Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  By the end of the ninth century, however, the Italians were beginning to outpace all their competitors. With access to the iron and timber of the north, the Italo-Byzantine cities of Amalfi, Gaeta, Salerno and Venice had the goods needed by the Islamic powers; in Constantinople they had a ready portal to the East. The Venetians were still nominally subjects of Byzantium, and since 813 they had claimed a monopoly on all Byzantine trade, the foundation for their absolute primacy in the centuries ahead. They dealt with the competition by fair means and foul. One of the oldest surviving decrees of the Venetian senate forbade Jews from travelling in Venetian ships. On land, their merchants ranged far and wide. As St Gerald of Aurillac passed through the outskirts of Pavia around the year 894, he was accosted by a group of Venetian merchants who tried to interest him in their spices and fabrics, both of which they had acquired in Constantinople. If Venice did not yet quite hold the gorgeous East in fee then it certainly had an early foothold in the trade.

  Thanks to the efforts of these obscure, far-flung traders, spices began to return to Europe in volumes not witnessed since the days of the Roman empire. And as consumption of spices picked up, so too other traditions began to reappear. The old strain of their seductive, decadent luxury resurfaced with new vigour. A history of Charlemagne’s reign relates the tale of a corrupt and worldly bishop, one telling proof of his decadence being his predilection for rich dishes seasoned with ‘all manner of various spices’ and other ‘incitements to gluttony’; the sort of lavish feast, the author adds, as was never prepared for the austere and virtuous Charlemagne.

  The salutary contrast between the high-living, spice-quaffing simoniac and the plain-eating emperor is pure romanitas. History was repeating itself: a millennium after Rome had first sent its fleets to India and its moralisers had fretted whether spices were corroding its once steely ethics, the same concerns were resurfacing. Just as medieval Europe lived in the long shadow cast by Rome, drawing its water from still-functioning aqueducts and travelling its worn but still workable roads, conducting its diplomacy and theology in its language, so with its cuisine. The mingled fascination and revulsion spices provoked, the intertwining of taste and distaste, wound back in time as far as the Caesars.

  * Malabathron is cinnamon leaf, sometimes also ‘Indian leaf, prized on account of its potent aromatic oil. It is the leaf of one of several relatives of cinnamon native to India.

  † Costus is the aromatic root of Sassurea lappa, indigenous to Kashmir, from which is extracted a powerful oil widely used in ancient perfumes and unguents.

  * A better parallel – for Eudoxus never reached his destination, or at least never lived to tell the tale – might be with the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa, who in AD 1291 sailed west beyond Gibraltar ‘that they might go by sea to the ports of India’, never to be heard of again. In the following years several expeditions were sent to find them, to no avail. It was perhaps with the Vivaldis in mind that Dante wrote of the ‘mad flight’ of Ulysses, who likewise – in Dante’s version – disappears over the western horizon without a trace (Inferno 26.125).

  * A people in north-east Palestine.

  * Saturnalia and Christmas may well have still more in common, in that the fourth-century Church seems to have appropriated the date for the celebration of its own festival of Christmas – a shrewd undercutting (or co-opting) of the opposition.

  * Cosmus was a famous parfumier, whom Martial lampoons elsewhere for his super-exclusive cinnamon scents. His ‘leaf’ is probably malabathron, or cinnamon leaf.

  * Spikenard, Nardostacbys jatamansi, is native to northern India, a scented grass from which an aromatic oil is extracted.

  * In his lost work On Drunkenness Aristotle claimed that wine spiced with cinnamon was less intoxicating.

  * By the middle of the first century AD Nero could acquire just the one specimen, apparently the last. Thus to his many crimes must be added an extinction.

  * Also known as ‘horse-heal’, a perennial herb prized for its bitter, aromatic leaves.

  * A reference to Nero.

  * Apparently a reference to white and black pepper.

  * To the medieval mind, luxury and lust were subsets of the same disorder. The subject is discussed more fully below.

  * A token though highly symbolic statement of Arab supremacy was the use of timber from a Greek ship wrecked in the Red Sea in the roof of the Ka’bah in Mecca; where, presumably, it remains.

