by Jack Turner
Only in Mediterranean waters did the spices come at last into European hands. By the turn of the millennium they crop up in the records of cities spread around its shores: Marseilles, Barcelona, Ragusa. Some spices arrived via Byzantium and the Black Sea, following the Danube to eastern and central Europe, but the greatest volume of traffic passed through Alexandria and the Levant to Italy. From Italy a number of routes led north over the Alpine passes towards France and Germany. Alternatively, which was both safer and faster, Venetian or Genoese galleys freighted spices out of the Mediterranean, through the straits of Gibraltar and up and around the Iberian peninsula before docking in view of the gothic spire of St Paul’s. From a Thameside wharf they were transferred into the store of a London merchant – as likely to have been Italian, Flemish or German as English – then in and out of a royal spicer’s cupboard before finally ending their long journey in the royal stomach.
If such was the system, however faintly we discern it, contemporaries saw it more faintly still – a fact that did not stifle, but rather stimulated, the imagination. It was a romance-writer’s stock-in-trade that spices perfume the air of the more beautiful dreamworlds that are such a feature of medieval literature. In a Castilian version of The Romance of Alexander written around the middle of the thirteenth century, galangal, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and zedoary* waft through the air of the dreamscape. Much like Coleridge transported to the sunny ice-caves of Xanadu, the anonymous author of Mum and the Sothsegger left behind the greyness and grinding poverty of the fourteenth-century English countryside for a vision of a blissful, better land, where the Golden Age endured in all its spicy abundance and lushness. The fantasyland of the Romance of the Rose, among the most widely read and emulated poems of the age, is similarly rose-tinted and spice-scented. In evoking these fairer climes spices were as much a poetic convention as pearly teeth and snowy breasts, chivalrous knights and damsels in distress.
While poets and mystics were generally content to perfume the air of their paradise with spices, and to leave it at that, others made more concerted efforts to map the fabulous locales where the spices grew. This was, necessarily, a highly creative enterprise. Since all reports of paradise and spices alike arrived second-hand, the medieval imagination was free to run riot. Though nothing could be confirmed (or, more to the point, disproved), what was generally agreed was that spices came from a topsy-turvy world where the normal rules of European life did not apply. They were securely lodged in the same world as the marvels and misshapen prodigies that writhe across the portals of Europe’s Romanesque churches or scamper and cavort across its manuscripts. An illumination in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale has a team of swarthy Indians in loincloths harvesting pepper in wicker baskets while a European merchant samples the crop; so far at least the botanical details are not far removed from the reality. Nearby, however, a gaggle of dog-headed Indians haggles over the harvest, men with faces set in their chests gambol among the bushes and others hop around on a single, stout foot.
In its mix of half-accurate detail and wild distortion this was a fairly representative example of European visions of the East. But how seriously were such depictions meant to be taken? There is a risk, in considering these and similar visions, that our own modern credulity outstrips the medieval. Evidently, some of the more fabulous tales of the Indies and their spices were never intended to be taken literally; they are a notoriously unreliable guide to informed opinion, and a trap for the unwary. In the fantastic Asia of such illuminations we are, manifestly, in a not-Europe. But while the tone of such depictions is often playful or didactic, what is clear is that they derived their force from their very invertedness. And spices were, for their creators, a means to that end. It is precisely through this fictive inversion that we, however dimly, can sense how extraordinary spices were in fact. Like the dog-headed men and man-devouring amazons with which they were paired, spices were as ordinary in the imagined Indies as they were exceptional in Europe; that they were commonplace in medieval fantasies was because they were extraordinary in reality.
