SPICE
The History of a Temptation

JACK TURNER

DEDICATION

To Helena

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Spices in The Age of Discovery

Columbus’s Conception of The Atlantic And The Indies

Vasco Da Gama’s Route, 1497–1499

Route of Magellan’s Circumnavigation, 1519–1522

Introduction: The Idea of Spice

Part I: The Spice Race

1: The Spice-Seekers

The Taste that Lavinched a Thousand Ships

Christians and Spices

Debate and Stryfe Betwene the Spanyardes and Portugales

The Scent of Paradise

Part II: Palate

2: Ancient Appetites

The Aromanauts

Of Spiced Parrot and Stuffed Dormice

Spice for Trimalchio

Decline, Fall, Survival

3: Medieval Europe

Flavours of Cockayne

Salt, Maggots and Rot?

The Regicidal Lamprey and the Deadly Beaver

Keeping up with the Percys

Part III: Body

4: The Spice of Life

The Pharaoh’s Nose

Abbot Eberhard’s Complaint

Pox, Pestilence and Pomanders

5: The Spice of Love

Whan Tendre Youthe Hath Wedded Stoupyng Age

Hot Stuff

Spice Girls

Afterword, or How to Make a Small Penis Splendid

Part IV: Spirit

6: Food of the Gods

Holy Smoke

God’s Nostrils

Odours of Sanctity

Old Age, New Age

7: Some Like it Bland

St Bernard’s Family Tiff

Filthy Lucre

Epilogue: The End of the Spice Age

Sources and Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAPS

Spices in The Age of Discovery

Columbus’s Conception of The Atlantic And The Indies

Vasco Da Gama’s Route, 1497–1499

Route of Magellan’s Circumnavigation, 1519–1522

INTRODUCTION The Idea of Spice

A certain Christopher Columbus, a Genoese, proposed to the Catholic King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, to discover the islands which touch the Indies, by sailing from the western extremity of this country. He asked for ships and whatever was necessary to navigation, promising not only to propagate the Christian religion, but also certainly to bring back pearls, spices and gold beyond anything ever imagined.

Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1530

One day at Aldgate Primary School, after the dinosaurs and the pyramids, we did the Age of Discovery. Our teacher produced a large, illustrated map, showing the great arcs traced across the globe by Columbus and his fellow pioneers, sailing tubby galleons through seas where narwhals cavorted, whales spouted and jowly cherub heads puffed cotton-wool clouds. Parrots flew overhead while jaunty, armour-clad gents negotiated on the beaches of the new-found lands, asking the natives if they would like to convert to Christianity and whether by chance they had any spice.

Neither request struck us ten-year-olds as terribly reasonable: we were a pagan, pizza-eating lot. As for the spices, our teacher explained that medieval Europeans were afflicted with truly appalling food, necessitating huge quantities of pepper, ginger and cinnamon to disguise the tastes of salt and old and rotting meat – which, being medieval, they then shovelled in. And who were we to disagree? It made a lot of sense, particularly relative to the generally perplexing matter of schoolboy history, whether it was frostbitten Norwegians dragging their sleds to the South Pole, explorers dying of thirst in the quest for non-existent seas and rivers, or knights taking the cross to capture the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel – all, from a schoolboy’s perspective, strangely perverse and pointless pursuits. The discoverers were somehow more intelligible, more human: our food at school was lousy, but theirs was so dismal that they sailed right around the world for relief. And to an Australian ten-year-old this was not only plausible but highly relevant: so this was why we were colonised by the English.

There was some truth in my potted ten-year-old perspective, albeit radically streamlined. The first Englishmen in Asia were indeed looking for spices, as were the Iberian discoverers before them (whereas Australia, not having any spice, was left till later). Spice was a catalyst of discovery and, by extension – in that much-abused phrase of the popular historian – the reshaping of the world. The Asian empires of Portugal, England and the Netherlands might be said with only a little exaggeration to have sprouted from a quest for cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmeg and mace, and something similar was true of the Americas. It is true that the hunger for spices galvanised an extraordinary, unparalleled outpouring of energies, both at the birth of the modern world and for centuries, even millennia, before. For the sake of spices, fortunes were made and lost, empires built and destroyed, and even a new world discovered. For thousands of years this was an appetite that spanned the planet and, in doing so, transformed it.

And yet to modern eyes it might seem a mystery that spices should ever have exerted such a powerful attraction, however bad the food: mildly exotic condiments, we might think, but hardly worth the fuss. In an age that pours its commercial energies into such unpoetical ends as arms, oil, ore, tourism and drugs, that such energies were devoted to the quest for anything quite so quaintly insignificant as spice must strike us as mystifying indeed.

In another sense, however, the attraction of spices is still with us. Let your remote control lead you far and wide enough through the nether regions of American television and sooner or later, amid the chat shows and the monster truck racing, you will come across a soft porn channel by the name of Spice. Any possible confusion about its contents – I first took it for a cooking channel – is soon dispelled by advertisements for a cast of pneumatic-chested sirens, served up and devoured by rippling, oiled hunks. The name was chosen, I suppose, to strike a suggestive note: to hint of exotic, forbidden delights, while at the same time forewarning of strong flavours – sultry scenes in the suburbs and breathless encounters poolside. A little will titillate, too much and your senses are overwhelmed.

Which is probably true enough. But while the Spice channel might suggest something about the creative proclivities of American television, the reader may think it has little to tell us about spice. Yet in fact the erotic associations of the word are part of an old tradition. Spices have always been sexy – and it would seem they still are, at least in TV-land. Spices have an ancient aphrodisiac reputation, of which the word’s erotic overtones are but the faint, figurative residue. Besides the Spice channel, these associations have resonated with many others, among them no less an authority on the topic than Barbara Cartland, the author of more than seven hundred romantic novels and the aphrodisiac cookbook Food for Love, the preface to which promises to bring ‘spice into your life!’ Long before the invention of television or the romantic novelist there was the Song of Songs, with its lyrical evocation of the loved one as ‘an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices …’.* Consciously or otherwise, in linking spices and love Cartland partook of a literary tradition reaching as far back in time as ancient Palestine.