  Dela Nuez Moscada.

  3

  Medieval Europe

  In the meadow there is a tree, very fair to look upon.

  Its roots are of ginger and galangal, the shoots of zedoary.

  Its flowers are three pieces of mace, and the bark,

  sweet-smelling cinnamon.

  The fruit is the tasty clove, and of cubebs* there is no lack.

  ‘The Land of Cockayne’,

  an anonymous (Irish?) poem of the early thirteenth century

  Flavours of Cockayne

  The medieval mystic dreamed of spices in paradise; the gourmand, in Cockayne. Indeed for the true gourmand, Cockayne was paradise. For as paradise soothed and delighted the weary spirit, so Cockayne was tailor-made for the empty, or for that matter the merely greedy, stomach. Here the only virtues were gluttony, leisure and pleasure, the only vices exertion and care. Doing nothing earned a salary, work was penalised, women were rewarded for sleeping around. A decent fart earned half a crown. Even in church the truest form of worship was to stuff oneself. Conveniently, the church itself was edible, its walls made of pastry, fish and meat, and buttressed with puddings. There were rivers ‘great and fine’, flowing not with water – a rarity in Cockayne – but with Oile, milk, hony and wine’.

  And yet for all this food there was not a single cook in the place, for the meals in Cockayne were at once ready-made and yet delectable – a combination, evidently, as arresting then as now. Supper walked, flew, ran or swam up to the plate. The larks obligingly delivered themselves, pre-spiced, to hungry mouths:

  The larks, already cooked,

  Fly down to men’s mouths,

  Seasoned in the pot most excellently,

  Powdered with cloves and cinnamon.

  Being a product of the medieval imagination, that there was a smell of spices to Cockayne’s miraculously self-serving larks was all but inevitable. Nor did the spices end there. One of the abbey’s wells was filled with spiced wine, another with a healing mixture of spices. The walls of the gingerbread houses were nailed with cloves. In the garden grew the vegetable kingdom’s equivalent of the philosopher’s stone, an all-in-one spice tree, with roots of ginger and galangal, shoots of zedoary, flowers of mace, bark of cinnamon and fruit of cloves. In one version of the poem, ‘Ginger and nutmeg, all one can eat, are what they use to pave the street.’ Even the dogs shat nutmegs.

  In all of its many versions in the various European vernaculars, Cockayne was a very spicy place. In the tongue-in-cheek judgement of one author, such attractions as the abundance of spices and the pre-cooked larks made Cockayne not only comparable to paradise, but better: ‘Though Paradise is merry and bright, Cockayne is far the fairer sight.’ The sizeable number of medieval Europeans for whom an empty stomach was a daily concern would probably have been inclined to agree.

  Satirical fantasy it may be, yet the various visions of Cockayne that survive suggest something of the depth of the medieval fixation with spices. They were objects of extraordinary charm and appeal, so enticing that they did not seem out of place among the pleasures of a dream. It was moreover a dream that cooks laboured hard to turn into reality, for spices featured as conspicuously in the real-world smoke and grime of the medieval kitchen and hall as they did in the make-believe landscape of Cockayne. Other foodstuffs have at one time or another held a similar grip on the imagination – coffee, tea, sugar and chocolate – yet all were, in comparison, passing fads. None accumulated a comparable body of myth and lore, nor carried quite the same social clout. When the glutton’s paradise of
Cockayne took shape, spices had already held a grip on the European imagination for centuries, and would do so for centuries yet.

  It is often claimed that spices returned to European cuisine with the crusaders, but this, we have seen, is manifestly not the case. They never left. The first and most enduring taste, and throughout the Middle Ages far and away the most important spice, was pepper. In 946 there was a pepper sauce – poisoned, in this case – on the table of King Louis IV (ruled 936–954) of France. By the turn of the millennium the spice was established as a regular feature of the noble and monastic diet. In 984 the monks of Tulle paid three pounds of pepper to their brothers of Aurillac to celebrate the feast day of their patron, St Gerald. At the Swiss abbey of St Gall the spice was sufficiently familiar for the monks to nickname one of their number ‘Peppercorn’, on account of his prickly personality.

