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

by Michael Krondl

The thought must have occurred to João that if his merchants were already turning a neat profit from the melegueta (less expensive than pepper by now), how much more could be earned from wresting the pepper trade from those lagoon-dwelling, money-grubbing collaborators of the Moor. He must also have heard more than one whisper in his ear from the Genoese who had flocked to the Lisbon court. The Venetians’ archrivals had long been active across Iberia as bankers, merchants, and mariners. They had also once provided Atlantic Europe with a good portion of its spices, but as the fifteenth century wore on, the Rialto merchants gradually pushed most Genoans out of the spice business. What sweet revenge if Portugal would snatch the spice monopoly from their Adriatic foes! And the Genoans weren’t the only Italians to smell opportunities at the Lisbon court. The Florentines were there, too, ready to invest in the lucrative trade at the first opportunity. Yet I wonder if João’s men would have made the sacrifices for a more ordinary commodity, for the alum (used as a mordant in dyeing wool) that made the Genoese piles of money in those days or the barrels of herring that funded the early Dutch republic. Did not the stench of Eden so long associated with spices make them more worthy of the conquistadores’ quest?

  The idea of circumnavigating Africa must have dawned slowly on the king as Portuguese caravels moved steadily down the Guinea coast, but at some point, the initial motive of the voyages—the search for gold and Prester John—was joined by a concerted strategy to reach the pepper coast of India. To further the plan, João sent spies across the Sahara to Alexandria and as far as Malabar to report what they found. But mostly, he sent the nimble little ships farther south to find their way under unrecognizable stars, past unknown coasts, in search of the southern passage to the Orient. Finally, in early January 1488, two caravels captained by Bartolomeu Dias rounded the cape that João would call the “Cape of Good Hope” for the promise it offered.

  During these decades of exploration, Lisbon’s state-of-the-art shipyards refined and enlarged their vessels. A document from 1478 mentions a caravela de descobrir purpose-built for the voyages of discovery, while a tubbier version called caravela redonda became popular for its larger hull capacity. (Columbus’s Niña and Pinta were both caravelas redondas.) Eventually, a much larger ship—the nau, or carrack—was designed. The nau had even more cargo space, thereby making the trip to India worthwhile.

  The knowledge of those consummately skilled shipwrights hasn’t been entirely lost, or at least not yet. Aporvela was able to build modern-day caravels because there is one remaining shipyard that builds fishing boats much as they have been built for five hundred years. The sailors still sail them as they did in the heroic days of Prince Henrique and Bartolomeu Dias, Hernâni tells me as we clamber off the Vera Cruz and say our goodbyes.

  A CITY RISES

  In the Alfama, the district that rises across the road from Aporvela’s trailer office, the smell of grilling fish penetrates every alley and tilted square, especially at lunchtime, when restaurants set up impromptu grills on the sidewalks and the working-class residents jostle elbows at the small tables that spill out onto the streets. The neighborhood gives you a sense of the rather modest place medieval Lisbon must have been before the profits from the black Indian gold transformed the city: a Lisbon of fishwives more than of God-possessed explorers. Today’s local restaurants, however, give virtually no clue as to Lisbon’s history as the capital of a spice empire. The fish is exquisitely fresh, the portions are abundant, but as far as spice, it is almost entirely absent, even if there is something vaguely medieval in the buckets of salt the Portuguese use in their cooking. But maybe I shouldn’t be looking for remnants of a world-spanning empire in my lunch of fat and delicious sardines. I would do better to look about. The harvest of Lisbon’s pepper ships is all around me, in the pink, brown, and black faces of the men at the next table; in the intertwined light and dark fingers of the couple next to me; in the kinky hair and sea gray eyes. This is where you can see the Christian Portuguese conquerors, the Jews who had fled Isabella’s Spain, the North African Moors, and sub-Saharan slaves. Sailors and fishwives still rub shoulders here (and not only shoulders, I expect) as they did when they came back from Cochin and Malacca.

