by Jack Turner
Filthy Lucre
What a prince does seems like a command.
Quintilian (AD 35–c.96), Declamations
Needless to say, where one stood on the fraught issues of spices, the libido, health and appetite depended considerably on one’s walk in life. It is no coincidence that clerical objections to spices tended to single out precisely the same qualities we have already met with in previous chapters. What nobles prized, the clerics decried. Instead of adequate nutrition, spices brought flavour; instead of sufficiency, the desire to eat more; instead of economy, profligacy; instead of celibacy, ruddy sexual vigour. For critics and admirers alike, many of these qualities, good or bad, were covered under the deeply ambivalent notion of luxury. Here too the intensity of their attractions cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of their ambiguities.
In recent centuries the idea of luxury has undergone a transformation. Whether in a holiday, a house or a hotel, luxury is, so the advertisers tell us, a good thing. Even the muesli I buy for my breakfast is, according to the label, a luxury. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, the tag of luxuriousness was more fraught, ripe with ambiguity: indeed for many it was not so much a recommendation as a slander, rank with associations of sin. Caesarius of Heisterbach felt that ‘Luxury, like gluttony, has wrought the greatest evils in the world’ – which he listed as the flood, the destruction of the five cities of the plain with fire and brimstone, the imprisonment of Joseph, the abasement of Israel, the blinding of Samson, the demotion and death of the children of Eli, the adultery and murders of King David, Solomon’s idolatry, Susanna’s condemnation and the beheading of John the Baptist. Like the other six deadly or cardinal sins, luxury was both a wrong in itself and the wellhead of greater evils: the notion of a cardinal sin derives from the Latin cardo, meaning pivot or hinge, the opening through which greater evils entered. It was not so much an issue of personal consumption as a cosmic wrong.
Or at least ‘luxury’ is one of many inadequate translations of what went by the untranslatable term of luxus, a wrong of rank, coruscating awfulness, conveying a sense of excess, superfluity, otherness, perversion, illicitness and – which was but a subset of the same – lust. To Caesarius, luxury and her daughters included ‘wanton and unbridled prostitution of mind and body, arising from unclean desires’, manifested in several degrees of fornication, debauchery, adultery, incest and unnatural vice. The word itself is cognate with the Roman word luxuria, conveying a sense of sprawling extravagance that is only faintly retained in its modern derivatives. The term was originally used of vegetation, implying abnormal and unbounded growth beyond the norm, surpassing its natural limits.
Just how far spices surpassed natural limits emerges obliquely, from the words of those for whom they were conspicuously luxurious in this latter, intensely negative sense. To those who preferred their consumption inconspicuous, they were the epitome of waste and profligacy; expensive foods, as one critic complained, ‘wherewith many poor men might be fed sufficiently’. What bedazzled a nobleman bent on parading his munificence represented to others a grotesque misuse of resources, a ‘great outrage of expense’. To the anonymous author of Mum and the Sothsegger, an early-fourteenth-century polemic, the profligacy of spices stuck in the throat. In contrast with the plain living and hard work of ‘simple men on ploughs’, at court all restraint was abandoned. The king should spend his days, not his nights, sleepless, nor should he spend more than was strictly necessary on dainties, dancing, jesters, ‘mirrors of sin’,* spices, wax, wine and waste. Fools, dancing and mirrors aside, Mum’s list is familiar from an episode covered earlier: wax, wine and spices were precisely the luxuries singled out by Zurara as freely dispensed by the munificent Henry the Navigator.