  Though spices were by now a taste shared by the elites across Europe, supply was a largely Italian affair. By the closing years of the millennium traders from several Italian maritime republics were energetically expanding their presence in the Muslim Levant, led, as they would be five hundred years later, by the Venetians. To safeguard their vulnerable position abroad, Doge Pietro II Orseolo (ruled 991–1009) negotiated commercial treaties with the Muslim North African powers. Even so, the trade remained a risky business, those who carried it out liable to periodic incarcerations, seizures of goods and shipwreck. At the turn of the millennium, the Saxon chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg writes of the loss of four Venetian ships crammed with many different spices.* At this point the Venetians shared the trade with merchants from Salerno, Gaeta and Amalfi – the dominance of the Republic lay in the future. In 996 a traveller to Cairo counted 160 merchants from Amalfi alone; in Syria, there were hundreds of others from Bari and Sicily.

  From Mediterranean ports spices were dispersed over the Alps and across the breadth of Christendom. In 973 Ibn Jaqub, a Jewish merchant from Andalucia, was astonished to find Indian spices for sale in the German town of Mainz. Under King Æthelred II ‘The Unready’ (ruled 978–1013, 1014–16), German merchants in London paid their customs duties in pepper. In England spices were a sufficiently common feature of the commercial scene to find their way into a school textbook, a set of translation exercises written around 1005 by Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire. Spices feature as part of the cargo of a merchant returning from across the sea, among his silks, gems, gold, oil, wine, ivory, metals, glass and sulphur: a detail to fire a bored schoolboy’s imagination, but one that he – or the abbot – must at the very least have recognised.

  By such means the absence of pepper was becoming more noteworthy than its presence, at least for a certain class. Towards the middle of the century the Italian cardinal-bishop Peter Damian wrote of a blasphemer who sprinkled his chicken with pepper ‘as is customary’. At the century’s close Ademar III, viscount of Limoges, hosted a visit by Duke William IX of Aquitaine, only to find his larder bare of pepper ‘for the count’s sauces’ – with such an exalted visitor in the house, an intolerable situation. Ademar sent his seneschal to a neighbour, who showed him great mounds of pepper piled on the floor, so that it had to be shovelled out ‘like acorns for pigs’.

  The same William was the first of the Provençal troubadours, a Falstaffian character of prodigious appetites, who on account of his riotous living managed the rare feat of being both excommunicated and going on crusade. His poem ‘I’ll do a song, since I’m dozing’ tells of a ménage-à-trois in the castle of two noble ladies, who waylay him one summer’s day as he rides through the Auvergne. Mistaking him for a mute and so unable to tell of their escapades – nor write of them: William’s literacy was a rarity among the nobility – they keep him at their pleasure for a week, in which time the lusty count beds them 188 times, primed for this Herculean effort by ‘a lordly meal’ of two fat capons, white bread, good wine, ‘and the pepper laid on thick’. ‘I nearly broke my tool and burst my harness … I can’t express the remorse that overtook me.’

  By now, pepper was well on the way to being considered obligatory, a highly visible and highly esteemed hallmark of the nobility. Yet if the spices were becoming more familiar with every year, it was a familiarity that rested on a network of trade and travel that few could have comprehended. The reality was scarcely less wonderful than the fantasies of paradise and Cockayne. A Rhine-land nobleman in the eleventh century could order his furs from Siberia, spices and silks from Byzantium and the Islamic world beyond, pepper from India, ginger from China and nutmegs and cloves from the Moluccas. Individuals such as Nahray ibn Nissim, a Tunisian Jew settled in Egypt, were dealing in products as diverse as Spanish tin and coral, Moroccan antimony, Eastern spices, Armenian cloths, rhubarb from Tibet and spikenard from Nepal. By this stage the trading guild known as the Karimis, a group of Jewish spice merchants based in Cairo, had their agents scattered across the Old World, from China in the east to Mali in the west.

