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

by Michael Krondl

  Vasco da Gama set sail from the Lisbon suburb of Restelo on July 8, 1497, with a small flotilla of two naus, the São Gabriel and São Rafael, and a caravel, the Bérrio, dispatched by the king, according to an anonymous chronicler of the voyage, “to make discoveries and go in search of spices.” King João II was fated never to see those sails emblazoned with the Crusaders’ cross swell with the Atlantic wind. He had died two years earlier, at the age of forty. The day he had been planning for all his life was witnessed by his cousin and brother-in-law, Manuel I. Apparently, João didn’t think much of his wife’s brother (he made an aborted attempt to have his illegitimate son declared heir), which may explain, at least in part, why King Manuel worked so hard to outstrip his predecessor’s legacy. It must have rankled him that they dubbed him “the Fortunate” while João had been called “the Perfect Prince.”

  We know quite a lot about Vasco da Gama’s fortunate royal patron, but the young explorer is a bit of a cipher. According to records, da Gama was only twenty-eight when he commanded that first mission to India. He was a middle son of middling aristocracy from the southern seaport town of Sines. While most definitely not a professional seaman, he seems to have had some experience serving in coastal missions under João’s administration. In later years, he had a reputation for being temperamental and capricious. However, on this first journey, the young captain-general comes across as so cautious as to verge on paranoia—at least when dealing with the locals in the Indian Ocean.

  Da Gama’s ships carried provisions for three years, guns and gunners, interpreters, musicians and priests, and a few convicts (death-row inmates who had their sentences commuted to naval service) for some of the riskier tasks. The commander also carried a royal letter addressed to Prester John. Oddly, given its ostensible mission, the armada was surprisingly devoid of trade goods. The ships set course straight across the Atlantic, then back down to the Cape of Good Hope, and up to the city of Malindi, about halfway up Africa’s eastern coast in what is today’s Kenya.

  By the time they reached Malindi on the eve of Easter 1498, more than nine months after setting sail, da Gama’s sailors had been suffering weeks of dehydration and dying of scurvy left and right. Several close calls with none-too-friendly natives along the East African coast had convinced them that no one could be trusted, so even in Malindi, where their reception was cordial, the Lusitanian adventurers kept a wary distance. Here, they took on fresh food and water, and equally important, they hired a Gujarati pilot to guide them across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. The pilot, though Muslim, supposedly even spoke some Italian! The rest of the trip was thankfully uneventful. The fleet reached Calicut in a mere twenty-six days on May 18, 1498, arriving just in time to be drenched by the southern Indian monsoon.

  The Portuguese did not make a great impression on the locals when they arrived in India.

  What came next was more farce than high drama. After his close shaves along the African coast, da Gama had no intention of putting himself at risk. That’s what the onboard convicts were for. So the first Portuguese conquistadores sent out to meet the legendary Indians were a couple of jailbirds. When they finally tracked down someone they could talk to, they also turned out to be foreigners—mainly, two Tunisians who just happened to speak Castilian and Genoese. Not surprisingly, the Arabs were none too pleased to see these all-too-familiar infidels. “May the Devil take you! What brought you here?” was their unsubtle greeting. To which the cons offered the oft-quoted reply “We come in search of Christians and of spices.” That first Calicut visit was not terribly successful on either account. Later visits would prove much more lucrative—at least, when it came to the spices.

  The following weeks saw the Portuguese slogging back and forth through the rain-soaked streets between the harbor and the royal palace. During their first visit, they could barely move because of the thick crowds who had come to gawk at this novel species of foreigner. Early on, the local ruler, the zamorin, had been quite favorably inclined toward the newcomers. He even granted da Gama a long interview, in which the potentate punctuated his sentences by expelling great gobs of betel juice and saliva into a royal-sized golden spittoon. But subsequently, the zamorin thought better of it and had the Europeans detained. Then he changed his mind and released them, and then once more locked them up. Da Gama spent several intermittent weeks fuming under house arrest, at a loss to figure out what was going on. He had arrived with the firm belief that the zamorin was a Christian, and now he wasn’t going to let mere facts get in the way. The Portuguese were so convinced they had found their longed-for coreligionists that they took the Hindu temples for churches. These “churches,” according to the chronicler, were decorated with “saints” wearing crowns and “painted variously, with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms.” Naturally, the only explanation for the zamorin’s behavior could be that it was caused by his malevolent courtiers, the perfidious Moors.