  In the fifteen hundreds, Lisbon was one of Europe’s greatest cities, a magnet for shipwrights, bankers, and merchants as well as seamen and working girls. It was a metropolis of ornate churches and sumptuous palaces that towered above another city of crowded tenements. Yet, today, that vision of gilded cloisters, tile-covered mansions, and twisting streets of teetering pastel houses is no more in evidence than the Asian aromatics that once used to season Lisboetas’ fish. Unlike Venice, which continues to float like a mirage from the distant past, or even Amsterdam, where the solid mansions built on the profits of the spice trade still stand to remind you of the Dutch city’s glory, the Lisbon you see today was built in a later, shabbier time. The resplendent city built of pepper and gold was almost entirely destroyed by an earthquake on the feast of All Saints on November 1, 1755. Ironically, the neighborhood that survived the earthquake was one of the city’s poorest. It is only in the upper reaches of the Alfama—on the steep slopes of the hill where the Romans first built their fortress, where the Moors set their citadel, and where the Christian kings spawned their schemes—that there are still hints of the gilded city that was.

  When you look up from the Vera Cruz, the medieval houses of the Alfama tumble down the hill without, somehow, managing to look picturesque. In the ancient neighborhood’s lower reaches, the buildings are as mangy and unkempt as the cats that lounge in deep pools of shadow. Climbing up the narrow lanes strung with celery green undershorts and custard yellow tank tops, it’s all too easy to imagine dodging the foul consequences of women yelling “Àgua, vai!” (Water, go!), as they used to before throwing the contents of their chamber pots out the window.*21 The crooked passageways of the lower Alfama have always belonged to the city’s working poor. Even in the heyday of the Portuguese spice trade, chances are that the grilled fish here never saw most of the Asian seasonings that provided jobs for the locals. Pepper might have been an exception. Hernâni Xavier makes the intriguing suggestion that Lisbon’s working classes were able to buy third-rate pepper (ruined on the return voyage) on the cheap, and so it is perfectly conceivable that it was more common then than it is now. What is certain, though, is that up the hill, the aroma of cooking fish would have mingled with cloves and cinnamon.

  As you climb the ever-wider stairways toward the crowning citadel of the castle, you leave the leaning tenements behind. The alleys become tidier and larger. Concealed behind some of the old walls, there are clues of the wealth that poured in with the Carreira da Índia, the annual convoy that arrived packed with pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. Through the open door of the Church of Santiago, a single gilded altar that escaped the earthquake’s fury still glimmers like a faded beacon from that earlier Midas-touched era. A half-open gate offers a tempting glimpse of a palm-shaded courtyard, the ancient tiled walls a florid tangle of blue, white, and gold. Out in the street, the steps take you higher, past mansions and boutiques filled with antique ceramics.

  At the top of the hill, the tallest of Lisbon’s seven-odd peaks, the citadel, the Castelo de São Jorge, towers over the skyline. The castle itself is fake, constructed in the 1940s by the fascist-leaning government of the time in a postcard-perfect, medieval style that Prince Valiant would be proud to call home. The current structure completely obscures a succession of older hilltop fortresses built by the Romans, the Muslims, and the conquering Portuguese. As you pause atop the crenellated towers with the other out-of-breath tourists, you can see why this would be the perfect place to build a fortress. Below, the river Tejo forms an estuary as it approaches the Atlantic Ocean, which makes it an almost ideal port. It is shaped like a bottle, the neck facing the Atlantic and the city occupying one of the shoulders. The Phoenicians called it “Ubis Ubbo” (Gentle Bay) when they settled here. Under the Romans, that turned into “Olisi
ppo” or “Olissipum” (thus, Lisbon). They called the natives Lusitanians, a name later revived by the poets of the Renaissance.

  The last invaders to take the hill were a force of northern Portuguese conquistadores in 1147, led by King Afonso Henriques and assisted by a Frankish band of Jerusalem-bound Crusaders (described by one Christian observer as “plunderers, drunkards and rapists…men not seasoned with the honey of piety”). Given its ideal location, Lisbon soon became the country’s main market, then, in 1260, its capital. From their hilltop aerie, the kings could overlook the sails multiplying on the wide green Tejo and peer down to see growing mountains of merchandise loaded and unloaded on the docks below.