  Thus when Pope Urban II proclaimed the first crusade at Clermont in 1095 both the taste for spices and the trade that fed it were already on a firm footing. When the crusaders made their bloody entry into the markets of the Levant and looked bedazzled at the spices and other Eastern exotica, they knew exactly what they saw. All religious zeal aside, this was a prospect that made crusading as attractive to the body as it was beneficial to the spirit.

  In another sense the crusades did transform the way spices were used and acquired in the West. The establishment of a foothold in the Levant helped drive a great quickening of economic life. New industries brought new spending power, and the demand for Eastern luxuries grew steadily. The chief movers and profiteers remained much the same as they had been four centuries earlier: chiefly, the Italian maritime republics, joined now by Barcelona, Marseilles and Ragusa. By nature more inclined to commerce than crusading, the Italians had initially heard the call to Holy War with diffidence, but they soon changed their tune when the Franks seized towns and fortresses along the Levantine coast and, for a time, Jerusalem itself. Shortly after the First Crusade, Genoa, Pisa and Venice all sent fleets to the east, where, in return for providing naval transport and protection, they extracted commercial concessions in several of the captured towns and seized what shipping they could lay their hands on. A Venetian squadron cruising off Ascalon in 1123 seized a rich Egyptian merchant fleet, plundering a fortune’s worth of pepper, cinnamon and other spices. The merchants who followed in the crusaders’ wake meant to continue as they had begun. For the first time since the fall of Rome, European merchants had a substantial presence at one end of the ancient caravan routes.

  Although the crusaders’ most spectacular conquests were soon whittled down and their enclaves pushed into the sea, the deepening and broadening of a commercial presence in the Levant marked a shift of enduring significance. Midway through the twelfth century the earlier trickle of Eastern luxuries had become something approaching a flood. Early in that century Anselm of Laon could write of pepper as a traveller’s ‘necessity’, to be carried on a journey along with cheese, bread, candles ‘and other such things’. In the 1170s William FitzStephen saw spices in the markets of London, a town which though blighted by ‘the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires’ had cosmopolitan appetites:

  Gold from Arabia, from Sabaea spice

  And incense; from the Scythians arms of steel

  Well-tempered; oil from the rich groves of palm

  That spring from the fat lands of Babylon;

  Fine gems from Nile, from China crimson silks;

  French wines; and sable, voir, and miniver

  From the far lands where Russ and Norseman dwell.

  Around this time guilds of spicers and pepperers begin to crop up across the major towns of Europe. The speciarius becomes an increasingly common figure on the urban scene; by the thirteenth century he is part of the mercantile establishment. In Oxford in 1264, one William the Spicer had his shop burned by boisterous students. In London, the Company of Gro
cers is still in existence, having grown out of the older guild of the Pepperers; its coat of arms has nine cloves at its centre. Guilds such as these are the remote ancestors of the supermarkets of the twenty-first century.

  There, however, the similarity ends. For the medieval spicer’s products, though increasingly familiar, were anything but prosaic. The secrets of the spice routes would not be revealed to European savants for centuries, and even today only the outlines are clear. From India spices flowed west along two broad routes, each heavily trafficked since ancient times. The first followed the western shore of the subcontinent north to Gujarat, passing Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and north to Basra, the port from which Sinbad set off on his adventures. Here caravans took the spices north and west, through Persia and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea. Alternatively, they charted a more southerly course, snaking out along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, via the oasis towns of the Syrian desert to marketplaces in the Levant. Many of these spices that came via the Persian Gulf ended up in Constantinople. What was not consumed within the Byzantine empire was reshipped to other destinations as far away as Scandinavia and the Baltic.

  The second main spice route from India followed the path once taken by Rome’s fleets, and now largely in Arab hands. From Malabar the spices were ferried across the Indian Ocean, around the Horn of Africa and north up the Red Sea. Some were unloaded at the Red Sea port of Jiddah, then proceeded by caravan to Levantine outlets via Mecca and Medina. What did not pass overland followed the old Roman route to the western shores of the Red Sea, where the cargoes were carried overland to the Nile and then shipped downriver for taxing, sale and reshipment in Cairo, before finally reaching the Mediterranean at Alexandria.