  You need not be a religious bigot to understand why the Muslim traders ensconced in Calicut wanted to get rid of the Europeans. Still, the conquistadores didn’t make it any easier for themselves. While it’s hardly surprising that courses in comparative religion would not be part of an aspiring fidalgo’s curriculum, it also seems that neither were the ABCs of business etiquette. The zamorin’s commercial representatives reportedly burst into peals of laughter when they saw the presents the Europeans had brought for their master. “The poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, would give more,” they sniggered. (The Portuguese chronicle of the voyage itemizes twelve pieces of cotton cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, six washbasins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey as the sum total of the gifts for a ruler who used gold even for his cuspidor.) The Hindu potentate was not amused.

  In the end, though, the two sides reached a compromise, no doubt aided by the fact that the Portuguese grabbed a few hostages of their own. So for the last few weeks, da Gama could supervise the trading operation from the safety of his own cabin. His men took advantage of this time to rummage through their chests to find anything and everything that they could hock in the Calicut spice market. The sailors went so far as to literally sell the shirts off their backs in order to buy pepper and cloves. The sweaty linen tops were apparently worth a lot less money here than back home, but then spices were even cheaper. The captain-general got to hold on to his clothes, but he did part with his personal supply of silver cups and other tableware, which he traded in for a hefty cargo of spices and precious stones.

  All in all, this first European expedition to Asia didn’t make much of an impression on the locals. Just to make sure the foreigners would be less confused in the future, the zamorin sent them off with a letter spelling out just what he wanted to see next time they arrived: “My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper and precious stones. That which I ask of you in exchange is gold, silver, corals and scarlet cloth.” Future visitors, including da Gama himself, got the message. In the interim, though, the Portuguese had to survive the return voyage home. Not many did.

  When da Gama’s ships finally limped back to the quiet waters of the Tejo in the summer of 1499, they were down to 55 men of the original crew of perhaps 170. Just how much spice they brought home is impossible to say, since most of it was in the hands of the officers and crew. There must have been at least several thousand pounds’ worth of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg on board—enough, at any rate, that the king awarded da Gama a bonus of more than a ton of spices while the surviving sailors received a couple of hundred pounds each. Still, it’s unlikely the crown made a profit on this particular voyage. But at least King Manuel now had plenty of firsthand intelligence. He knew that a hundred-pound bag of pepper selling for sixteen ducats in Venice could be had for two in Calicut, and what was perhaps even more important to the heir of the Crusader kings, he also had eyewitnesses (however deluded) who swore that India was crawling with Christians.

&nb
sp; The king embraced the returning mariners as heroes. They were paraded through the streets, and Vasco da Gama was the toast of the town. Manuel “the Fortunate” quickly dispatched the news to courts across Europe. In a jubilant letter sent a bare forty-eight hours after the India fleet’s return, the Portuguese ruler announced to Isabella and Ferdinand, the joint monarchs of Castile and Aragon, the Portuguese “discovery” of the (real) India, where his men had found great quantities of cloves, cinnamon, and other spices, to say nothing of “rubies and all kinds of precious stones.” (No wonder Isabella got so ticked off at Columbus just then.) He bragged that he would sweep the Indian Ocean clear of the infidel and, with the help of the Indian Christians, take over the spice trade. He even had the chutzpah to give himself a new title, “Lord of Guinea [that is, Africa] and of the conquest of the navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.” That would stick it in the eye of anyone who thought he wasn’t good enough to succeed João II!

  In the following ten years or so, Manuel actually came close to living up to the terms of his boastful title. As soon as da Gama came home, preparations were made for another expedition, this one much bigger, better armed, and most important, better supplied with the silver that Indians wanted in exchange for their black gold. This was the 1500 armada led by Pedro Álvares Cabral that just happened to discover Brazil during a brief stopover on the way to India. But Cabral was even less of a diplomat than da Gama. When he finally reached Calicut, he quickly got into an altercation with the local Muslim merchants. This escalated into an all-out bombardment of the zamorin’s capital. Needless to say, Calicut was not very receptive to trading with the Portuguese after that. However, the attack endeared Cabral to the zamorin’s enemies.

