Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  The spice-loving Apicius, too, remained in vogue. The text of De Re Coquinaria survives through two manuscripts dating from the middle of the ninth century, one written at Tours, the other at the German monastery of Fulda. Assuming that these ancient cookbooks were not recopied for purely antiquarian interest, spices must have been at least reasonably familiar and available, at least to the wealthy. Via these two writers the Roman kitchen lived on in a strange half-life in the halls of the early-medieval nobility. Indeed in one sense both Anthimus and Vinidarius represent an advance on Roman times, since they are aware of the clove, a spice apparently unknown to Apicius. That they were was due to the efforts of unknown others, the crews and merchants of the Arab dhows, Malay outriggers and Chinese junks pushing east, many thousands of miles away, to the five tiny volcanic islands where the spice grew. By such obscure means the clove appeared in European cuisine the best part of a millennium before any European source makes mention of the Moluccas.

  These cookbooks aside, the next few centuries offer extremely lean pickings for the culinary historian. Taio, bishop of Zaragoza (?–651), makes a passing reference to sumptuous banquets sprinkled with the exquisite aromas of sweet-smelling spices. At much the same time the Frankish collection of diplomatic form letters known as the ‘Formulary of Marculphus’ mentions a variety of spices that could apparently be eaten in the former Roman province of Gaul. Along with more solid fare such as piglets, chickens and eggs, legates on official business were granted access to pepper, cinnamon, dates, almonds, pistachios, salt and oil, all of which could be supplied by the remnants of the Roman cursus publiais. Assuming the document is something more than a nostalgic fantasy, its spices are an astonishing testament to the survival of Roman institutions in an age of collapse.

  But by the standards of early-medieval Europe, Merovingian Gaul was a bright spot. It comes as a greater surprise to find spices across the English Channel at much the same time, when St Egbert (c.639–729), a Northumbrian monk and archbishop of York, knew some exotic recipes with pepper, all suffixed with a description of their medical utility. He sounds like a dangerous host to have dinner with: his chapter on ‘foxes, birds, horses and wild beasts that may be eaten’ features an alarming recipe that serves as a remedy for fever and diarrhoea. He advises emmer groats mixed with pepper to heal sores of the mouth. In Italy around 643 Jonas of Bobbio writes of pepper and nard arriving from India. In Visigothic Spain, Isidore knew all the major spices, although in all these cases it is unclear whether they were used for what we might regard as gastronomic or for dietetic or medical purposes.

  As medieval demand was slowly easing itself into the channels it would follow for another thousand years, so too it was with supply. In the early centuries of the Middle Ages, Europe’s immediate sources of spice were the Byzantine and Jewish traders who even now remained in contact with the East. From the fifth century onwards references crop up to the ‘Syrian’ – that is, Byzantine – merchants in most major ports of the Mediterranean. Their commercial networks stretched from Trebizond on the Black Sea to Barcelona, penetrating as far inland as Paris, Orléans and Lyon. When the Burgundian King Guntram (c.535–592) visited Orléans, he was greeted by its merchants in Syrian, Latin and Hebrew – the languages of commerce in sixth-century France. Eastward, Byzantine traders reached at least as far as Sri Lanka. Even in the sixth century the Byzantine state maintained a customs official at Clysma on the Gulf of Suez, who made yearly trips to India. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Greek-Egyptian monk who travelled to India sometime around 550, tells the tale of a Byzantine merchant who indulged in a little one-upmanship with a Persian trader at the court of a Ceylonese king, not long before Cosmas’ own day. Thanks to the superior quality of his coinage, the Byzantine was able to convince the Ceylonese that he was the emissary of a king far greater than his Persian rival’s. (A similar yarn was told in the first century by Pliny the Elder, of a tax collector blown from Arabia to Ceylon, where he was likewise saved by the quality of the coin in his pocket.) Thanks to his solid gold nomisma the Byzantine was rewarded with a trip around the city on an elephant’s back, to the accompaniment of drums and fanfaronade, leaving the Persian ‘deeply chagrined at what had occurred’.