Retrospectively, of course, it is a little easier to extract the fact from the fantasy, but in medieval times the lines were more blurred. It is precisely this sense of a world turned upside-down and inside-out that animates the genre of more-or-less fictional travellers’ tales that appears from roughly the thirteenth century on. Many such were parodies, such as that of Brother Cipolla of The Decameron, with his trip to Liarland (‘where I found a great many friars’) and Parsnip, India, with its amazing flying feathers. Of these the most celebrated, and in every sense the spiciest, was the Itinerarium conventionally attributed to one Sir John Mandeville, a suitably chivalric-sounding pseudonym of an anonymous, probably French, author. First circulated in various versions and translations between 1356 and 1366, along with the other by-now stock features of the marvellous Eastern landscape – Gog and Magog, Prester John, the Great Khan and his Asian Utopia – spices are one of the hallmarks of his fantastic tableaux. Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace grew in Java ‘more plentyfoulisch than in any other contree’, a land that had ‘many tymes overcomen the Grete Cane of Cathaye in bataylle’. Here, perhaps, is a grain of fact, a vague awareness of Javanese traders shuttling spices west from the Moluccas; so much the author might have learned from Marco Polo. But the force, and the point – for Mandeville (or whoever) wrote not to inform, but to amaze – is of the extraordinary become prosaic. Read on and there are ox-worshipping Cynocephales, corpse-eating savages and gems engendered from the tears of Adam and Eve. Such was the world where the spices grew. Along with the dragons and the mountains of gold, they were one of its distinguishing features.
Mandeville’s account must have raised a knowing chuckle among the merchants who, even then, knew better. And there were plenty who did know better. Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar who travelled through India, South-East Asia and China from roughly 1316 to 1330, reported meeting ‘people in plenty’ in Venice who had been in China. At much the same time, the Tunisian traveller Ibn Battuta saw Genoese merchants in India and China. But though the merchants did the legwork it was the Mandevilles who set the tone. (Perhaps this is to underestimate the savvy of the spice-dealers, who, after all, had an interest in making bankable publicity for their exotic wares: ‘Thus men feign, to make things deer and of great price,’ as a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk said of the wilder myths concerning the origins of cinnamon.) Such accurate information about the spices as did make it through was either kept a close secret or else recast in brighter colours.
Or, alternatively, it was discarded as nonsense. Tellingly, Mandeville’s account proved vastly more popular than a far more sober and factual authority on the Indies and their spices, the Travels of Marco Polo. Published a generation or so before Mandeville, Polo’s book met with widespread suspicion. Despite Rustichello’s best efforts (Rustichello being the professional romance-writer with whom Polo shared a prison cell in Genoa, thanks to whose ability to spot a bestseller the Travels exist), the Venetian’s unadorned account of Asia, with its straightforward, real-world qualities, was in some respects harder to credit than the fiction. In his uncomplicated, businessman’s manner Polo claimed to have sailed past lands where spices were commonplace, growing on real trees, harvested by real people, in quantities that Europeans could not fathom. He claimed the city of Kinsay (Hangchow), with its 12,000 stone bridges and hundred-mile circumference, received a hundred times as much pepper as the whole of Christendom, ‘and more too’. In his matter-of-fact tone, this was a little too much to swallow. It was somehow easier to place the Indies and their spices among the dog-heads and the floating islands. So extraordinary were spices that even the truth seemed fabulous.
And so it remained until the sixteenth century, when at last the discoverers chipped away at the great edifices of medieval ignorance and fantasy, dragging the realms of spice and gold into the prosaic light of day; into the unromantic focus of the profiteer a
nd the venture capitalist. The great spice age, the apex of the appetite, was also the age that killed off their mystery.
Ironically, the individual who did more than any other to draw spices out of fantasy into cold fact was himself one of the most avid consumers of medieval legends of spice and gold. This is perhaps Columbus’s most remarkable achievement, for in respect of Eastern fables he bears, as has already been noted, more than a passing resemblance to Don Quixote, who so overcharged his fancy with the wooings, battles and enchantments of Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul that he quite lost his grip on reality. But whereas Quixote’s dreams sprouted from tales of chivalry and romance, Columbus’s schemes were founded – and sold – on sources that presented themselves, however capriciously, as impeccably factual. The surviving remnants of his library in the Biblioteca Colombiana in Seville include several of the books from which he drew his ideas, among them the early-fifteenth-century Imago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) and the Historia Rerum of Pope Pius II (ruled 1458–1464), each alike laced with descriptions of the fabulous, spicy wonders of the East. There too is Columbus’s copy of Polo’s Travels, the margins crammed with the admiral’s comments on each and every mention of gold, silver, precious stones, silk, ginger, pepper, musk, cloves, camphor, aloes, brasilwood, sandalwood and cinnamon. Dipping in and out of these books, taking what he liked and disregarding what did not suit, spicing Polo’s figures and distances with the vivid hues of the others, Columbus constructed the fabulous mental geography that, quite contrary to his expectations, succeeded in revolutionising geography in an altogether different sense. When he sailed west he quite genuinely believed he was sailing to paradise. If he succeeded in reaching the place where the spices grew he had, ipso facto, arrived.