  In Cochin, the Europeans were greeted with open arms and allowed to buy spices by the ton: mostly, the local pepper, but also cinnamon brought in from nearby Ceylon and cloves and nutmeg from the distant Spice Islands of Indonesia. This second trip showed even more promise than the first. After all, the fleet returned home with some half million pounds of spices aboard (presumably, mostly in the form of pepper), and it did discover Brazil. But at what cost? Manuel couldn’t have cared less about the beaches of Ipanema. His concern was those blessed Christians, and Cabral came back with the truth this time. Now the king knew that the longed-for fifth column in the Moor’s rear was an illusion. What’s more, Cabral had lost half the fleet along the way. Hundreds of men had died, and it wasn’t even clear that the crown made a profit on the trip. Manuel complained to the Venetian ambassador that he had lost eighty thousand ducats on the venture—though, admittedly, that figure should be taken with a grain of salt, given his audience. Still, to put this into context, that half million pounds of spices brought back by what remained of an original fleet of fifteen ships was roughly equivalent to the average load of a single Venetian galley returning from Alexandria at the time. Whatever the actual numbers, Manuel was not pleased and never gave Cabral another commission. There were apparently many at court who thought the whole project should be abandoned. But Manuel had staked too much on it to give up just yet.

  The next two trips—in particular, another large expedition led by da Gama—proved so fabulously profitable that from now on, an annual fleet left Lisbon for India’s Malabar Coast. In many ways, the Portuguese modeled their approach on ideas developed by Venetians in their spice trade. There was the same thuggish behavior, the same brutal enforcement of the spice monopoly. Nevertheless, though the design may have been similar, Manuel and his men were drawing on a much larger canvas. The Portuguese set up fortified feitorias (trading posts) at strategic points from West Africa to the Moluccas. Unilaterally, Lisbon declared a monopoly in trading pepper throughout the whole Indian Ocean and proceeded to seize or sink any ship that wouldn’t cooperate. Along the way, the sea-hardened conquistadores seized Ormuz, the critical lump of rock that controlled the entrance to the Persian Gulf; captured Goa, about halfway up India’s western coast; and took Molucca (near present-day Singapore), which commanded the sea-lanes between the East Indies and points west.

  With their paltry resources, at least six months’ and perhaps seventeen thousand miles’ journey from home, that the Portuguese more or less succeeded seems nothing short of miraculous. King Manuel’s men certainly thought so and credited their God. More objective observers might note that the Europeans also had other things going their way. When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, most of the spice trade was in the hands of loosely organized merchants, mostly Muslim, North Indian Gujaratis. A good part of northern and central India was in the process of being overrun by the Moguls sweeping down from central Asia, while Egypt was succumbing to the Turkish Ottomans. Both of these ascendant powers were vastly more powerful than the underresourced kingdom on Europe’s western promontory. However, they were almost entirely land-based empires with no navies worthy of the name.*24 The masterful Lisbon shipwrights had no competition to speak of on the open seas, and Portuguese gunnery was state-of-the-art in its day. The Muslim merchants’ ships carried no heavy artillery. They were less maneuverable, and their all-wood construction made them crumple up like balsa wood when smashed by Portuguese cannonballs. In 1513, the adroit Portuguese admiral Albuquerque boasted to his king that “at the rumor of our coming, the native ships all vanished, and even the birds ceased to skim over the water.” In point of fact, plenty of smuggling went on, especially in the later years, more often than not with Portuguese collusion.

  While Lisbon’s caravels, galleons, and naus rode unchallenged on the waves, on land it was another matter. Here, the Portuguese never established anything even vaguely resembling an empire along the lines of the Spanish land-based conquests in the Americas. In Asia, the Lusitanians wrested a few square miles here, a couple of acres there—little more than supply stops for their spice armadas.