  The rise of Islam would put an end to voyages such as Cosmas’, and send the Byzantine long-distance trade into a terminal decline. The following century, the armies of Mohammed exploded out from Arabia, seizing within a few short decades all the ancient routes and markets of North Africa and the Levant. Islam’s expansion in maritime and commercial terms was scarcely less dazzling. Within a hundred years the great Islamic merchants had established themselves along the spice routes of both land and sea, from Malabar in India as far west as Morocco.* By camel and dhow, traders and mariners fanned out east even to China and the Moluccas. By the eighth century Arab traders had their own commercial enclave in Canton; as early as 414 the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien had reported many Arab-speaking merchants in Sri Lanka. Where there were spices there were Muslims. The supply of spices to Europe became, several Jewish merchants excepted, an Islamic concern.

  Under new management the spice trade of the Indian Ocean flourished as never before. Even in the Mediterranean religion was a porous barrier to commerce. The Hellenic city of Alexandria continued to flourish under Arab rule, and Byzantium remained in communication with the spice routes right up to its final capture by the Ottomans in 1453. Caravans bearing Eastern luxuries snaked across the deserts of central Asia, Persia and Arabia, transferring their goods into Byzantine hands at any one of a number of the empire’s Black Sea ports. To the south, Byzantine merchants bought spices from Muslim merchants at entrepôts in Anatolia or the Levant.

  In return for such high-value goods as early-medieval Europe could muster – furs and amber from the Baltics, slaves, timber and metals from the Alps and the Balkans – Jewish and Byzantine intermediaries ferried spices and other luxuries back west. By the sixth century their chief westward conduit flowed through the ports of Byzantium’s remaining Italian possessions, via the head of the Adriatic and the Po valley. (Ravenna and its tributary towns remained Byzantine possessions until the middle of the eighth century.) Slightly to the north, Venice was still at this stage little more than a cluster of settlements on the islands of the lagoon, whose residents scraped out a meagre existence from salt and fishing. As unpromising as their watery circumstances must have seemed, their location would in due course grant them an unrivalled entrée into the trade. In the happy coincidence of geography, politics and appetite were the key to the traffic that would enrich the Venetians for the best part of a thousand years.

  Unfortunately, the evidence is too fragmentary to say how substantial that traffic was. We do know that early in the eighth century spices were arriving in Lombardy in sufficient volume for King Liutprand (ruled AD 712–744) to grant one of his officials a salary of one gold solidus (1/72 of a pound), one pound of oil, one pound of garum and two ounces of pepper. In Germany, Frisian traders bought spices and silks at Mainz. In north-west France in 716, King Chilperic II granted the monks of Corbie monastery a toll exemption on an annual allowance of thirty pounds of pepper, two of cloves, five of cinnamon and two of spikenard, along with other Eastern or Near Eastern imports such as almonds, chickpeas, rice and pistachios, all of which they acquired at faraway Marseilles. Chilperic’s ruling was a renewal of older concessions by Chlotar III (ruled 657–673) and Childeric II (ruled 673–675). The context suggests these were intended more for the monks’ diet than their medicine cabinet. It seems reasonable to assume that the monks were not alone in enjoying their flavours.

  At much the same time as the monks of Corbie received their exemption, spices start cropping up around Europe in the context of commercial transactions. Given a chronic shortage of trustworthy specie, and the absence of a standardised coinage from one region to the next, spices had the supreme merit of being accepted everywhere, a sort of universal currency. There are records of serfs buying their freedom with a payment
of pepper, and the spice was commonly used as rent payment. During the reign of Charlemagne the church of San Fidis in Genoa received rent in the form of one pound of pepper, a custom that lingered on as long as any other tradition of spice. As late as 1937 the king of England received rent from the mayor of Launceston in Cornwall consisting of a hundred shillings and one pound of pepper – the mayor might have reflected that this particular rent ceiling had proved very much to his financial advantage. When Prince Charles crossed the River Tamar in 1973 to take symbolic possession of the Duchy of Cornwall his tribute included a pound of pepper. According to the OED a token pepper rent remained a form of payment until the end of the nineteenth century.