  Under the Christian monarchs, the city grew beyond the confines of the castle hill as ad hoc streets and squares spread across the surrounding peaks and valleys. Between 1400 and 1600, the city’s population more than doubled. Not that the rest of Portugal saw much benefit from the yellow and the black gold that was unloaded on Lisbon’s docks only to be immediately reloaded onto ships headed to London or Antwerp. Lisbon was increasingly the shining city on the hill surrounded by a country of shantytowns. But that only made it more of an attraction for the peasants and artisans who flocked here. Naturally, it wasn’t merely needy agricultural laborers and skilled craftsmen who were lured by the city’s wealth. Clerics, squires, and sycophants milled around the tiled courtyards by the castle walls to sniff out any opportunity of advancement. Fidalgos bowed and preened to train for any potentially lucrative appointments.*22 The path to fortune was different here than in Venice or any of the Italian merchant republics. Here, everything depended on royal favor. If you wanted to advance your career as a soldier, merchant, or priest, you needed the monarch’s blessing. For the king, it was an expensive proposition. By 1500, Manuel I was providing for some four thousand retainers at his court alone. It’s no wonder the Portuguese royals were always on the lookout for a new revenue stream.

  As profits from African gold and Indian pepper increasingly flowed up the Tejo, it was more than symbolic when Manuel moved his residence down from the castelo to the riverbank Paço Real da Ribeira, right in the middle of the harbor. Just east of the palace, a broad beach swarmed with longshoremen off-loading foreign slaves, sugar, spices, and gold even while boats were packed with domestic oil, dried fish, and salt. A few hundred yards to the west were giant dry docks, where the groans of bending timbers and the pounding of hammers kept the monarch’s windows rattling from morning to dusk. The kings, who prided themselves on their crusading zeal, now lived much like shopkeepers who set up house above their store to keep an eye on the merchandise. King François I of France had a point when he dismissed his Portuguese counterpart as “le roi épicier” (in French, épicier means both grocer and spice seller). The jibe must have stung, though, and it explains, at least in part, the Lusitanian rulers’ chronic need to mix a judicious dose of evangelism into their commerce, to search for Christians as well as spices.

  BEYOND GOOD HOPE

  Looking down from the castelo, it would appear no more than a quick scramble to the Praça do Comércio, where the king’s harborside palace used to stand. In fact, it is a long, circuitous descent down winding alleys and precipitous stairs. These days, the vast, charmless square is mostly desolate except for the occasional camera-toting visitor and the itinerant street peddler hawking fake Armani sunglasses. Under the grocer king and his immediate successors, this used to be the royal residence’s busy front yard and was accordingly referred to as Terreiro do Paço (literally, “Palace Grounds”). Old illustrations show grand parades in honor of visiting potentates filling the field. Temporary grandstands were erected here to give a better view of heretics burned alive at the frequent and well-attended autos-da-fé. I’ve been told that visitors occasionally comment on the resemblance of the Praça do Comércio to the Piazza San Marco. It is true that both are more or less right on the water, both have monotonous three-story neoclassical façades defining three sides. There are no famous cafés here, though, and no pigeons. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Lisbon, just like Venice, turns her back to the mainland to greet the sea. And in much the way the doge’s palace stood guard over the Adriatic harbor, the king’s palace stood sentry at his realm’s front gate.

  But the Portuguese monarch was a different sort of creature than the CEO of Venice Inc. It’s almost as if the local topography reflected the way decisions were made in each town. Like Lisbon’s tumbling vertical façade, here, all the power and the glory cascaded down from the king, while in Venice (and Amsterdam, too, for that matter), wealth and influence spread horizontally, much as the watery city spread across the lagoon. But that may just explain why the Portuguese pioneered the direct route to India. It’s hard to see how anyone but an absolute monarch could have mustered the resources necessary to get the job done.