  All the same, the arrival of the naus didn’t just gum up the works of Muslim commerce in the Indian Ocean. It had serious repercussions for the Arabs’ main trading partners in the Mediterranean, the Venetians. At first, the traders on the Rialto were nonplussed, reassured by the fact that what was now referred to as the “Calicut voyage” had been a financial bust. The Cabral voyage seemed only to confirm their theory that it was just a matter of time before the Portuguese monarch would give up on the Indian money pit. Others were less sanguine. Girolamo Priuli, himself a spice trader of note, wrote in his diary only weeks after Cabral’s return, “I can clearly see the ruin of the city of Venice, because without the [spice] trade the city will lose its money, the source of Venice’s glory and reputation.”

  Above and beyond the dispatches from Lisbon, the Venetians had more immediate, and probably more serious, concerns closer to home. While news of da Gama’s return to Lisbon trickled back to Italy, war had broken out between the Republic and the Ottoman Empire. This was a disaster for the spice trade, which depended on those very ports—Alexandria in Egypt, Aleppo in Syria—that were now (or would shortly be) under Istanbul’s rule.*25 Before the war, the Venetians’ annual spice convoy averaged some 1.5 million pounds of pepper (a little more than half the total spice cargo), but ten years after da Gama’s first trip, Venice’s combined spice imports were a bare third of what they had been before. The difference was now made up in Lisbon, which was bringing in something like five times as much spice as the city of Saint Mark. As a final humiliation, in 1515, Venice had to sail up the Tejo to buy spices for her customers. Things eventually got so bad that in 1527, the Venetian senate offered to buy the spice monopoly of the Portuguese crown, a proposal that was looked into with at least some seriousness at the Paço da Ribeira, though the two sides could never agree on the terms.

  Venice’s Italian competitors were chortling with glee to see the mighty Queen of the Adriatic put in her place. A Florentine resident in Lisbon at the time smirked that the Venetians would be reduced back to catching fish for a living. The opinion among historians has gone back and forth over the years as to whether
the Portuguese blockade of the Indian sea route or the war in the Middle East had the more severe impact on Venetian trade, but however you weigh the causes (everyone agrees that it was a mixture of both), the result was that the Republic of Saint Mark seemed to be all washed up in the spice trade. Or so it appeared to observers in the first couple of decades of the sixteenth century. Yet, by the 1530s, Istanbul, Alexandria, and the Levant reopened to the Europeans, and the Rialto traders were back in business. The Portuguese had never really been up to the job of controlling all the shipping in the Indian Ocean. They had not managed to plug up the Red Sea route. And while they had a more or less tight grip on the Malabar Coast, they had virtually no say in what went on in Java, Sumatra, or the Spice Islands. As a consequence, tons of pepper slid through their fingers (often as a result of well-greased palms) on their way to the eastern Mediterranean. By the end of the final years of the sixteenth century, almost as much pepper was sailing past the Lido as was unloaded on the Lisbon waterfront.

  Still, the Portuguese king was making a tidy profit, at least for a time. The half dozen or so ships that arrived yearly on the Carreira da Índia (the flotilla from Cochin) unloaded millions of pounds of spice—somewhere on the order of 2 to 3 million pounds in the early years and at least twice that later on. More than 80 percent of this would have been pepper, with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and mace making up the bulk of the rest.*26

  Commentators often remark on the smallness of Portugal and the enormity of its achievements. But that’s just it: it’s only when you take that very smallness (and poverty) into account that you can begin to understand why the Portuguese were so willing to risk their shirts—it’s all they had. To the kings of France, with a population (and tax base) ten times that of Portugal, the profit rung up in the pepper trade would have amounted to only a small percentage of their takings. For the Mogul emperor ruling more than a hundred million Indians, it would have been chump change. However, for the impecunious country of Portugal, spices became even more valuable than African gold. King Manuel I was making twice as much money from the spice trade as from precious metals. When his daughter Isabella was betrothed to the Hapsburg emperor Charles V in 1521, her dowry was paid largely in sacks of pepper. In the case of Manuel’s son João III, fully one-half of his revenue came from re-exporting the African and Asian spices that his father’s men had fought so hard to purloin. For the Portuguese kings, it was worth mobilizing all the resources of their little kingdom to secure the shriveled black berries for which Europeans were willing to pay good money. As a result, pepper became the currency that paid for the Lusitanian empire. Yet it wasn’t just emperors who were paid off in pepper. Captains, officers, and even cabin boys received part of their wages in the form of spices.