  However, what was token by the nineteenth century was, in the ninth, anything but ordinary. By the time they arrived in Europe spices were so wildly expensive and rare as to prohibit their consumption for all but a tiny minority, as some writers are at pains to point out. In 535 the senator Cassiodorus (c.490–583) penned a letter to a minor official in the service of Theodahad, the Gothic ruler of Italy, insisting that he perform various duties in equipping the army and seek with all due assiduousness ‘such spices as befit the royal table’. Even more so than in Trimalchio’s day, spices were the preserve of privilege, and one of its markers.

  They were not, evidently, a plebeian pleasure. In a Life of Pope Gregory the Great (ruled 590–604) attributed to a ninth-century biographer known as John the Deacon, there is an intriguing reference to the redistribution of the goods that the Church received as rent. On the first day of the month the Pope would make a public appearance outside St Peter’s, when he would distribute grain, wine, vegetables, cheese, lard, fish and oil to the poor who gathered for alms. The more fortunate nobles received spices (pigmenta) and other luxury goods ‘so that the Church should be thought of as nothing other than a repository for all’. To modern eyes, Gregory’s deliberate lack of evenhandedness might seem a slightly odd way of getting the point across, but the gesture was quite in keeping with the strict hierarchies of medieval society – and spices, like nobles, belonged at the top. If the anecdote does not date from Gregory’s time it at least reveals the assumptions a Roman deacon might harbour in the ninth century.

  As the conditions of life steadily deteriorated the force of such statements could only increase. Around the time of the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth century, a monk or scribe prepared a ‘form-letter’ from a bishop to his ruler, begging to be excused from attending a council on account of illness. The request is sweetened with spices, among various other exclusive goods, described self-deprecatingly as ‘trifling but exotic little gifts from over the sea, such as I believe befit the honour of your divine piety’. Cinnamon, galangal, cloves, mastic and pepper are all recommended gifts, complementing a dark green cloth, date palms and their fruits, figs, pomegranates, an ivory comb, vermilion, parrots, and ‘a very long spike of a sea-fish’ (a narwhal spike?) besides. Like the papal offering the clear implication is that spices were apt for nobility: the one was closely identified with the other. They were grouped among the trappings of wealth and power, and therein, as ever, lay much of their attraction.

  It would be misleading, however, to suggest that spices’ exclusivity was accepted by all with the same relish as was evidenced by kings and nobles. Their air of luxury was restated in more morally loaded manner in a riddle of St Aldhelm (c.639–709), a relative of King Ine of Wessex (ruled 688–726) and friend to Aldfrith, king of Northumbria (ruled 685–704). With his royal connections Aldhelm could have eaten as well as anyone in early-medieval England, but he seems to have been unimpressed by the experience, judging by one of his riddles:

  I am black on the outside, clad in a wrinkled cover,

  And yet within I bear a burning marrow.

  I season delicacies, the banquets of kings, and the luxuries of the table,

  Both the sauces and the tenderised meats of the kitchen.

  But you will find in me no quality of any worth,

  Unless your bowels have been rattled by my gleaming marrow.

  The answer to the riddle, needless to say, is pepper.

  That Aldhelm looked on spices with a jaundiced eye is not surprising. His disdain for the comforts of life was legendary: he was in the habit of reciting the entire Psalter up to his neck in a barrel of ice-cold water. The more remarkable fact is that he knew them at all. For his was an age when towns and cities had all but disappeared; when the greater part of the population never moved more than ten miles from their native village; when brigands and raiders roamed the roads and seas, descending on the few residual pockets of urban life with terrifying fury; when even neighbouring lands must have seemed scarcely less fantastic to most Europeans than distant India. The mere fact of the presence of pepper in Dark Age Europe is a source of wonder. Though fragmented and at times barely visible, even now the spice trade remained a ligature between parts of the earth that had only the faintest inkling of the other’s existence.

  The reputation of spices as luxuries confined to kings and great noblemen would only begin to change as the millennium drew to a close. After a flurry of references around the time of Charlemagne, followed by a near century of silence, the trade returned to western Europe on a more solid basis towards the end of the ninth century.