Of course ‘spice’ suggests much more than veiled erotic allusion. Besides romance, if that is the word, there are the Romantics, for whom spices are inextricably linked with images of a fabulous Orient in all its mystery and splendour. The word comes poetically charged, In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Titania tells Oberon of her conversation with a changeling’s mother in the ‘spiced Indian air’; in the dour surrounds of a New England farmhouse, Herman Melville imagined the ‘spiced groves of ceaseless verdure’ growing on the enchanted islands of the East. For countless others spices and the spice trade have evoked a host of vague, alluring images: dhows wafting across tropical seas, the shadowy recesses of Eastern bazaars, Arabian caravans snaking across the desert, the sensual aromas of the harem, the perfumed banquets of the Moghul’s court. Walt Whitman looked west from California to ‘flowery peninsulas and the spice islands’ of the East; Marlowe wrote of ‘Mine argosie from Alexandria, Loaden with spice and silks, now under sail … smoothly gliding down by Candy shore’. In a similar vein Tennyson waxed lyrical on the ‘boundless east’ where ‘those long swells of breaker sweep/The nutmeg rocks and isles of clove’. Spices and the trade that brought them have long been one of the stocks-in-trade of what Edward Said labelled the Orientalist imagination, their reputation for the picturesque, glamour, romance and swashbuckle enduring from the tales of Sinbad to several recent (often equally fabulous) non-fiction potboilers. We can still appreciate the nostalgia of Masefield’s poem ‘Cargoes’, with its

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores.

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

All of which was a world away from the ‘Dirty British coaster’ laden with ‘Tyne coal’ and ‘cheap tin trays’ of Masefield’s day.

Or, for that matter, our own day. Much of spices’ own cargo is still with us, for they continue to evoke something more than mere seasonings, a residual verbal piquancy that is itself the echo of a past of astonishing richness and consequence. By the time these quintessentially Eastern products reached the West, spices had acquired a history laden with meaning, in which respect they are comparable to a mere handful of other foods, the weight and richness of their baggage rivalled only by bread (‘give us this day our daily bread’), salt (‘the salt of the earth’) and wine (‘in wine is truth’ – but also the liquor of death, life, deceit, excess, the mocker or mirror of man). Yet the symbolism spices have carried is more diverse, more spiked with ambivalence than these parallels would suggest. When spices arrived by ship or caravan from the East, they brought their own invisible cargo, a bulging bag of associations, myth and fantasy, a cargo that to some was as repulsive as others found it attractive. For thousands of years spices have carried a whole swathe of potent messages, for which they have been both loved and loathed.

To explain why this is so, how spices came to acquire this freight, is the purpose of this book. Contrary to the certainties of my faraway classroom, this was not an appetite amenable to a simple explanation: there was a good deal more to the attraction of spices than culinary expediency, nor, for that matter, was the food of the Middle Ages quite so bad as moderns have generally been willing to believe. This is a diverse and sprawling history spanning several millennia, beginning with a handful of cloves found in a charred ceramic vessel beneath the Syrian desert where, in a small town on the banks of the Euphrates, an individual by the name of Puzurum lost his house to a devastating fire. In cosmic terms, this was a minor event: a new house was built over the ruins of the old, and then another, and many others after that; life went on, and on, and on. In due course a team of archaeologists came to the dusty village that now stands atop the ruins where, from the packed and burned earth that had once been Puzurum’s home, they extracted an archive of inscribed clay tablets. By a happy accident (for the archaeologists, if not for Puzurum), the blaze that destroyed the house had fired the friable clay tablets as hard as though they had been baked in a kiln, thereby ensuring their survival over thousands of years. A second fluke was a reference on one of the tablets to a local ruler known from other sources, one King Yadihk-Abu. His name dates the blaze, and the cloves, to within a few years of 1721 BC.

As startling as the mere fact of the cloves’ survival might seem, what makes the find truly astonishing is a botanical oddity. Prior to modern times, the clove grew on five tiny volcanic islands in the far east of what is today the Indonesian archipelago, the largest of which measures barely ten miles across. Because cloves grew nowhere else but on Temate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan, these five islands, collectively the Moluccas, were household names of the sixteenth century, spoils contested by rival empires over half a world away. Cervantes found in the rivalry between Ternate and Tidore a suitably exotic setting for his novel The History of Ruis Dias, and Quixaire, Princess of the Moluccas. And yet as colourful as the Moluccas seemed to a sixteenth-century readership, in Puzurum’s day they were surely beyond even the reach of fantasy. For this was an age when Mesopotamian scribes etched their cuneiform narrations of the hero Gilgamesh, when the wild man Humbaba stalked the cedar forests of Lebanon, when genii and lion-men roamed the lands over the horizon. Many centuries before compasses, maps and iron, when the world was an inconceivably more vast and mysterious place than it has since become, cloves came from the smoking, tropical cones of the Moluccas to the parched desert of Syria. How this occurred, who brought them, is anyone’s guess.

Since the incineration of Puzurum’s cloves there have been many more famous spice-seekers sprinkled through history. There are the names we learned at school: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, gambling with scurvy, shipwreck, sheer distance and ignorance to find the ‘places where the spices grow’ – with spectacularly mixed results. There were, besides, the colossal, heroic failures: Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson hunted in vain for nutmeg in the snowy wastes of Canada; the Pilgrim Fathers scoured the cold Plymouth thicket; others froze among the bergs of Novaya Zemlya or left their bones bleaching on some forgotten shore, an entire hemisphere short of their objective.

The story of their spice odysseys have filled plenty of books already. The pages that follow do not pursue the twists and turns of the spice routes, nor the (generally sorry) fates of the traders who travelled them. This book is not a history of the spice trade, at least not in a conventional, narrative sense. I have not sought to retrace the winding pathways that brought cloves to Puzurum or nutmeg to the king of Spain, least of all to show how spices ‘changed the world’. (All writers and publishers who embrace this view too avidly would be well advised to read Carlo Cipolla’s hilarious, acid parody, Le poivre, moteur de l’histoire [Pepper, Motor of History].) In fact I am less concerned with the thorny questions of causation, how spices shaped history, than with how the world has changed around them: why spices were so appealing; how that appeal emerged, evolved and faded. In focusing on the appetite that the spice trade fed, this is not so much a study of the trade as a look at the reasons why it existed.

