In the late Middle Ages, when the increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie began to be able to afford a little ostentatious display of their own, the feasts of the aristocrats had to become even more fabulous, the spicing more refined, the dishes more exquisite and artfully designed. And just to make sure the entire populace would know how fantastic was the prince’s inner realm, the entire dinner might be put on display for the hoi polloi. “Before being served, [the dishes] were paraded with great ceremony around the piazza of the castle…to show them to the people that they might admire such magnificence,” recounts Cherubino Ghirardacci, who witnessed a wedding party hosted by the ruler of Bologna in 1487. Our reporter does not mention the smell, but surely the abundance of expensive meat with a last-minute sprinkling of spice gave forth an aroma that broadcast the ruler’s power even more effectively than the grand dishes glimpsed from across the road.
It was a medieval commonplace that people of different status and position not only deserved but required different foods. A peasant might fall gravely ill from eating white bread and spiced wine rather than the appropriate gruel and ale. A monk would certainly suffer painful indigestion from eating peppered venison, a food more properly reserved for knights. These rules were accepted as being part of divine providence. Inasmuch as there was a natural order among the beasts, each of which was assigned its appropriate food by the Creator, so each human being was assigned his position in the divine plan. Something of the kind still exists today in food attitudes among observant Hindus, with each particular caste having its own rules regarding what may or may not pass their lips. For an upper-caste Brahmin to eat food that is forbidden or inappropriately prepared is to disrupt the order of the universe. A similar connection existed between food and religion in Christendom before Martin Luther upset the cart. When Saint Benedict set up his monastic communities in the early sixth century, he specified just what his monks could eat and when. (It wasn’t much and it wasn’t too often.) Every Catholic had to conform to the religious calendar, but within that generalized scheme, each social stratum had different rules. The Italian preacher Savonarola, best known for castigating Renaissance Florentines for their ungodly ways, also had opinions on the appropriate dining habits of various castes. “Hare is not a meat for Lords,” he writes. “Fava beans are a food for peasants.” Beef was apparently okay for artisans with robust stomachs but could be consumed by lords and ladies only if corrected with appropriate condiments.
The Italian word for apothecaries was speziali ( from spezie, “spices”), for the obvious reason that they were the ones selling spices.
Spices were supposed to be especially effective when it came to “correcting” the nutritional defects of other foods. In much the way we analyze food according to three categories (protein, fat, and carbohydrate), medieval nutritionists divided up foods according to the four humors (phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile). The diet manuals of the time were as obsessed with breaking down foods into their constituent parts as the most avid follower of the South Beach Diet. However, since the nutrients in food were seldom in balance, the cook was expected to fine-tune every dish. It was a job for an alchemist as much as a chef. Outside of the kitchen, physicians also made use of the humoral system by recommending specific foods for particular personalities and maladies, and since spices were deemed especially concentrated compounds for adjusting humoral imbalance, they were prescribed for everything from plague to impotence.
That spices were integral to an opulent lifestyle, even a “necessity” required by one group to set itself apart from another, is incontrovertible. That they were widely used as nutraceuticals is also broadly documented. All the same, if health concerns were the main determinant of what the moneyed classes eat, customers for foie gras and forty-five-dollar-a-pound chocolates would be in short supply.
In many ways, the medieval and Renaissance elite’s desire for spicy food may not be so different from today’s popularity of Thai food in America and Balti food in Britain: it was exotic, it was hip, but people also assuredly liked the taste. That spices were pricey and had almost magical curative powers only added to their allure.
SIR JOHN AND THE SEARCH FOR PARADISE
Hard facts and solid reality go only so far in explaining any cultural phenomenon, and this was certainly the case for medieval Christendom. I figured if the academics didn’t have the answers, maybe a ghost could give me some clues. This is why I found myself in St. Albans. The phantom in question was Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century knight supposedly buried in the city’s great cathedral. Sir John was the acclaimed author of the most popular travel book of his time, in which he described a trip that took him from Norman England to Venice, Constantinople, the Holy Land—and all the way to paradise. The Voiage and Travayle of Syr John Maundeville Knight (as it was known in one English translation) was a huge international bestseller.
Like so many travel books of its time, Sir John’s story is a pilgrimage tale. The narrator, a Norman English knight, takes leave of St. Albans on Michaelmas Day, 1322. He voyages across the bejeweled Orient to famous shrines cluttered with miraculous relics. He treks through the sun-baked places where Jesus once trod. He hobnobs with the sultan of Egypt. But then comes the good part. After his grand tour of holy sites in the Levant, Sir John heads east—to mythical Christian kingdoms; to India, with its pepper groves; to the Spice Islands of Indonesia; indeed, all the way to Eden’s gate. The stories get increasingly fabulous as he travels toward the rising sun. But his medieval readers were not about to split hairs between the merely astonishing and the truly unreal. Some of Asia’s actual wonders were so unbelievable that many gave more credence to Sir John’s mythical rulers and mouthless dwarfs than they did to the equally amazing description of Kublai Khan in Marco Polo’s much more factual account. Not all of Mandeville’s stories of the wondrous Orient are made up. The report of the ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace of Java and the surrounding isles is more or less on the mark, as is the description of a forest where pepper vines cling to trees bearing fruit like raisins, even if the descriptions of rivers of gems and lands of one-eyed giants might strain our own credulity. It would be hard to say if Mandeville’s audience believed his stories or whether they just found him more entertaining, but the Englishman’s book consistently outsold Marco Polo’s narrative for a good two centuries.