Above and beyond the sheer costliness of the spices, it was the vanity of their uses that most riled their more puritan critics. Underlying this stance was the conviction that our needs are simple, and amply provided for by God. Since God had made the world He clearly had not meant it any other way: the lilies of the field were more beautiful than the raiment of Solomon. It was no more than consistent, indeed it was almost a logical corollary, to hold that any disruption of that order was disruption of God’s will, to meddle with what He had intended. Anything that smacked of artifice was an alteration of the divine creation, a perversion of nature. Applied to the table, this purist instinct took the form of a culinary iconoclasm: if the correct purpose of nutrition was nourishment, it followed that the cook’s art was unnatural, his sole function to delight the palate, thereby transforming God’s creation into a debased and perverted form. Introducing foreign flavours to local foods was both to inflate our own simple needs and to meddle with what had been amply provided, merely for the sake of a transient pleasure. Thus Chaucer’s Pardoner accused cooks of degrading God’s creation with their sauces ‘made of spicery of leaf’, all of which he dismissed as ‘abominable superfluity’, and converting ‘substance into accident’, the real essence of a thing into mere external form. Spices were a sort of anti-food, transforming and concealing what God had made. Worse than superfluous, they were impious. The spice-eater was not merely a glutton, worshipping the false god of his stomach, he was guilty of the Luciferian sin of rebellion.
That these concerns were something more than abstract theological debates can be sensed from Dante’s peopling of the eighth circle of hell, where a Sienese gourmet by the name of Niccolò wallows deep in leprous horrors, his crime the discovery of ‘the costly use of cloves’.* Revealingly, he shares his corner of hell with those whom Dante classes as ‘the counterfeiters’. There in the slime with the clove-eating Niccolò are Caccia d’Asciano and Abbagliato, two members of Siena’s brigata spendereccia or Spendthrift Brigade, who made themselves notorious by gorging themselves on food and wine then smashing the plates and glasses. Another resident is Griffolino d’Arezzo, a heretic and falsifier of metals burned to death for claiming he could fly, and the Florentine Capocchio, an alchemist burned at the stake in 1293. All are sentenced to languish for eternity in a dank malarial ditch for the crime of tampering with the natural order.
Dante evidently liked it bland. Of all of the black marks set against spices, this stigma, that they were the unnatural food of the rich few, was one of the most tenacious. To the clerical reformer John Wycliffe spices were nothing less than diabolical. In his late-fourteenth-century treatise Of Antichrist and his Followers, the latter appear eating ornate food ‘seasoned with hot spices and extra-hot with sauces and syrups’. He returned to the theme in his tract Of the Leaven of Pharisees, fulminating over those false monks who guzzled hippocras, feigning a life of holy poverty even as they lived off their flock like parasites. The spiced wines they drank and shared with their noble patrons were at once a trapping and a symbol of a life conducted contrary to clerical principles. Greedy, rapacious hypocrites, their lifestyle made them worse than ‘common thieves and outlaws’, who took from the rich but at least shared the proceeds with the poor. In a similar vein the Franciscans of the late-fourteenth-century poem Pierce the Plowman’s Crede ought to live poorly and walk barefoot, but on closer inspection turn out to have fur lining for their tunics, fancy buckled shoes and revealing hose, and to carry spices everywhere they went. Another poet claims the begging friars turned a tidy profit from selling spices to ‘grete ladys & wenches stoute’ – pleasant enough for the woman, but the husband foots the bill. Still worse was to follow, since the mendicant ‘will not blink at winning a woman privately and leaving a child within – and maybe two at once!’ A contemporary writes of the Jacobins and Augustines ‘of Judas’ kin’, who come knocking at the door and taking bribes in the form of spices. If a priest were to intercede on one’s behalf or say a wedding or funeral mass, one had better have some spices ready, since the average member of the clergy ‘spendeth no speech minus the spice’.
Most of the sting of the accusation would disappear as the cost of spices plummeted, yet their air of grubby worldliness outlasted the Mi
ddle Ages in at least one corner of the world, albeit in a highly ritualised form. Since at least the thirteenth century, it was customary in France to lubricate judicial proceedings with spices, for which reason Villon dedicates a verse to a greedy lawyer, to whom he leaves a whole basket of cloves, taken from another still greedier advocate. As late as the end of the eighteenth century it was still the custom in French courts to use spices as thinly-veiled bribery, as competing plaintiffs advanced their suits with ‘gifts’ of spices to judge and jury. The expression ‘to pay the spices’ meant to win one’s court case – a form of corruption of which Molière and Racine made merry. It would take a revolution to put a complete stop to aromatic bribery.