To his dying day he believed that he had been but a hair’s breadth from getting there. He went to his grave not in the poverty often imagined, but unenlightened. Writing on the troubled progress of his third voyage in the autumn of 1498, charged with chronic mismanagement of the infant colony of Hispaniola, whose disgruntled settlers were now in open rebellion against his command, Columbus assured his patrons that he had been no more than a day’s sailing from the earthly paradise. At the time this seemed reasonable enough, at least to Columbus. Not only his reading told him so, but also the evidence of his own eyes. As he sailed around the top of South America, standing on deck off Trinidad, the Pole Star arced in the sky above him, and the world seemed to spin off its usual axis. Columbus had the overwhelming, disconcerting impression that the ship was climbing, sailing up the incline to paradise. (By this time he had concluded that the world was pear-shaped, with the heights of paradise perched on a protuberance shaped like a woman’s nipple.) The Caribbean season was balmy and mild like an eternal spring: yet more evidence. Buckets were lowered over the side and it was found that the ship, though still out of sight of land, was sailing in fresh water – the outflow, surely, of one of the four rivers flowing from the heights of paradise. Columbus knew he had been, at most, only a short sail from the realms of spice and gold.
In the days of disgrace and humiliation that lay ahead, chained below deck, ignominiously sent back to Spain with his settlers in open revolt, it was a galling thought. But as Columbus’s jailers and the increasingly impatient King Ferdinand were beginning to realise, he was adrift in a sea of delusion. The sweet water through which he had sailed was in fact the enormous outflow of the Orinoco; the people he met were not prelapsarian residents of the terrestrial paradise but all-too earthly Caribs. Even the translators of biblical languages that Columbus had had the foresight to bring along were of no use in deciphering their unintelligible clicks and grunts.*
But then Columbus always was a dreamer; it was the quality that simultaneously made him great and, as far as some of his contemporaries were concerned, absurd. Even now there were harder heads that were beginning to see America for what it was, but in his defence, Columbus’s assumptions and wild surmises seem a good deal stranger now than they did then. Given his premises and the mental universe of the medieval cosmographer, to seek the kingdom of Sheba beyond the mangroves and jungled fringes of what is now the Dominican Republic was not, at the time, so Quixotic. After all, the Bible said that Sheba’s kingdom lay somewhere to the east – or west, if you went far enough – and was it not the biblical truth that Sheba had brought spices to Jerusalem? ‘There came no more such abundance of spices, as these, which the Queene of Sheba gave to King Solomon.’ And there were many willing to push the notion of the unearthly origins of spice further still. Plenty of spices found their way into the medieval heaven: according to a deep-seated assumption of medieval theology, God, Christ, the Virgin and saints, the holy and royal dead, commonly smelled of spices. These were ideas and practices that were themselves inheritances from a much older, pagan past. Thousands of years before Columbus set off on his spice odyssey, it was not only heaven and paradise that smelled of spices, but the gods themselves.
And yet for the disappointed king this was of little interest – it was too recherché, too elevated by far. Short of cash, greedy for more, Ferdinand was not amused by his admiral’s flights of fancy. And who can blame him? Columbus had promised earthly gold and spice but instead delivered meandering reworkings of old myths and fairy tales. With every year he seemed to be losing an already shaky grip on reality; he was becoming a crank. More galling still, between letters from his dreamy admiral Ferdinand was receiving altogether more down-to-earth missives from his Portuguese son-in-law, from whose boasting pamphlets of spiced Indian triumphs the booksellers were turning a tidy profit.
