On entering the church, you find the tomb of Vasco da Gama just on the right and the remains of Luís Vaz de Camões, Portugal’s great epic poet and da Gama’s self-declared publicist, on your left. Belém was traditionally the last landfall before the outbound trip to India, and one of the jobs of the Hieronymite monks sequestered here was to look after the spiritual needs of the sailors before their long and perilous voyage. Vasco da Gama and his men went to Mass here (it was a modest chapel then) before clambering aboard the São Gabriel and the São Rafael, their two ships named—not by happenstance—after archangels.
Academic historians of the last hundred years or so get all stiff and tweedy when you suggest that people will go to all ends for the sake of their religion. They’ll assure you that religion is just a cover for other, more “rational” motivations. They would prefer to explain the world in terms of economic self-interest, of class warfare, or of dynastic imperatives. But has not the early twenty-first century made it catastrophically clear how many people (and not just the desperate, either) are ready to leap over the brink in the name of their religion? The same was certainly true of “the age of discovery.” While greed should certainly be given her due, there is no reason to think that da Gama was not perfectly sincere when he said that he came in search of Christians and spices. Certainly, the grocer kings spent piles of money to promulgate Christianity around the world, often using cash they didn’t actually have. Portuguese viceroys in India regularly complained that money was being spent on gilding altars while their cannons rusted. Letters dispatched from the Paço da Ribeira overseas would typically begin with “Forasmuch as the first and principal obligation of the Kings of Portugal is to forward the work of conversion by all means in their power” or some such thick and pious phrase. And this idea was not limited to the kings. Portuguese of every class considered themselves as “the standard-bearers of the faith,” chosen above all Western nations to spread the Catholic creed.
The way Europeans saw it in those days, the obstacle that stood in the way of Christianity was Islam. As far as the spice trade was concerned, it was simply a bonus, a gratuity that could be collected by the conqueror of the infidel—much as it had been during the Crusades. It’s clear from the record that the Portuguese monarchs were on the lookout for Christians long before they got it in their heads to look for spices. And the Christian who was at the top of their list was, of course, Prester John. As everyone knew, he was the powerful ruler of a Christian kingdom somewhere in “India,” a place that was vaguely indicated as anywhere to the south and east of Europe in most medieval conceptions of the world. Popular books written by the likes of John Mandeville described the mythical monarch’s fabulous riches in tantalizing detail. In his land, precious stones were supposed to be so large “that men make of them vessels, as platters, dishes and cups.” And what was even more enticing to the Lusitanian kings, the legendary ruler could field an army of more than one hundred thousand—according to Mandeville, at least. To give the court of Lisbon some credit, Prester John’s kingdom wasn’t entirely wishful thinking, since in the high plateaus of Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), a Christian enclave had, in fact, withstood Muhammad’s armies—though the modest mountain kingdom could hardly live up to the English knight’s fantasy.
The Europeans had good reason to drool over a potential ally in the infidel’s rear. Things weren’t going so well for Christendom in the fifteenth century. Admittedly, Catholic Portugal and Spain had consolidated their possessions in the Iberian Peninsula and had even made some successful forays into North Africa. But elsewhere, the situation was grim. To the south and east, Christian armies were crumbling at the onslaught of an expansionist Turkish superpower. In the years before their 1571 defeat at Lepanto, the Ottomans seemed unstoppable, gobbling up the Orthodox Christian Balkans and ready to gulp down Catholic Vienna.
Because they had so successfully muscled into Muslim territory—admittedly, their opponents were the ninety-pound weaklings of North Africa’s beaches—the Castilian and Portuguese monarchs figured it was their responsibility to venture out farther and save Christendom. Accordingly, the search for Prester John became a strategic imperative and the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope a military maneuver designed to get behind the enemy lines. Prince Henrique even went so far as to send out an open letter to the European rulers to join him in his pursuit of Prester John so that they might all band together in a great Christian army to march on Jerusalem. (They turned him down.) João II’s enthusiasm for the African project was also, in large part, motivated by the search. All those caravels were sent up the Senegal, the Niger, and the Congo rivers with the idea that they might connect with the Nile, which would take them to Prester John’s kingdom. When that idea came to naught, Bartolomeu Dias was dispached to find an alternate route. At the same time, another expedition was sent overland with the same goal. That there was money to be made along the way simply made the project more attractive.