  At Lisbon’s Museu de Arte Antiga, there is a series of fifteenth-century panels that might as well be a family portrait. Here is Henrique, the Navigator Prince, doughy and wry. Nearby is his nephew King Afonso V in a fabulous tunic of purple and green velvet with his wife, Isabel, in a gorgeous scarlet dress. (It makes you wonder how many shiploads of melegueta paid for those fabulous outfits.) Their son, the future João II, is just behind his father—a pudgy preteen with tousled hair. His almond eyes show no hint of his later Machiavellian streak. Yet who knows how far the Lusitanians would have gone if it hadn’t been for this ruthless and determined young man? At the time, not everyone in Portugal thought the Atlantic explorations were a good idea. King Afonso, for one, was never much interested in the Indian project. João, though, had none too subtle ways of convincing his opposition. Once he assumed the throne in 1481, he beheaded his most prominent opponents. An uncooperative bishop perished in a cistern. João personally stabbed to death one of his detractors. Even before he sat in his father’s seat, he was, by all accounts, fixated with reaching India. The obsession was apparently born some years earlier when, as crown prince, he secured the African spice and gold monopoly from the king. Then, once he held the reins of power, João II pursued the search for a southern passage to India with all his resources. And finally, when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the way to India’s perfumed riches was clear.

  Among the many hangers-on at Paço da Ribeira during João II’s rule was a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus. He had married into a Portuguese family*23 and had his own ideas about reaching the Spice Islands. Contrary to what you may have been taught in elementary school, educated people did not think the world was flat in the Renaissance. There was, however, no consensus about just how big the globe was. According to one eminent Florentine geographer of the time, the earth was some ten thousand miles around the equator. (The actual distance is closer to twenty-five thousand.) Using this number, Columbus made the perfectly reasonable calculation that you could get to the Indies much faster by sailing west than by going south and east. There is some indication that João didn’t cotton much to the Italian adventurer on a personal level, but what eventually damned his proposal in Portuguese eyes was the preposterousness of the numbers. The frequent trips down the coast of Africa had given Portuguese navigators a pretty good sense of how big the earth was from pole to pole. If Columbus’s numbers were to be believed, the earth would have the improbable shape of an upended football. All the same, the king apparently took the idea seriously enough to have a commission look into it. They gave it a thumbs-down.

  There may have been another reason why João was none too interested in going west. He may already have known what was there. Hernâni Xavier, for one, is convinced that two Portuguese maps show Brazil as early as the 1430s. But even if those maps are discounted, other circumstantial evidence all but proves that the Portuguese had at least some idea of the Americas before Columbus’s voyage. Portuguese sailors certainly spent the years between Dias’s discovery of the cape route and da Gama’s epochal voyage exploring the southern Atlantic, and given the currents and winds, it’s
almost impossible that they didn’t at least sight South America. This is the likely reason why, in the 1494 treaty of Tordesillas, which divided up the world between Portugal and Spain, João fought tooth and nail to have the dividing line moved west. This just happened to place Brazil in the Portuguese sphere—six years before Brazil was officially discovered! But, at least for the moment, João knew that he did not have the resources to simultaneously explore a new world and pursue the pepper project in the East.

  Spurned in Lisbon, Columbus went knocking on Isabella’s door in neighboring Castile, talked the queen into backing his plan, and the rest, as they say, is history. It all seems inevitable now, the partnership of Columbus and Isabella and the subsequent Spanish conquest of the New World, but at the time, it seemed an unlikely scenario. The Castilians had never been especially interested in the Atlantic, busy as they were with conquests back home. But once Dias had shown the feasibility of the cape route, the Spanish monarchs must have felt a certain urgency to act so that they wouldn’t lose out to their neighbors in any potential spice bonanza. This insecurity, this need to keep up with the Joãos, must have helped convince the queen next door to invest in the Genoan’s scheme. Columbus, in the meantime, was so convinced of his numbers that even after several trips to the West Indies, he would never admit that he had not found the fabled East. Not only did he insist on calling the indigenous peoples “Indians” and their islands the “Indies,” he came back with spices that he called pepper (pimienta), which were in fact capsicums and allspice. (The Spanish continue to call the latter pimienta dulce or pimienta de Jamaica.) Isabella was not impressed. When she found out that Vasco da Gama had returned from Calicut with the real thing, she sent for Columbus, who was on his third voyage to the Antilles at the time. Subsequently, the Genoan was brought home in chains and stripped of his titles and income. As far as the Castilian queen was concerned, his voyages were failures, the route to the Indies and their aromatic riches now in firm possession of the Portuguese. In Lisbon, Vasco da Gama would receive precisely the same titles (in imitation of the Castilian model) that Columbus had lost: those of admiral and viceroy of India.