From cloisters and courthouse, complaints of the worldly excess of the spices were easily extrapolated to the level of national economics. Perhaps more than any other trade, the long-distance luxury trade with the East was open to the charge of needlessly enriching foreigners – and impoverishing one’s countrymen. Who those foreigners were was of course a matter of perspective. For most Europeans they were Italians. In The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, an anonymous English polemic of the early fifteenth century, the author slates the Genoese merchants in their great carracks ‘with cloth of gold, silver, and pepper black’, who he felt should be banned from English waters. He reserves special scorn for the ‘commodities and nicetees’ of the Venetians and Florentines, who kept the kingdom supplied with spices and other luxuries with their galleys laden with ‘thyngs of complacence’. Grouped among such fripperies as apes, marmosets and other ‘nifles and trifles’, the ‘dear and deceitful’ spices and other such ‘wasteful goods’ amounted to nothing less than a particularly efficient means of redistributing wealth into the hands of the enemy.
The Libelle would have brought a sardonic smile to the Venetians, the Florentines or any of the Italian trading republics, since they were themselves often at the receiving end of the identical complaint. From the Italian perspective, those cash-guzzling foreigners were for the most part Muslims or the orthodox Christians of Byzantium. Indeed the complaint could be shunted back down the spice routes as far as the clove and cinnamon groves, just as it was shunted down in time from one moralist to another, ever since Pliny bemoaned the costly magnetism of India’s pepper. Perhaps the most startling occurrence of the complaint was as the Age of Discovery got underway, in precisely those kingdoms that were expending the greatest efforts on acquiring the spices for themselves, both East and West. Columbus’s patron King Ferdinand was apprehensive of an outflow of scarce Spanish currency to Portugal in return merely for pepper and cinnamon. ‘Let’s put an end to that,’ came the royal decree; ‘Garlic is a perfectly good spice.’
It would have been no solace to Ferdinand that identical concerns were expressed over the border. Even during the heady days of the first discoveries and conquests, the Portuguese crown found itself grappling with problems that belied the glamour and the martial glories of its eastern empire. There to see with his own eyes was the Portuguese poet Francisco de Sá de Miranda (1481?–1558). Not one to be carried away by the headlong rush to empire, he singled out spices as a sort of fool’s gold. However, it was not so much the drain on the kingdom’s finances as the cost in terms of human capital that concerned him:
I have no fear of Castile,
Whence comes no sound angry of war;
But I’m afraid of Lisbon,
That at the smell of this cinnamon,
Unpeoples our kingdom.
These complaints of demographic and economic drain were destined long to outlast the medieval world, passing in due course from one European power to another as the focus of the spice trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both the Dutch and English East India Companies regularly fielded the complaint that their Eastern traffic was beggaring the country. In England the matter was repeatedly raised in Parliament, where the East India Company had to defend itself against the charge of putting the nation’s scarce capital to flight for the sake of spices. The issue was especially acute for the English, since aside from a strictly limited amount of pepper smuggled out from under the eyes of the Dutch in India or squeezed from the wretched, malaria-plagued Sumatran port of Benkulen, all of the country’s spices arrived via middlemen. For this reason, in 1662 King Charles II issued a proclamation forbidding the purchase of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace from parties other than the producers themselves – a measure aimed at the Dutch and those ‘foul traders at home’ who dealt with them, treasonously draining the kingdom of its bullion.