Yet the book wasn’t popular merely for its stories of miraculous relics and kinky hermaphrodites. At least some travelers and mapmakers took Mandeville’s information altogether seriously. The German cartographer Martin Behaim used Mandeville as a source when he made the first globe of the world in the fateful year of 1492. Several of Columbus’s contemporaries aver that he had a copy of the book on him as he peddled his improbable ideas from court to court. The obstinate Genoan could point to Sir John’s Travels as proof that you could get to the fabled East Indian Spice Islands by sailing west.
But then the rigid lines between empirical data and received wisdom, between experience and revelation, between science and religion, were not as clearly delineated as they are today. When you went on a pilgrimage, as Sir John did, it was not merely a physical journey, it was a spiritual quest in search of paradise. And though the goal of the trip may have been metaphysical, the road signs pointing to every shrine and pilgrimage site were all too real. Even paradise was right there on the maps for anyone to see. When you traveled east, toward Jerusalem, you were on your way toward the earthly Eden. Then, beyond the Holy Land—as Mandeville describes in gripping detail—you needed to cross the infidel realms before reaching the great Christian kingdom of Prester John. Just beyond that, to the east of Asia, all the experts agreed, you would reach Adam and Eve’s original garden. Here was a country of joy and plenty, evergreen trees would whisper in the gentle wind, and verdant meadows were irrigated by fountains of youth. (The tourist boards of every Caribbean island are thoroughly versed in the same concept.)
Eden didn’t just have a location and an address, it ha
d a taste and an aroma. Paradise smelled like spices, for it was there these precious commodities grew. The connection was made explicit when melegueta pepper was called “grains of paradise,” despite its African origin. The thirteenth-century travel writer Sire de Joinville describes the fishermen in the Nile dragging up nets “filled with the goods which this [distant] world produces, with ginger, rhubarb, sandalwood and cinnamon; and it is said that these come from the earthly paradise.” Purportedly, the spices that grew in Eden’s groves were shaken loose by that gentle elysian breeze and fell into the headwaters of the Nile. Saints and their remains supposedly smelled of spices, since they were already halfway to heaven. Moreover, this idea of an unearthly scent was not unique to Christendom. Persian and Arabic sources also describe a sweet afterlife filled with perfumed plants and food. Even the Chinese thought cinnamon was the bark of the tree of life. So it’s hardly surprising that when later European adventurers traveled halfway across the world in their quest for the precious seasonings, they were ever on the lookout for Shangri-La. Many, just like Christopher Columbus, brought along Mandeville as a guide. On the third voyage to his “Indies,” the Genoan adventurer wrote to his patrons, “There are great indications of this being the terrestrial paradise, for its site coincides with the opinion of the holy and wise theologians…all of whom agree that the earthly paradise is in the East.” You will recall that he still thought he was just east of Asia.
All this is not to say that the main reason for Columbus’s epochal voyage was a quest for the Garden of Eden. Most spice seekers were more interested in getting rich quick than in the rewards of the afterlife. But all the same, you can’t entirely discount the religious drive. Let’s not forget that Columbus was in the pay of Queen Isabella, the conquistadora of Granada, the last Muslim refuge in western Europe. The “Most Christian” monarch and her shock troops, the mounted conquistadors, saw themselves as heirs to the Crusaders, and, like those earlier warriors, their ultimate goal was to liberate Jerusalem. (Admittedly, they did get a little sidetracked.) The story of Columbus’s great rival Vasco da Gama is even more clear-cut. He was specifically charged with searching for the legendary Christian ruler Prester John when he headed for India’s spice coast. There, too, greed outshone more metaphysical aspirations, yet that does not mean that the people of the time did not take their religious motivations seriously. Indeed, the early Iberian expansion can only be understood when seen as a tale of armed pilgrimage in which the quest for spices is just one chapter.
The idea that you might reach paradise by traveling east has a certain logic to it, given the times. We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as Mesopotamian agriculture, the Phoenician alphabet, Greek philosophy, and Arab bookkeeping all flowed from east to west. Both Christianity and Islam followed the same route. So did wheat, olives, sugar, and spices. The historian Norman Pounds has depicted this flow of technological and cultural innovation from the Middle East as a “cultural gradient” that was tilted down toward Europe throughout the greater part of human history. It is certainly true that when Sir John traveled from England to Italy, Byzantium, and finally the Middle East, he would have been encountering progressively more advanced technologies, economic structures, and cultures, to say nothing of more sophisticated cuisines.