But if the Admiral of the Ocean Sea ended up sailing down spice routes of the imagination, discovering a new continent by a happy accident, these were not the only leads he might have followed. For if his fancy eventually led him far from reality, far out of this world, others took more earthy associations of spice for inspiration. To many of Columbus’s contemporaries, spices were anything but paradisal, not so much on account of their origins as due to the uses to which they were put. Here the associations, above and beyond the pungent smell of Mammon, concerned very much more body than spirit. To those of less visionary inclinations than Columbus, it was not paradise that spices evoked so much as Babylon.
Half a millennium after Columbus laboured in vain, only vestiges of the former magnetism of spice remain: the twin poles of attraction and repulsion. But if the aura has long since faded, the continuing interest of the subject lies precisely in the complexity, the contradictory quality of the mixture: of sweetness and astringency; of hunger laced with misgivings; of recommendations and recipes hedged about with reservations. These were, moreover, tensions that even in Columbus’s day had co-existed for centuries. Long before he set off on his optimistic blunder, there were others who pursued not only the Indies and their spices, but also the paradises and Sirens that hovered about them; and others who decried them with equal vigour. This was an appetite of far greater antiquity than even Columbus could imagine, and pregnant with greater ambiguities than he would admit.
* Mastic is the resin of Pistacia lentiscus, an evergreen shrub native to the eastern Mediterranean, much sought after in medieval times for use in dyes, perfumes, varnishes and as a flavouring. The major producer of mastic was the Greek island of Chios, where Columbus’s Genoese countrymen acquired the spice.
* Not everyone was convinced. Some present at the Saló believed that the Indians were Moors, and that Columbus had sailed somewhere down the coast of Africa.
* Contacts may well have been still older. Excavations of Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium BC have turned up specimens of the Indian chank, a conch shell found only in the coastal waters of southern India and Sri Lanka.
* A quintal is a commercial hundredweight.
* There may have been earlier Spanish efforts to sail to the Spice Islands, but they were stymied either by the Spanish crown’s unwillingness to confront Lisbon or perhaps by Portuguese machinations. As early as 1512
the archbishop of Valencia had promoted a plan whereby the Spanish would sail east, contest Malacca, and take possession of the Moluccas.
* The third ship, the Concepción, had been abandoned and burned in the Philippines, ‘because there were too few men’.
* Incidentally, this was the first occasion when the English used lemon juice to ward off scurvy.
* The connection has long been a source of confusion for the unwary, and fodder for a good deal of sensationalist historicising, none of which should be taken too seriously. There was little more to the swap of the two islands than belated recognition of facts on the ground. At the time of the treaty’s signing the English had occupied Manhattan, and the Dutch had taken Run. The matter was not much more complicated than that.
* Galangal is the root of Alpinia officinarum, a native of eastern Asia related to ginger, with a similar though slightly more astringent taste. Still popular in Thai cuisine, it was widely used in Europe in the Middle Ages.
* Zedoary is an aromatic tuberous root of one of several species of Curcuma, related to ginger and turmeric. It was widely used in medieval medicines and cuisine.
* He took along a converted Jew who spoke Hebrew, Arabic and ‘Chaldee’ (Persian).
II
Palate
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Ancient Appetites
The beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Greeks, stir white foam on the Periyar river … arriving with gold and departing with pepper.
The Lay of the Anklet, a Tamil poem of c. AD 200
The Aromanauts
From 11 to 8 BC the Romans’ largest military camp in the land they knew as Germania stood on a well-defended site by the banks of the Lippe river, near the present-day town of Oberaden. Today the region lies in the middle of the huge industrial sprawl of the Ruhr valley, but when the Romans arrived this was a wasteland dividing the barbarian and the civilised worlds. Behind were fields and towns; ahead, bogs and forests. It was to push that division outward that the Romans were here, and this, after three years of fighting, they did. The fearsome tribesmen of the Sugambri were ground down, relocated or put to the sword. The legions moved on to new wars and new frontiers. The camp on the Lippe was abandoned and left to an all but total obscurity, uninterrupted but for a brief flurry of interest some two thousand years later with the visit of a team of German archaeologists. Picking through the kitchen scrapheap, they found olive pits, coriander seeds and black pepper.