These reasons were more diverse than we might at first suppose. Taste was only one of the many attractions of spices; they bore many exotic flavours, not all of them to be enjoyed at the table – or even, for that matter, enjoyed. Intertwined in their long culinary history there is another older still, one that until recent times was seldom far from the minds of their consumers. Besides adding flavour to a dry and salty piece of beef or relieving the fishy tedium of Lent, spices were put to such diverse purposes as summoning gods and dispelling demons, driving off illness or guarding against pestilence, rekindling waning desire or, in the words of one authority, making a small penis splendid – a claim that would gratify the creative talents behind the Spice channel. They were medicines of unrivalled reputation, metaphors for the faithful and the seeds of purportedly volcanic erotic enhancement.

But if they were much loved, they were also viewed with mistrust. There was a time not so long ago when the more strait-laced residents of the Maine coast were liable to hear themselves dismissed as ‘too pious to eat black pepper’ – a recollection, perhaps subliminal, of a time when spices were forbidden foods. More than exceptions to a rule, these dissenters help explain an appetite that was ripe with ambiguity and paradox. For when the critics – and they were many – explained what was so objectionable about spices, they tended to single out the reasons that their admirers found for liking them: the merits of flavour, display, health and sexual enhancement transmuted into the deadly sins of pride, luxury, gluttony and lust. These were anything but innocent tastes, and therein lay much of their attraction. It is only by viewing spices in terms of this complex overlap of desires and distaste that the intensity of the appetite can be adequately accounted for – why, in other words, the discoverers we learned about in Aldgate Primary School found themselves on foreign shores, demanding cinnamon and pepper with the cannons and galleons of Christendom at their backs.

All authorities are inclined to inflate the importance of their chosen topic, yet it is my hope that this anatomy of an appetite is not mere antiquarianism. As writers as diverse as Jared Diamond and Günter Grass have observed, food has played a huge role (and a curiously neglected one) in shaping the destinies of humanity – a fact that seems unlikely to change in an age of environmental degradation. Within this field spices occupy a special place. Notwithstanding that they are, in nutritional terms, superfluous, the trade that carried them has been of fundamental importance to two of the greatest problems of global history: the origins of contact between Europe and the wider world, and the eventual rise to dominance of the former – hence, in a nutshell, the academy’s interest. However, in the pages that follow I avoid the larger questions of causation in favour of a more intimate, human focus. This book is written with a sense that history comes too often deodorised, and spices are a case in point. The astonishing, bewitching richness of their past has suffered from being too often corralled into economic or culinary divisions, the essential force of their attraction buried in a materialist morass of economic and political history. Narratives of galleons, pirates and pioneers are more readable but, ultimately, no more explanatory of why that trade existed.

Inasmuch as I have a thesis, it is that spices played a more important part in people’s lives, and a more conspicuous and varied one, than we might be inclined to assume. As whimsical as the claim may seem, there is a deeper historical point. For in the final analysis the great historical developments associated with supplying Europe with spice sprang from a demand: from the senses, hearts and breasts of mankind; from the shadowy realms of taste and belief. In people’s emotions, feelings, impressions and attitudes towards spices all the great, spice-inspired events and dramas, all the wars, voyages, heroism, savagery and futility had their elusive germination. The very existence of the spice trade, Columbus’s voyages in search of the phantom spices of the Americas, archaeologists’ discovery of four-thousand-year-old cloves in the Syrian desert – these are events that can be endlessly speculated upon by historians and archaeologists, with ever greater elaboration and sophistication. And yet it is easy to overlook the question from which the others derive: why the trade existed in the first place. It all sprang from desire.

Very obviously, a subject as ephemeral as this demands flexibility from reader and writer alike. The story of spice consists of a thousand unruly, aromatic skeins of history, and several years spent trying to untangle them has taught me that they refuse to be neatly woven into the straighter, clearer-cut threads that historians conventionally spin across time and space. In lieu of a narrative, I have tried to isolate such traditions as can be drawn out from the huge rattlebag of facts thrown up by such a diffuse topic, to tease out the more important continuities of spices’ past and follow them down through time. The result bears a resemblance to polyphony, albeit without the satisfying resolution.

The book begins with a brief discussion of what historians have called the Spice Race, the crowded decades at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, when Europe poured quite extraordinary energies into the search for spice. The following chapters consider the chief hallmarks of the appetite that drove that search, under the headings of cuisine, sex, medicine, magic and distaste: palate, body and spirit. An epilogue touches on some of the reasons behind spices’ fall from grace, how it was they ceased to be so esteemed, downgraded to the mildly exotic foodstuffs they are today. These are broad horizons, with scant regard for conventional or chronological arrangement, yet I would argue that the merits of the thematic approach outweigh the drawbacks. Medieval and occasionally even modern authorities constantly looked back centuries or even millennia for precedents and justification of their own use of spice; indeed, one of my concerns is to show the extent to which these traditions have survived since remotest antiquity. This is not to suggest that a set of beliefs pertaining to spice survived intact from beginning to end. But I would argue that the spices have their traditions, reverberating with echoes and recollections; that the apparently straightforward act of eating them has been heavily burdened with historical baggage.

There are other advantages in flitting across time and space. If the narrative wanders from one time and place to another, that is exactly what spices themselves have always done, cropping up in defiance of the received wisdom, in places where, by rights, they should never have been. The drawback, of course, is that any one of these themes could warrant several books of its own, and since day two I have felt overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches. The problem has no easy solution other than a broad brush and a carefree ruthlessness in its use. Where I have resorted to particularly sweeping statements I have tried to flag some of the complexities and nuances of the academic debate, where there is one, in the endnotes.

It might be helpful at the outset to clarify what exactly I mean by ‘spice’. The short list below is far from comprehensive, nor is it intended as a technical guide. There is, in fact, no single, satisfactory definition: ask a chemist, a botanist, a cook and a historian what is a spice and you will get very different responses – for that matter, ask different botanists and you will get different definitions. The history of the word itself, its changes and devaluation, is a theme running through the book.