Unlike the Venetians, who considered business an estimable occupation, the European nobility—and the court of Lisbon was no exception—shuddered at the idea of making money through trade. Da Gama’s knightly order of Santiago, for instance, specified that not only could Jews, Moors, and heathens not be admitted to the order but neither could money changers, merchants, their employees, or anyone who had at any time “exercised any art, craft or occupation unworthy of our knightly Order, and still less should any entrant ever have earned his living by the work of his hands.” There was an out, however. While, under normal circumstances, knights would lose their standing if they became mere merchants, the act of buying and selling was considered okay if it was in connection with war (or with the holding of land). In holy war, which could potentially weaken the infidel, trade and plunder were even a Christian duty. According to the same rationale, the king could build an empire based on trade as long as it was seen as an ongoing crusade. It was why King Afonso V named the coin minted from African gold the cruzado (“crusader”). Not everyone saw it this way. After all, when the king of France called Manuel “the grocer king,” it had been an obvious put-down.*31
The Renaissance popes—who were, at any rate, too busy poisoning their enemies, begetting children, and decorating chapels (at least, according to the Protestants)—were perfectly happy to let the Portuguese and Castilians take the fight to the enemy. To make the line of control crystal clear, the Spanish-born pope Alexander VI split the world between the two in a papal edict that began “Inter caetera.” This was later finessed in the famous 1494 treaty of Tordesillas, which gave Castile all of the New World with the exception of Brazil, while granting most of Asia to Portugal. Over the years, various agreements forged in Rome gave the respective Iberian kings the right to exercise almost complete religious control over any conquered lands. As a result, as long as the ships departing Belém were filled with priests, the king could retain a clean conscience about the holds that returned packed with pepper.
Opinions on the Lusitanian record when it comes to evangelization are sharply divided. (We’re talking about religion, after all.) Hernâni Xavier, for example, would point out that the missionaries sent by Lisbon were far less violent in imposing their religion in Asia than the Castilians were in the New World. In fact, official policy supposedly forbade forcible conversion, and the Portuguese methods did tend to be more subtle—if hardly less coercive—than was typical of the time. But perhaps more important, once Lisbon discovered that Eastern Christians were few and far between and Prester John had neither the means nor the desire to help conquer the infidel, the lure of India’s black gold shoved the proselytization effort to a sputtering back burner. The Christians just couldn’t keep up with the spices. A group of newly arrived clerics told the scandalized vicar of Malacca in 1514 “that the chief reason why they had come out to the East was to amass a fortune in cruzados; and one of them said that he would not be satisfied unless he had secured 5,000 cruzados and many pearls and rubies within the space of three years.�
�� Even if they were not all this greedy, the quality of the average clergyman did not improve until the arrival of the Jesuits in 1542.
Unlike the Spanish in America, where slaughtering the heathen simply facilitated the looting of temples, the Portuguese in India couldn’t be so cavalier. (Lieutenant Neves, who, like every Portuguese, will find any opportunity to put down the Spanish, adds the telling detail that the looting Castilians referred to their cargo as “treasure,” while Lisbon-bound pepper was always referred to as “merchandise.”) Unlike their Iberian neighbors, the Portuguese needed the Hindu and Muslim spice merchants alive to deliver the goods. Consequently, non-Christians in most Portuguese possessions were allowed to practice their religion more or less unhindered during the first thirty years after da Gama’s arrival. This, however, was to change as the winds of the Counter-Reformation propelled the foot soldiers of a newly proactive Rome to the eastern empire.
The Catholic Church in Europe had taken several decades to react to its Protestant critics, but by the mid-sixteenth century, a sweeping retrenchment was in full swing. The so-called Council of Trent, which met on and off throughout the middle years of the century, set a take-no-prisoners policy toward anyone who wavered from the rule book. Partly as a result of this uncompromising approach, Europe would be embroiled in a century of religious wars. In India, the new emphasis on toeing the Vatican’s line led to a much more aggressive policy of intolerance. In Goa, the Hindu temples that had previously been allowed to stand were burned to the ground. New, highly discriminatory laws were put in place, making the practice of religion and livelihood onerous for any non-Christian. Orphans were forcibly taken from their relatives and raised as Catholics. On alternate Sundays, Catholic enforcers rounded up Hindu families and corralled them in nearby churches, where they were subjected to interminable sermons. Non-Christians, arrested for breaching the religious laws, often sought to evade punishment by asking to be baptized. But, lest they go back on their word, the Jesuits “invited” the quaking Hindus to lunch. For a Brahman, to eat a meal prepared by untouchables was tantamount to being excommunicated from his religion. The practice is recounted in a letter to the queen in 1552, in which a crown official describes the Jesuits’ forcibly shaving their Hindu victims and compelling them to eat beef. Not that the correspondent found the practice itself particularly reprehensible; his complaint was that so many of the locals had fled due to this overzealous behavior that no one was left to work the fields! Obviously, not every Jesuit considered force-feeding heathens part of his job description, and, at least among the lower castes, many Indians came willingly to Christianity. They, after all, had nothing to lose by abandoning Hinduism with its discriminatory rules. What’s more, no matter how involuntary were the original converts, by the second and third generation, their descendants invariably turned into devout Catholics.
In Portugal, many Jews had also converted under duress, and there, too, most became sincere practicing Christians. Nevertheless, enough tried to hold on to the vestiges of Judaism that the Inquisition wouldn’t let them be. Much like the Brahmans forced to eat their sacred cows, the so-called New Christians were compelled to eat pork sausages to prove the authenticity of their conversion.*32 Refusal to do so could land you in the clutches of the Holy Office. This would result, at best, in a life of disgrace and, at worst, in a fiery death at the stake.
Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents. The Christian rules could never compare to the thicket of Talmudic jurisprudence that grew up around the laws of kashruth, nor the tangled hierarchy of dietary strictures of the Hindu caste system. Even so, there were plenty of regulations that obedient Christians were supposed to observe. The most notable restriction was on the consumption of warm-blooded animals. Birds, mammals, and their by-products—eggs, milk, butter, and so on—were restricted for something like a third of the year by the time you added up Lent, Advent, every Friday, and a basketful of other ecclesiastical fast days. Fashions in canon law and the practical considerations of the Vatican meant that there were usually plenty of exemptions made for certain individuals (the infirm and soldiers come to mind) and even for whole regions of Christendom. After 1365, parts of northern Europe were exempted from the no-butter rule on meatless days. (It continued to be banned during Lent.) But even in Europe, caste also played some part. Many of the religious orders, for example, had to adhere to more restrictive rules than laypeople. Much like several Indian religions, Christianity put great stock in the mortification of the body, and fasting was seen as a particularly effective tool for spiritual enlightenment. Peasants, on the other hand, made do with a mostly Lenten diet year-round, whether they liked it or not.
All this might be worth no more than an esoteric footnote in a history of medieval Europe if it weren’t for the fact that these religious rules and restrictions had an enormous impact on national economies and international trade—to say nothing of what ended up on the dinner table.
The church’s diet rules, like the religion itself, were invented in the Mediterranean, with its gracious weather, olive groves, and abundant coastline. An Italian would hardly take it as hardship that she was forced to cook with olive oil and eat fish one day in three. In the north of Europe, however, it was another matter. Here, cooks had only animal fats to cook with, and fishermen were at the mercy of months of miserable weather when they could hardly go fishing at all (notably during the winter months of Advent and Lent). One result of the fasting rules had been to encourage fishing where it was possible and fish-farming where it was not. In part, the Dutch were aswim in capital to invest in the spice trade because they had made a fortune off the herring fishery. To preserve the perishable catch, tons of salt had to be shipped across seas and up rivers, subsequently followed by a return cargo of the preserved fish themselves. The Portuguese, despite their renown as fishermen, imported dried fish from northern Germany. Along with the salt, thousands of barrels of olive oil made the trip north as well, accompanied by smaller quantities of almonds (to make almond milk) to provide a substitute for lard, butter, and milk. Southerners didn’t necessarily export their best. The English expression “as brown as oil” is noted as early as the fifteenth century and gives an idea of the quality of much of the oil arriving in the North. To add insult to injury, the imported oil could be at least double and sometimes as much as ten times the cost of local butter (itself an expensive commodity). Portugal was especially well located to profit from this religiously required trade, since, by sea, it was the closest to the needy nations of the North. Long before Lisbon was outfitting naus for the East India route, her merchants were already making a tidy profit sending salt, olive oil, and almonds to London, Bruges, and Hamburg.
Spices came into this religious framework rather indirectly. Since most pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and their like were considered “hot” and “dry” according to medieval dietary beliefs, they were especially needed on all those fast days to temper or adjust the “moist” and “cold” humors attributed to fish. (A quick look at any medieval cookery manual makes it evident that fasting was in no way related to abstemiousness; some of the fish dishes are even more over-the-top than meat preparations.) In general, the church did not particularly approve of spiced food, especially when cinnamon and ginger were added purely for reasons of taste. As the early medieval saint Bernard points out, you could sin by “taking carnal pleasure in smelling spices or potions or flowers or herbs or foods or other things with a good scent, not out of praise to God, but for immoderate sensual pleasure.” In a late-fourteenth-century diatribe, “Of Antichrist and His Followers,” the proto-Protestant preacher John Wycliffe describes the minions of Beelzebub wolfing down foods “seasoned with hot spices and extra-hot with sauces and syrups.” When taken for “medical” purposes, however, the use of spices was more excusable. Moreover, theological antipathy to the Asian imports waxed and waned. In the early Middle Ages,
cinnamon and other aromatics were actually brewed up into an anointing oil used in church sacraments, but by Wycliffe’s day, spices were more likely to show up on a bishop’s pot roast than on his altar. The early medieval emphasis on mortification of the body was losing much of its appeal in those later years. Certainly, most of the Renaissance popes had no issues with pursuits of the flesh—culinary or otherwise. But then this is what led to the Protestant reaction, after all. To Martin Luther and his fellow travelers, the Roman church was a cesspool of corruption and moral turpitude; Christianity could be purified only by returning to its simpler origins. The abolition of pleasure, whether in the form of exotically spiced dishes or public baths where the genders mixed, was placed high on the new puritan agenda. Unfortunately, the Catholic reaction to this was to become even more puritan than the puritans, with sex and cooking falling as sacrificial lambs to the Counter-Reformation. Not that the religious reformers managed to ban fun entirely. People still licked their chops with pleasure, but now they worried more about going to hell for it.
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice Page 17