Similar complaints would persist until events finally pushed the trade into irrelevance. Over time, many causes combined to deprive the refrain of its potency, until it fizzled and was forgotten. Though in absolute terms the spice trade grew larger from medieval into modern times, in relative terms spices suffered a loss of visibility. New trades appeared, other imports overshadowed spices as conspicuous gobblers of cash. Moralisers found other commodities to single out as more reprehensible, more ethically dubious: sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate, all of which have long since been trumped by still more potent stimulants.* So too Enlightenment economics would chip away at and finally demolish the mercantilist logic that for so long gave complaints against spices such clout; or which, conversely, had made of spices such an effective symbol of worldly means. But by this time both spices and the spice trade had long since ceased to be a pressing national concern beyond a handful of exporter countries, much less a matter for national economic or moral debate. Why and when this occurred is the subject to which we now turn.
White pepper on the vine.
John Gerard, The Herball or General historie of plantes (London, 1636).
* On one occasion Bernard found himself inflamed with desire for a young woman, whereupon he promptly threw himself into an icy pond and stayed there until he had cooled off a little, presumably to the amusement of the woman concerned.
* For the medieval monk this was a more germane topic than one might imagine. Readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will have a sense of some of the sexual tensions bubbling away in the all-male but celibate community of the cloister.
* The original sense of a pittance was a bequest to a religious house, whence it came to designate a small dietary allowance to the monks. The sense here is of modest sufficiency.
* The mirror was long denounced by critics as a spur to vanity.
* This would appear to be one of several unwarranted Dantean slanders. In the previous century England’s King Henry II had already discovered the ‘costly use of cloves’ (in wine), and an Anglo-Norman recipe book of the twelfth century contains a recipe for a clove-flavoured dish called ‘mawmeme’.
* Though sugar’s critics are perhaps staging a comeback.
EPILOGUE
The End of the Spice Age
The rarer something is, the more it is sought after. In India pennyroyal is dearer than pepper.
St Jerome (c.347–419/420), ‘To Evangelus’
In February 1755 a battered frigate flying a French ensign and bearing the name of La Colombe hove into view off the remote Moluccan island of Meyo. The voyage had left the ship the worse for wear; it was barely seaworthy, its ancient rigging so decayed that it was incapable of sailing to windward. On board was a one-armed Frenchman with a cunning plan. His name was strangely appropriate to the task in hand: Pierre Poivre, a Gallic Peter Pepper. Like many others who had travelled to the Moluccas before him he was there not to trade, but to steal.
The Moluccas had been the sole home of the clove since cloves existed, and so they still remained, with some qualifications, when Poivre dropped anchor. Originally confined to five islands to the west of Halmahera, by Poivre’s day the spice grew on a few dozen islands of the surrounding archipelago, under the watchful eye of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC. After the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 1605, the VOC had set about making each and every clove on earth a Dutch possession.
Under Dutch rule the islands were exploited with a ruthlessness and efficiency never seen before. Gaps in what had been a porous Portuguese monopoly were plugged, and all clandestine trading ruthlessly suppressed. The Moluccas were squeezed by a rule as harsh as that on the better-known plantation regimes of Caribbean sugar and cotton, and the inevitable rebellions mercilessly put down. In 1650, the Dutch governor, despite being bedridden, insisted on personally knocking out the teeth of a Ternatean rebel commander, smashing the roof of his mouth, cutting out his tongue and slitting his throat.
To prevent uprisings and to stamp out smuggling, it was Dutch policy to concentrate the clove on the central Moluccan island of Ambon and a few outlying islands. The sultans of Ternate and Tidore were pensioned off, kept amenable by a combination of cash and the ever present threat of superior force. The clove groves were torched.* From the VOC fortress on Ambon annual expeditions set off to destroy illegal clove trees and to punish renegades. Smugglers were blown out of the water; all unauthorised cultivation was punishable by death. Dutch troops crushed the smuggling centre of Macassar, where English, Chinese and Portuguese bought illicit cloves. By Poivre’s day, through cannons and subsidies, the spice was scarcely more widespread than it had been for thousands of years; as closely guarded, as one observer wrote, as ever a jealous lover watched his sweetheart.