The OED is, as ever, a good place to start:

One or other of various strongly flavoured or aromatic substances of vegetable origin, obtained from tropical plants, commonly used as condiments or employment for other purposes on account of their fragrance and preservative qualities.

Broadly, a spice is not a herb, understood to mean the aromatic, herbaceous, green parts of plants. Herbs are leafy, whereas spices are obtained from other parts of the plant: bark, root, flower bud, gums and resins, seed, fruit or stigma. Herbs tend to grow in temperate climates; spices in the tropics. Historically, the implication was that a spice was far less readily obtainable than a herb, and far more expensive.

Environment may also account for spices on a more fundamental level. Chemically, the qualities that make a spice a spice are its rare essential oils and oleoresins, highly volatile compounds that impart to the spices their flavour, aroma and preservative properties. Botanists classify these chemicals as secondary compounds, so called because they are secondary to the plant’s metabolism, which is to say that they play no role in photosynthesis or the uptake of nutrients. But secondary does not mean irrelevant. It is generally accepted that their raison d’être is a form of evolutionary response, the plant’s means of countering threats from parasites, bacteria, fungi or pathogens native to the plant’s tropical environment. Briefly, the chemistry of spices – what in the final analysis makes a spice a spice – is, in evolutionary terms, what quills are to the porcupine or the shell to the tortoise. In its natural state cinnamon is an elegant form of armour; the seductive aroma of the nutmeg is, to certain insects, a bundle of toxins. The elemental irony of their history is that the attractiveness of spices is (from the plant’s perspective) a form of Darwinian backfiring. What makes a spice so appealing to humans is, to other members of the animal kingdom, repulsive.*

Historically, of course, neither chemistry nor the curiosities of natural selection could be known, and there were other qualities that marked out a spice. Before the European discovery of the Americas the rare and fine spices were, practically by definition, Asian. There was no shortage of other, home-grown aromatics native to the Mediterranean basin, among them many spices now widely associated with Eastern cuisine, such as coriander, cumin and saffron. (In medieval times England was a major producer of saffron – a reminder that traffic along the spice routes went both ways.) Moreover, many substances formerly counted as spices are today classed otherwise. Early in the fourteenth century the Florentine merchant Francesco Balduccio Pegolotti wrote a business guide in which he listed no fewer than 188 spices, among them almonds, oranges, sugar and camphor. When Lady Capulet calls for spices Juliet’s nurse takes her to mean dates and quinces. Generally, however, the spices were alike in being small, long-lasting, high-value and hard to acquire. Above all, the word conveyed a sense of their uniqueness; there was no substitute. To say a spice was special was tautological; indeed the words have a common root. And as a sense of their exceptionalism was embedded in their name so it was integral to their appeal.

By any measure the most exceptional of the spices, and far and away the most historically significant, is pepper. The spice is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a perennial climbing vine native to India’s Malabar Coast. Its tendrils bear clusters of peppercorns on dense, slender spikes, turning a yellowish-red at maturity, like redcurrants. On this one plant grow the three true peppers: black, white and green. Black pepper, the most popular variety, is picked while still unripe, briefly immersed in boiling water, then left to dry in the sun. Within a few days the skin shrivels and blackens, giving the spice its distinctive wrinkly appearance. White pepper is the same fruit left longer on the vine. After harvest the outer husk is softened by soaking, left to dry and rubbed off in water or by mechanical action. Green or pickled peppercorns are picked while still unripe, like black pepper, then immediately soaked in brine.

Pepper has several lookalikes, the cause of much confusion, which all belong to different species. Melegueta pepper was widely used in medieval times, but is now confined to speciality shops, a fate shared by long pepper. (The latter is doubly confusing for sharing an Indian origin with black pepper, whereas Melegueta pepper is native to Africa.) The attractive pink peppercorns commonly sold in combination with the other peppers are entirely unrelated – the plant, native to South America, is in fact mildly toxic, recommended more by its appearance than its taste.

The clove, on the other hand, is unmistakable. The spice is the dried, unripe flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum,* an evergreen tree reaching a height of twenty-five to forty feet (eight to twelve metres), thickly clothed with glossy, powerfully aromatic leaves. A walk through the perfumed groves of Zanzibar or the Indonesian islands is an unforgettable experience; in the age of sail mariners claimed they could smell the islands while still far out to sea. The clove itself grows in clusters coloured green through yellow, pink and finally a deep, russet red. Timing, as with pepper, is everything, since the buds must be harvested before they overripen. For a few busy days of harvest the more nimble members of the community head to the treetops, beating the cloves from the branches with sticks. As the cloves shower down they are gathered in nets and spread out to dry, hardening and blackening in the tropical sun and taking on the characteristic nail-like appearance that gives the spice its name, from the Latin clavus, nail. The association is common to all major languages. The oldest certain reference to the clove dates from the Chinese Han period (206 BC to AD 220), when the ‘ting-hiang’ or ‘nail spice’ was used to freshen courtiers’ breath in meetings with the emperor.

For reasons of both history and geography, the clove is often paired with nutmeg and mace. The latter two are produced by one and the same tree, Myristica fragrans. The tree yields a crop of bulbous, yellowy-orange fruit like an apricot, harvested with the aid of long poles, with which the fruit is dislodged and caught in a basket. As the fruit dries it splits open, revealing a small, spicy nugget within: a glossy brown nutmeg clasped in a vermilion web of mace. Dried in the sun, the mace peels away from the nutmeg, fading from scarlet to a ruddy brown. Meanwhile the aromatic inner nutmeg hardens and fades from glossy chocolate into ashen brown, like a hard, wooden marble. Legend has it that unscrupulous spice traders of Connecticut conned unwitting customers by whittling counterfeit ‘nutmegs’ from worthless pieces of wood, whence the nickname the ‘Nutmeg State’. A ‘wooden nutmeg’ was a metaphor for the fraudulent or ersatz. Schele de Vere’s nineteenth-century Americanisms cites the ‘wooden nutmegs’ of the Press and Congress who ‘have to answer for forged telegrams, political tricks, and falsified election returns’.