This gradient, however, was set to shift decisively in Europe’s favor some hundred years later, when Mandeville’s book was set in movable type. It is worth noting that while the slope of civilization went downhill from east to west, spices were desired, but just when that demand peaked, the slope reversed, and the mythical Oriental aromatics began to lose their allure in Europe. By the time of the Italian Renaissance, innovation, culture, and conquest began to flow in the opposite direction. The first tentative voyages in search of paradise and pepper gave way to the aggressive expansion of European power across the globe.
Unfortunately for Mandeville’s reputation, once actual travelers had seen the fabled Spice Islands, they found he had embroidered the truth. Pearls were common enough, and pepper was a scruffy weed that hardly merited cultivation. More recently, academics have even dismissed his very existence. My ghost may never have been more than a fiction. But whether he existed or not, the protagonist of the Travels had provided medieval Europe with a taste of paradise. The trouble was that once Eden had been ransacked and colonized, it lost its scent of spice. The transformation was in small part a result of Mandeville’s success, but it was also to be his undoing.
BLACK GOLD
While their mythical origins in the East gave Oriental aromatics a marketing advantage over local seasonings, the money you could make buying them in one place and selling them in the next gave traders more than enough motivation to get into the spice business. The pepper grown in the hills of India’s Malabar Coast could change hands a dozen times before reaching the shops run by the pepperers guild in Mandeville’s England. And each time the pepper changed hands, passed a customs checkpoint, or was subject to taxes, its price shot up. According to one study of the fifteenth-century trade, the Indian grower might be paid one to two grams of silver for a kilo of pepper; when it reached Egypt’s main port of Alexandria, the price had shot up to ten to fourteen grams; the traders at Venice’s spice market on the Rialto were charging fourteen to eighteen; and by the time it was offered to London’s gentry, the price had increased to some twenty to thirty grams of silver. Not that any individual link in this chain made a killing. It’s been estimated that the Venetians, who did as well by this trade as anyone, made a comfortable but not extortionate net profit of 40 percent. Still, that was twice the return on investment that Florentine bankers were getting at the time. It’s worth noting that today’s profit margins can be almost as plush: pepper was recently trading at about $1.60 per kilo wholesale in India, while an upscale grocer in New York was charging $5.49 for a 1.62-ounce jar (that’s $120.00 per kilo!) for McCormick “Gourmet” Black Pepper. But the big difference between then and now is that there were few other commodities with this kind of moneymaking potential. And once the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, entered the Asiatic trade, their profits could be even more spectacular. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese could earn net profits of 150 percent or more from the pepper they bought in South India and sold in Lisbon. Nutmeg could fetch a hundred times in Europe what it cost in Malabar. The margin was even greater when it was purchased at its source in the Spice Islands of today’s Indonesia.
AN ANCIENT TRADE
The fantastic profits to be made from the spice trade had attracted businessmen for millennia and not only, or even primarily, in Europe. A thriving spice trade existed among India, China, and the islands of Southeast Asia long before the Portuguese and Dutch bullied their way in. The Chinese ruling classes of the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.) were as fond of Indonesian and other spices as any Burgundian lord. Marco Polo claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou). By some estimates, the percentage of spices that reached the European market was never much more than about a quarter of what Asia produced.
If we can rely on the reporting of the Old Testament, Joseph was sold to a caravan carrying spices into ancient Egypt. Just what kind of spices we aren’t told, but chances are they brought at least a little pepper. A pharaoh who died in 1224 B.C.E. has been found embalmed with peppercorns up his nose. In later years, when the queen of Sheba made a courtesy call on King Solomon, she reportedly brought along camels bearing spices as a house gift. Perhaps a more trustworthy source is an archaeological dig in Syria that has unearthed cloves dating back to about 1700 B.C.E.—and that in the kitchen of an ordinary household! When the Romans arrived on the scene, they, too, imported spices from Asia, though at nothing like the later European rate. Pepper seemed to have been popular, as was cinnam
on and its look-alike, cassia, though some scholars have argued that these last two were actually altogether different spices from the ones we recognize by those names today. In time, the western empire collapsed, and pepper was a rare sight indeed in the former Roman provinces. Elsewhere, though, spice merchants continued to keep the tables of the rich and powerful well supplied. China, India, Persia, and the Arab states of the Middle East still used spices just like they always had, as both tonic and seasoning. Even the Eastern Roman Empire—or Byzantium, as it came to be known—kept up its culinary habits more or less as before.
In Europe, things were different. With the collapse of Rome, the orderly territories north of the Alps were ravaged. Wheat fields were bludgeoned into wastelands, and vineyards were trampled into dust. Trade was throttled. Great cities shriveled to hamlets. Ordinary folk resorted to scavenging for roots and nuts, while the warrior class tore at great haunches of roasted beasts, swilling beer all the while. Or that, at least, is our image of the Dark Ages. Undoubtedly, there were pockets of polished civilization amid the roughened landscape, especially in the monasteries, where fragments of a Roman lifestyle remained. Italy, in particular, retained active ties to both the current “Roman” empire in Byzantium as well as the memory of the old stamping grounds of the Caesars. All the same, whatever else you might say about the invasions of the Germanic and Slavic tribes that swept across the continent in those years, their arrival was hardly conducive to the culinary arts.
The Taste of Conquest Page 2