  Driving this increased consumption was a slow stirring of Europe’s economy and the steady growth of its population. The revival of the metallurgy and textile industries in central and western Europe and the opening of silver mines in Germany’s Harz mountains went some way to remedying a chronic shortage of the precious metals needed to pay for high-value imports from the East. Increased surpluses in the hands of an emergent landowning class – kings and local strongmen, bishops and monasteries – brought with them a new level of demand for luxuries and the trappings of wealth.

  Meeting this demand brought about one of the pivotal developments in European history. Through trade and travel Europe was exposed to a wider world from which it had been effectively isolated for centuries; and where goods and money flowed, books, people and ideas followed. Exotic and expensive luxuries were, after piety and war, the chief expenses of the aristocracy. The trade that supplied them sparked a whole ‘complex of activities’, economic, political, geographic and technical, whose effects are still with us. Slowly, surely, Western Christendom developed from a sheltered, isolated backwater to an increasingly confident, assertive culture.

  In the memorable phrase of the historian Richard Southern, this was the heroic age of trade, when success could bring riches and ennoblement, but failure meant death or slavery. All travel was perilous, but none more so than the international luxury trade. Outside the isolated centres where urban life was once more beginning to stir, the countryside was often utterly lawless; feeble central authorities struggled with local lords to make their writ run beyond the city walls. Further afield, traders risked all manner of predation. In the ninth and tenth centuries bandits still roamed the Alps and attacked the passes. In 953 the emperor Otto I sent an emissary to the Caliph of Cordoba, his mission to enlist the latter’s support in suppressing Saracen marauders who controlled the Alpine passes, the jugular of the luxury trade. Their depredations could be spectacular: one of their most illustrious victims was Abbot Mayeul of Cluny, captured and ransomed at the cost of a thousand pounds of Cluny’s silver. Nor were the seas any safer. At the end of the tenth century the Mediterranean was, for Christians, hostile waters. Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Malta were all in Muslim hands. Pirates preyed on all shipping they could seize. There was no common law to arbitrate disputes, and all redress came from force or reprisals in kind.

  Yet all these perils notwithstanding, there was even now an international network that managed to distribute spices from the Moluccas to England. Its hub was the northern Italian town of Pavia, the ancient capital of Lombardy. A text describing the situation at the start of the tenth century lists the levies and duties payable by merchants passing through the town,
foremost among whom were the ‘many rich Venetian merchants’ who used to come each year. Each of them visiting Pavia was obliged to pay the master of the king’s treasury an annual tax of one pound each of pepper, cinnamon, galangal and ginger. (To his wife they had to pay one ivory comb and a mirror, twenty gold solidi, plus one denarius of Pavia.) Also in the city were English merchants who in recompense for past troubles – the English seem to have acquired a reputation for hooliganism early – paid compensation every three years of fifty pounds of silver, mirrors and weapons, plus two big greyhounds fitted with silver collars.

  The merchants who supplied such luxuries remain shadowy in the extreme. The great Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne was probably correct in arguing that in this age of fragmentation the Jews were uniquely well placed to cross, and profit from, the divide between early-medieval Christendom and Islam. Apparently no one ranged further afield than the loose alliance of Jewish merchants known as the Rhadanites. Their name appears, tantalisingly, in the Book of Routes composed around 850 by Ibn-Khordabeh, director of posts to the Caliph of Baghdad. The postmaster outlines a network of trade routes that reached from Gaul to China – at a time when the Christians, in Ibn-Khordabeh’s words, could ‘not even put a plank on the water’. In the ninth century, Muslim armies and raiders sacked Arles and Marseilles; in 846 they ravaged the basilica of St Peter’s. In such adverse circumstances Charlemagne and his Frankish nobles apparently relied on Jewish intermediaries for their Eastern luxuries, and it was doubtless his need for that trade that explains Carolingian tolerance for the Jews, a sharp contrast with the persecution and forced conversions they had endured under the earlier dynasty of the Merovingians.