Adulteration, conned customers and mistaken identities are recurrent themes in the history of spice, bedevilling the historian’s sources just as they did, historically, the consumers. The problems were particularly acute with cinnamon – a fact, we shall see, with some considerable ramifications, and over which scholars continue to wage arcane debates to this day. The tree that bears the spice, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, is a small, unassuming evergreen, resembling a bay or laurel, native to the wet zone of Sri Lanka, in the island’s west and south-west. The spice is formed from the inner bark, which is stripped from the tree with knives, cut into segments and left in the sun to dry, curling into delicate, papery quills. Cinnamon’s best-known relative is cassia, the bark of Cinnamomum cassia, originally a native of China but in historical times widespread throughout South-East Asia. This and several other members of the family were long considered the poor relations – cassia has a coarser, ruddy bark, with a more pungent aroma. (It is also easier and cheaper to produce: much of the ‘cinnamon’ sold in the modern West is in fact cassia.) It is disconcerting, though hardly surprising, to find the medieval consumer more attuned to the difference.

For even the most indifferent there can be no mistaking the last major spice, ginger. Zingiber officinale has been cultivated for so long that it is no longer found in a wild state. Of all the spices it is by far the least fussy, and far the easiest to transplant. The plant will no longer go to seed of its own accord but must be propagated manually, with root-stalk cuttings. (During long oceanic voyages Chinese navigators grew the spice in boxes to ward off scurvy.) Provided the ambient soil and air are sufficiently hot and wet, the slender, reedy stems soon sprout, flowering in dense spikes coloured pale green, before maturing through purple and yellow. The spice is the root, or tuberous rhizome. But, amenable as it is to transplantation, before the technology of refrigeration, air travel and greenhouse, no European had eaten fresh ginger, at least not in Europe. The spice arrived after a long journey by ship and caravan, occasionally candied in syrup but more commonly and conveniently in dried form, either powdered or whole, in the distinctive, gnarly lumps still occasionally to be seen in a Chinese grocery.

These, the archetypal, tropical Asian spices, are the main subjects of this book – the dramatis personae. Occasionally the narrative strays beyond them, for as we have seen, ‘spice’ was never a clear-cut category. There were others that rose into and fell from favour, however these were foremost, whether on grounds of cost, origin, reputation or the sheer longevity and intensity of demand. They were in a class of their own. But while spices are the immediate subject, in a broader sense the book is necessarily about Europe and Asia, the appetites that attracted and the links that bound. For the most part, however, the scene and action of the following chapters are written from a European perspective, partly on account of my own linguistic limitations, but also in deference to what might be termed the law of increasing exoticism. A fur coat is standard in Moscow, a luxury in Miami. When the world was an immeasurably larger place so it was with spices, and particularly these spices. The further they travelled from their origins the more interesting they became, the greater the passions they aroused, the higher their value, the more outlandish the properties credited to them. What was special in Asia was astonishing in Europe. In the European imagination there never was, and perhaps never will be again, anything quite like them.

* Nard is an aromatic plant of the Himalayas used in ancient perfumes and unguents. Calamus is an aromatic, semi-aquatic perennial herb, widely distributed from the Black Sea to Japan, put to similar purposes. Frankincense and myrrh are powerfully aromatic gum resins native to southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Frankincense was primarily used in ancient incense. Myrrh was put to purposes as diverse as incense, seasoning and embalming.

* Spices can be toxic to humans too if taken in sufficient quantities. Protracted overdoses of nutmeg can cause cancer of the liver.

* Sometimes also called Eugenia caryopbyllata.

I The Spice Race

1 The Spice-Seekers

When I discovered the Indies, I said that they were the richest dominion that there is in the world. I was speaking of the gold, pearls, precious stones, and spices, with the trade and markets in them, and because everything did not appear immediately, I was held up to abuse.

Christopher Columbus, letter from the third voyage, written from Jamaica, 7 July 1503

The Taste that Launched a Thousand Ships

According to an old Catalan tradition, the news of the New World was formally announced in the Saló del Tinell, the cavernous, barrel-vaulted banqueting hall in Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic, the city’s medieval quarter. And it is largely on tradition we must rely, for aside from a few sparse details the witnesses to the scene had frustratingly little to say, leaving the field free for painters, poets and Hollywood producers to evoke the moment that marks the watershed, symbolically at least, between medievalism and modernity. They have tended to imagine a setting of suitable grandeur, with king and queen presiding over an assembly of everyone who was anyone in the kingdom: counts and dukes weighed down by jewels, ermines and velvets; mitred bishops; courtiers stiff in their robes of state; serried ranks of pages sweating in livery. Ambassadors and dignitaries from foreign powers look on in astonishment and mixed emotions – awe, confusion and envy. Before them stands Christopher Columbus in triumph, vindicated at last, courier of the ecosystem’s single biggest piece of news since the ending of the Ice Age. The universe has just been reconfigured.

Or so we now know. But the details are largely the work of historical imagination, the perspective one of the advantages of having half a millennium to digest the news. The view from 1493 was less panoramic; indeed, altogether more foggy. It is late April, the exact day unknown. Columbus is indeed back from America, but he is oblivious to the fact. His version of events is that he has just been to the Indies, and though the tale he has to tell might have been lifted straight from a medieval romance, he has the proof to silence any who would doubt him: gold, green and yellow parrots, Indians and cinnamon.

At least that is what Columbus believed. His gold was indeed gold, if in no great quantity, and his parrots were indeed parrots, albeit not of any Asian variety. Likewise his Indians – the six bewildered individuals who shuffled forward to be inspected by the assembled company were not Indians but Caribs, a race soon to be exterminated by the Spanish colonisers and, deadlier still, by the germs they carried. The misnomer Columbus conferred has long outlived the misconception.

In the case of the cinnamon Columbus’s capricious labelling would not stick for nearly so long. A witness reported that the twigs did indeed look a little like cinnamon, but tasted more pungent than pepper, and smelled like cloves – or was it ginger? Equally perplexing, and most uncharacteristically for a spice, his sample had gone off during the voyage back – the unhappy consequence, as Columbus explained, of his poor harvesting technique. But in due course time would reveal a simpler solution to the mystery, and one that the sceptics perhaps guessed even then: that his ‘cinnamon’ was in fact nothing any spicier than the bark of an unidentified Caribbean tree. Like the Indies he imagined he had visited, his cinnamon was the fruit of faulty assumptions and an overcharged imagination. For all his pains Columbus had ended up half a planet from the real thing.

