent highway system has connected up the country. For most of its history, any industry or commerce depended on the sea.

  This was all too evident to the medieval Portuguese king João I as he surveyed his army of armed and hungry knights with nowhere to go and nothing to do. In the early Middle Ages, conquistadores from northern Portugal had gradually annexed the country from the Muslims in a move that mirrored the Christian expansion in next-door Castile. By 1385, the kingdom was secured from the greedy encroachments of the Castilians and consolidated under João I. But now that there were no more Moors to slaughter or Castilians
to fight, what was a king to do? The sensible João, “having no one to conquer on land,” to quote the Portuguese national poet Luís Vaz de Camões, “attacked the waves of the ocean.”

  Or to put it more prosaically, in 1415, he dispatched a fleet of his restless conquistadores just across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar for a looting spree at the wealthy Muslim port of Ceuta. It was just a logical extension of the Christian campaign in Europe. “The Portuguese kings were very keen on the idea of guerra justa, a ‘just war,’” is the way Hernâni explains it. Which is to say that Christian legal scholars could always rationalize fighting (and enslaving) Muslims. And if the infidels happened to occupy a town bursting with grain and gold, so much the better. Ceuta had become wealthy because it was the outlet for caravan routes that delivered sub-Saharan gold, melegueta pepper, and slaves to the Mediterranean coast. These were then sold to Arab, Genoan, and Catalan merchants, who exchanged them for grain but also for Asian spices brought in from the Levant. Though João’s greedy troops had been more or less aware of the loot behind Ceuta’s gates before their battering rams splintered them to pieces, they had had only a vague glimmer of where the riches came from. After some unsubtle interrogation of the residents, they now knew. It’s worth noting that among the desert-dusted knights who rode into Ceuta were the king’s own sons, including the young Henrique, the one later dubbed “the Navigator.” The prince, who was subsequently made governor of the colonized city, seemed especially keen on the details of the caravan route.

  Hernâni tells me there were no caravels during that first African incursion, but they came into play very soon afterward. Their voyages down the African coast started shortly after the Ceuta conquest, no doubt stimulated by the riches the conquistadores had found, and some of these trips, at least, were under the auspices of Henrique. In many ways, these excursions were just an extension of what Portuguese mariners had been doing for uncounted generations. Lisbon merchantmen had long been sailing the rough Atlantic waters north to Flanders and the Baltic ports with cargoes of olive oil, salt, and oranges. To the south, Portuguese fishermen had traced the African shore for hundreds of miles. Hernâni scoffs when I remind him that the Venetians and Genoans, too, delivered spices to the northern ports. “They stayed by the shore,” he corrects me. “We sailed direct across the open sea.”

  Yet despite the impression given by Aporvela’s historian-in-residence, the Portuguese did not discover everything. The Genoans, Catalans, and even the Castilians had sailed out into the broad Atlantic and certainly discovered at least the Canary Islands and Madeira. The very idea of going round Africa to reach the spiceries most likely originated with the Genoese, who were trying to pull one over on the Venetians. Still, however daring, those earlier trips never led to much of anything. It was only when the Portuguese rediscovered the uninhabited islands of Madeira and the Azores far out in the Atlantic that they came to be colonized and exploited on Lisbon’s behalf. Extensive sugar plantations were carved into ravines between Madeira’s craggy slopes in the early fourteen hundreds. A hundred years later, the Azores became essential for provisioning armadas sailing back and forth from the Americas. In the meantime, as the caravels were sent south past the desert shore and farther south to the jungle coast of Guinea (as most of sub-Saharan Africa was called), they discovered riches only hinted at by the caravans that crossed the dunes.

  There is no question that the caravels’ main objective was the gold that flowed down West African rivers. But other “goods” were picked up along with the precious cargo, too—most notably, enslaved Africans, ivory, and the “pepper” collected in the backwoods. Melegueta pepper, also known as grains of paradise and Guinea pepper, had been imported into Europe for centuries, mostly via North African ports such as Ceuta. The French, in particular, had an especial fondness for les graines de paradis, as fourteenth-century cookbooks such as the Ménagier de Paris make abundantly clear, but the African spice was used in other parts of northern Europe, too, mostly to flavor beer and wine. According to medieval physicians, the spice was “hot and moist,” and perhaps because of this, it was much appreciated in colder climates. The little grains were, at least for a time, more expensive than Asian black pepper. In Ceuta, melegueta was even used as a local currency (much like peppercorns in Europe), and prices were quoted in gold and melegueta, much as we might say dollars and cents. When caravels replaced camels, the profits from the melegueta trade poured into the Portuguese treasury. The West African spice imports would generate a steady flow of cash well into the sixteenth century, even if the profits never approached the fabulous wealth of the later black pepper imports.*19 All the same, in Prince Henrique’s day, the Portuguese were still only dabbling in the spice trade.