In April 1493, his wayward botany amounted to a failure either too bizarre or, for those whose money was at stake, too deflating to contemplate. As every schoolchild knows (or should know), when Columbus bumped into America he was looking not for a new world, but an old one. What exactly he was looking for is clearly delineated in the agreement he concluded before the voyage with the Spanish monarchs, promising the successful discoverer one tenth of all gold, silver, pearls, gems and spices. His posthumous fame notwithstanding, in this respect Columbus was only a qualified success. For in what in due course turned out to be the new world of the Americas, the conquistadors found none of the spices they sought, although in the temples and citadels of the Aztecs and Incas they stumbled across riches that out-glittered even the gilded fantasies they brought with them from Castile. Ever since, it is with the glitter of gold and silver, not the aroma of spices, that the conquistadors have been associated. But when Columbus raised anchor, and when he delivered his report in Barcelona, seated in the place of honour alongside the Catholic monarchs, ennobled and enriched for his pains, the perspective was different. The unimagined and unimaginable consequences of his voyage have clouded later views of causes, privileging half of the equation. Columbus sought not only an El Dorado but also, in some respects more beguiling still, El Picante too.

Why this was so may be answered with varying degrees of complexity. The simplest answer, but also the shallowest, is that spices were immensely valuable, and they were valuable because they were immensely elusive and difficult to obtain. From their harvest in distant tropical lands, spices arrived in the markets of Venice, Bruges and London by an obscure tangle of routes winding halfway across the planet, serviced by distant peoples and places that seemed more myth than reality. That this was so was as much a function of the geography as the geopolitics of the day. Where the spices grew – from the jungles and backwaters of Malabar to the volcanic Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago – Christians feared to tread. Astride the spice routes lay the great belt of Islam, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. As spice was a Christian fixation so it was a Muslim milch cow. At every stage of the long journey from East to West a different middleman ratcheted up the price, with the result that by the time they arrived in Europe the value of the spices was astronomical, inflated in some cases to the order of 1,000 per cent – sometimes more. With cost came an aura of glamour, danger, distance and profit. Seen through European eyes, the horizon clouded by ignorance and vivified by imagination, the far-off places where the spices grew were the lands where money grew on trees.

Yet if the image was beguiling, the obstacles that stood in the way seemed insuperable – prior, that is, to Columbus. His solution was as elegant as it was radical. It was not inevitable, said Columbus, that Eastern goods should arrive from the east; nor that Westerners should pay such a premium, thereby lining the pockets of the infidel. The world being round, was it not simple logic that spices might also come around the other way: round the back of the globe, from the west? (Contrary to one hoary myth, hardly any informed medieval Europeans were flat-earthers. That the earth was spherical had been accepted by all informed opinion since ancient times.) All one had to do to reach the Indies and their riches was head west from Spain: the ancients had said so, but thus far no one had put the idea to the test. With a little endeavour spices would be as common as cabbages and herrings. Columbus, in not so many words, proposed to sail west to the East, to Cathay and the Indies of legend; or, in the words of one of his intellectual mentors, the Florentine humanist Toscanelli, ‘ad loca aromatum’, to the places where the spices are.

It was an idea of hallucinatory promise – not for the prospect of discovery for discovery’s sake, nor even because the idea was particularly original, but because of the fiscal rewards. In the event of success Columbus’s scheme would deliver his Spanish patrons a limitless source of wealth. For the small outlay required to fit out the expedition – a sum roughly equivalent to the annual income of a middling Castilian nobleman – Columbus proposed to drag the Indies out of the realms of fable and into the mainstream of Spanish trade and conquest. Though the story of his voyage has been endlessly mythologised, buried under a mountain of romantic speculation and scholarly scrutiny, in effect his success depended on convincing a coalition of investors and then the crown that his relatively inexpensive plan merited the gamble. There were experts who disagreed, but in fifteenth-century Spain no more than in a modern democracy did expert opinion or the weight of evidence always carry the day. With a powerful syndicate and capital on his side, those who labelled Columbus crack-brained no longer mattered. His voyage was possible because he got the backing and the cash, and he got the cash because of the promise of more – vastly more – to come back in return. Today he would be labelled a venture capitalist of a particularly bold and inventive hue.

Hence, very briefly summarised, the scene in the Saló. And if the returning discoverer’s choice of exhibits made a good deal more sense then than now, so too, in his defence, did his mistakes. Very few Europeans had been to the real Indies, and fewer still had looked on the spice plants in their natural state. Reports of spices and Indies alike arrived rarely, often heavily fictionalised, a situation that left the fertile medieval imagination free to run riot, and few had imaginations more fertile than did Columbus. A month after first sighting land he had seen enough for his own satisfaction, writing in his log that ‘without doubt there is in these lands a very great quantity of gold … and also there are stones, and there are precious pearls and infinite spicery’ – none of which he had thus far laid eyes on. Two days later, as his small flotilla picked its way through the coves and reefs of the Caribbean, he discerned hidden treasures beyond the palms and sandy beaches, convinced that: ‘These islands are those innumerable ones that in the maps of the world are put at the eastern end. And he [Columbus] said that he believed that there were great riches and precious stones and spices in them …’ The evidence was lacking but his mind was made up. He had set out to find spices, and find spices he would. Desire was father to discovery.

And yet for all Columbus’s confidence there was, undeniably, something odd about his ‘spices’ – not least the fact that they did not taste, smell or look like spices such as he and his patrons knew from their daily table. But Columbus would not be disillusioned. Indeed on the subject of spice the logs and letters of his voyages read like a study in Quixotic delusion. His imagination was more than equal to the challenge of an intruding reality, far outstripping the evidence. Within a week of his arrival in the Caribbean he had the excuse to dispel any doubts: a European, unfamiliar with the plants in their natural habitat, he was bound to make the odd mistake: ‘But I do not recognise them and this causes me much sorrow.’ It was an escape clause that would stay obstinately open for the rest of his life.

So Columbus kept looking, and he kept finding. He was far from alone in his wishful thinking. His men claimed to have found aloes and rhubarb – the latter at the time imported from China and the Himalayas – although, having forgotten their shovel, they were unable to produce a sample. Rumours flitted among the excited explorers; sightings abounded. Someone found some mastic trees.* The boatswain of the Niña came forward for the promised reward, notwithstanding the fact that he had unfortunately dropped the sample (a genuine mistake or a cynical manipulation of his commander’s optimism?). Search teams were dispatched, returning with yet more samples and the caveat, by now customary, that spices must be harvested in the appropriate season. Everywhere they were bedevilled – and shielded – by their innocence. On 6 December 1492, lying off Cuba, Columbus wrote of the island’s beautiful harbours and groves, ‘all laden with fruit which the Admiral [Columbus] believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognise them …’

What Columbus could see for certain, on the other hand, was the potential of great things to come. If the first samples of ‘Indian’ spices left much to be desired, his evidence and testimony were at least enough to convince the crown that he was onto something.* Preparations for a second and much larger expedition were immediately put in place, a fleet of at least seventeen ships and several hundred men sailing from Cádiz on 25 September 1493, carrying with them the same freight of unfounded optimism. In the Caribbean forests Diego Alvarez Chanca, the expedition’s physician, found evidence of fabulous wealth tantalisingly out of reach: ‘There are trees which, I think, bear nutmegs, but they were so far without fruit, and I say that I think this because the taste and the smell of the bark is like nutmegs. I saw a root of ginger which an Indian carried hanging around his neck. There are also aloes, although not of the kind which has hitherto been seen in our parts, but there is no doubt that they are of the species of aloes which doctors use.’ As he shared his commander’s illusions, so Chanca also shared his excuses: ‘There is also found a kind of cinnamon; it is true that it is not so fine as that which is known at home. We do not know whether by chance this is due to lack of knowledge of the time to gather it when it should be gathered, or whether by chance the land does not produce better.’

However not all these spice-seekers were quite so naïve or gullible as their cavalier tree-spotting might suggest. In order to assist in the search, each of Columbus’s expeditions took along samples of all the major spices to show the Indians, who would then, so it was hoped, direct them to the real thing. Yet such was the strength of the Europeans’ conviction that even their samples failed to clear up their misunderstanding – rather, the reverse was the case. During the first voyage, two crewmembers were sent on an expedition into the Cuban hinterland with samples of spices, reporting back on 2 November 1493: ‘The Spaniards showed them the cinnamon and pepper and other spices that the Admiral had given them; and the Indians told them by signs that there was a lot of it near there to the south-east, but that right there they did not know if there was any.’ It was the same story everywhere they went. ‘The Admiral showed to some of the Indians of that place cinnamon and pepper … and they recognised it … and indicated by signs that near there there was much of it, towards the south-east.’

The Spaniards’ error was, then, of the sort that has always bemused strangers in a strange land: shortcomings of intelligence; problems of communication; they were finding what they wanted to find, regardless of the reality. The script was repeated with every new landfall. The Indians, already sufficiently puzzled by the pale, bearded strangers, were accosted with samples of dried plants they had no way of recognising. Anxious to get rid of their visitors, or perhaps keen to help but reluctant to admit ignorance of the directions – a still-flourishing Caribbean tradition – the Indians fobbed them off with a wave of the hand and a vague report of gold and spices ‘further on’. And the Spaniards, incapable of rejecting their convictions, refusing to believe the awful possibility, willingly accepted the version of events that suited them best. Exceptions to their expectations were discarded as anomalies, not the smoking gun of falsification. No one could see that the empire had no spice.

Everywhere they went, on this and on subsequent voyages, it was the same story. Yet before long the excuses started to wear a little thin, and in due course Columbus’s inability to make good his promises of gold and spices would contribute to the loss of his credibility. On each of his four voyages to the Caribbean he was compelled to turn for home with little more than paltry samples of gold and his indifferent ‘spices’, just enough to save him from ridicule, leaving others behind to carry on the search, each time with his excuses at the ready. Ferdinand’s patience with his dreamy admiral wore thin, as did the patience of those who served under him. An anonymous memo of 1496 stated what was becoming increasingly clear to all but Columbus: that the islands’ so-called spices were worthless. One who had his feet more firmly planted on the ground, and perhaps the first to appreciate the realities of the situation, was a crewmember of the second voyage, Michele de Cuneo. Writing from the island of Isabella during the second voyage, on 20 January 1494, he was quick to accommodate himself to a spice-free America. When an expedition was dispatched into the hinterland, returning with two Indians, their failure to find any spices was compensated for by their samples of gold: ‘All of us made merry, not caring any longer about any sort of spicery but only of this blessed gold.’ And indeed gold was where the future lay.

Even now, however, and for decades after, the hope of American spices lingered on. As late as 1518, Bartolomé de las Casas was still prepared to believe that New Spain was ‘very good’ for ginger, cloves and pepper. Remarkably, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, was perturbed by America’s elusive spices – this in spite of his having delivered a quite colossal fortune into the royal treasury from the conquered empire of Montezuma. In a string of letters to the king he repeatedly promised to find a new route to the Spice Islands, and offered a string of shamefaced apologies for his failure to deliver any cloves or nutmeg in the treasure ships now regularly sailing back to Castile. His men, he pleaded, were still looking. In his fifth letter of 1526, like Columbus before him, he asked for a little forbearance. Given time, he promises, ‘I will undertake to discover a route to the Spice Islands and many others … if this should not prove to be so, Your Majesty may punish me as one who does not tell his king the truth.’

Fortunately for Cortés his bluff was not called. He found no spices, but neither was he punished. For several decades more the conquistadors kept looking, yet all, like Columbus, found themselves chasing a will-of-the-wisp. In the south of the continent, Gonzalo Pizarro set off on a deluded, disastrous quest for cinnamon, plunging from the icy heights of the Peruvian altiplano into the Amazonian jungle, half a planet away from the real thing. Others sailed north, searching for nutmeg and a north-west passage deep in the icy wastes of the Canadian backlands. In due course the New World garnered new dreams and new fortunes from gold and silver; after, there was sugar, fur, cotton, cod and slaves. It was not for well over a hundred years after Columbus first looked that the myth of America’s spices was finally dispelled.