  Just when the idea of turning those profitable little trips down the African coast into a concerted effort to round the Cape of Good Hope occurred is unclear. Hernâni insists that it was the Navigator Prince who came up with the idea; still, even he will agree with most other historians that it was Henrique’s great-nephew, King João II, who really made reaching Asia by sea a national priority. It was under his watch and with his often-direct supervision that the scheme of circumnavigating the Muslim world for a direct path to India’s pepper coast was put into action.

  With twenty-twenty hindsight, it’s easy to admire the audaciousness of João’s plan, the relentless drive down the coast, the investment of enormous treasure to secure a goal that was perhaps a generation in the future. A Venetian of the time would most likely have dismissed the idea as unaccountably reckless, but then no merchant of the great trading republic could have assembled enough investors for this kind of risky adventure—or, for that matter, sacrificed the lives of thousands of his employees to secure such an ephemeral prize. The Portuguese approached the spice trade much as they had the attack on Ceuta, flailing their battle lances and yelling out the war cry Santiago e a elles! (“Saint James and at them!”). They could justify every raiding party as an assault against the Moor, each trip up an African river as a scouting party for potential Christian allies. This kind of reasoning might not have cut it in the boardrooms on the Rialto, but at the royal palace in Lisbon, suffused with the ideology of chivalry and holy quests, who could argue with a king whose stated goal was to defeat the infidel and free Jerusalem? To further these ends, each caravel was charged with searching for Prester John, the fabulous Christian ruler who supposedly waited in the Muslims’ rear. Of course, it didn’t hurt the king’s cause that money was pouring in from gold, melegueta, and, increasingly, sugar. All the same, João II and his men needed the foolhardiness of conquistadores to stay the course, given all the hardships along the way.

  Yet why India? Why pepper? João’s kingdom was already profiting handsomely from melegueta, so it could be argued that black pepper was just another lucrative item to add to the product line. For many years, historians asserted that the motivation for Portugal’s expansion could be explained by a rise in pepper prices at the end of the fifteenth century. But the numbers do not bear this out; prices actually slid. Moreover, it does not naturally follow that a small maritime nation at the westernmost edge of Europe would decide to expand its trading sphere from the middle Atlantic to India, a spot more than five thousand miles in the opposite direction (and that’s as the bird flies, not as the caravel sails).

  There’s no doubt that the king needed more money for the treasury. The court soaked up mountains of African gold just to keep up appearances: to purchase Florentine woolens, Oriental silks, and Venetian spices. Whereas the royals’ relatives in Castile, Burgundy, and England could depend on the receipts from their vast estates and to some degree taxes, the monarchs in Lisbon grew increasingly dependent on their income from overseas to make ends meet. As it was, they were always living beyond their means, needing to borrow money from Italian bankers to pay the bills.

  It’s worth remembering that Lisbon was directly on the Italian route between the Mediterranean and Flanders. Venetian ships, loaded with spices, w
ould pull up to docks only a few hundred feet distant from João’s harbor palace to pick up supplies before continuing north. The king could literally open his window and sniff the precious cargo as the pepper galleys passed by. Hernâni Xavier points out that the Italians, however, had no use for the salt and olive oil that were Portugal’s stock-in-trade, so when the royal court needed pepper or cinnamon, it had to pay for the spices with precious African gold.

  As in the rest of Europe, the Portuguese elite used to eat food seasoned with saffron, ginger, cloves, and pepper, and especially cinnamon. The earliest Portuguese cookbook that has come down to us apparently traveled with the household of the Infanta Maria, João II’s great-niece, when she married into an Italian family. The manuscript, O livro de cozinha, has a scattering of recipes that call for the usual medieval masala. To make a dish of lamprey eel, for example, you sauté it and then “add a very small amount of water and vinegar, and sprinkle on cloves, pepper, saffron, and a little ginger.” However, the Renaissance O livro de cozinha had many fewer of these well-spiced recipes than its Italian and French counterparts. Quite a number of the recipes use no spices at all, and others confine themselves to a finishing sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon. This last touch can probably be credited to the Moorish influence, as is hinted by a recipe for galinha mourisca (Moorish chicken).*20 The fact that the Portuguese had to pay hard cash for their beloved cinnamon may account for the relatively modest use of spices at the time; by the same token, it made the royal household aware firsthand how much money there was to be made in the spice business, a point that was brought home with every royal bite.