And yet the search was not quite the failure it seemed at the time. The Central American jungle yielded vanilla, and Jamaica allspice – its hybrid taste and pepper-like appearance the source of much confusion. There were, besides, other vegetal riches ripe for the plucking: tobacco, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Columbus himself brought back pineapple and cassava. Centuries later, Asian spices were eventually introduced to the Americas, with such success that Grenada is now a major producer of nutmeg; the island republic features a nutmeg on its flag. And even Columbus, his delusions and false dawns notwithstanding, found one reasonable approximation to a spice. In his log for 15 January 1492 he writes of Hispaniola that ‘there is also plenty of aji, which is their pepper, which is more valuable than [black] pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it [from Hispaniola].’ Peter Martyr, the Italian humanist at the Spanish court, noted that five grains of the new plant brought back by Columbus were hotter and more flavourful than twenty grains of Malabar pepper. Columbus himself was taken aback by its heat, reporting to the king and queen (like many an unwary newcomer since) that he found Caribbean food ‘extremely hot’. The natives seemed to put their incendiary pepper in everything.

Not even such a dreamer as Columbus could have foreseen the future success of his ‘aji’: it was, of course, the chili, and it was growing wild all over Spain’s new possessions. Within decades the plant had spread so rapidly around the world that Europeans travelling in Asia expressed confusion as to its origin, just as we too might wonder at the possibility of Thai or Indian food without its bite. But in 1493 the future popularity of the chili was unknowable, and would in any case have come as scant consolation to those who had their hopes or money invested in the chimerical spices of America. Given its ease of harvest and transplantation, the chili was never the major money-spinner that the true Eastern spices had been for thousands of years. In respect of spices, which is to say in respect of one of the primary reasons why it was discovered, the New World was something of a disappointment.

Christians and Spices

After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood.

Voltaire, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’ésprit des nations, 1756

Outside his native Portugal, where past glories live long in the memory, Vasco da Gama has generally been remembered as Columbus’s less eminent contemporary. It is a somewhat unfair assessment, for in a number of senses da Gama brought about what Columbus left undone. In sailing to India five years after Columbus sailed to America, da Gama found what Columbus had sought in vain: a new route to an old world. The one might be thought of as the complement to the other, as much in terms of the objectives as the achievements of their missions. Between the two of them, however dimly sensed it may have been at the time, they united the continents.

The greatest difficulty of Columbus’s voyage was that it was unprecedented. In navigational terms, the outward crossing was uncomplicated. Barely out of sight of Spanish territory in the Canary Islands, his small flotilla picked up the north-easterly trades that carried it across the Atlantic in little over a month. In comparison, da Gama’s voyage lasted over two years, covering some 24,000 miles of ocean, a distance four times greater than Columbus had travelled. When Columbus sailed to America he had to chivvy his men through thirty-three days without sight of land; da Gama’s crew endured ninety. Their voyage was, in every sense, an epic – literally so, inasmuch as it provided the inspiration and subject matter for Portugal’s national poem, the magnificent, sprawling Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões, its 1,102 stanzas an appropriately monumental and meandering tribute.

As tends to be the way with epics, the drama was supplied by a combination of heroism, foolishness and cruelty. After saying their last prayers in the chapel of Lisbon’s Torre do Bélem, the crew bade farewell to wives and families before setting out on their ‘doubtful way’ (caminho duvidoso), directing their three small caravels and one supply vessel down the Tagus on 8 July 1497. Passing the Canaries, they headed south down the African coast, skirting the western bulge of the continent towards the Cape Verde islands. Next they turned their prows south and west into the open ocean, hoping thereby to avoid the calms of the Gulf of Guinea – so much they already knew from the many earlier Portuguese expeditions that had sought African gold and slaves for decades. Dropping below the equator they passed from a northern summer into a southern winter whose gales, now deep in the southern latitudes, slung them back east to Africa. Even now they were still far to the north of the Cape of Good Hope, and they had to fight a tortuous battle against adverse currents and winds before they could finally round the bottom of the continent. When they finally left the Atlantic for the Indian Ocean they were already six months from home.

Thus far their course had been scouted by the exploratory voyage of Bartolomeu Diaz a decade earlier; now they were entering uncharted waters. With scurvy starting to get a grip on his exhausted crew, da Gama cautiously worked his way north along Africa’s east coast in an atmosphere of steadily mounting tension. Stopping for supplies and intelligence at various ports along the way, the Portuguese met with mixed receptions, ranging from wary cooperation to bewilderment and outright hostility. A lucky break came at the port of Malindi, in present-day Kenya, where they had the immense good fortune to pick up an Arab pilot familiar with the crossing of the Indian Ocean. By now it was April, and the first gatherings of the summer monsoon, blowing wet and blustery out of the south-west, propelled them across the ocean in a mere twenty-three days. On 17 May, ten months after leaving Portugal, a lookout smelled vegetation on the sea air. The following day, through steam and sheets of scudding monsoon rain, the mountains of the Indian hinterland at last rose into view. They had reached Malabar, India’s Spice Coast.

Thanks to good fortune and the skill of their pilot they were no more than a day’s sailing from Calicut, the principal port of the coast. Though they naturally had little idea of what to expect, the newcomers were not wholly unprepared. With their long experience of voyages down the west coast of Africa, the Portuguese were accustomed to dealing with unfamiliar places and peoples. On this as on earlier voyages, they followed the unsavoury but prudent custom of bringing along an individual known as a degredado, generally a felon or outcast such as a converted Jew, whose role it was to be sent ashore to handle the first contacts with the local population. In the not unlikely event of a hostile reception the degredado was considered expendable. And so, while the rest of the crew remained safely on board, on 21 May an anonymous criminal from the Algarve was put ashore to take his chances.

A crowd rapidly formed around the exotic, pale-faced stranger. To the bemused Indians little was clear, other than that he was not Chinese or Malay, regular visitors in Calicut’s cosmopolitan marketplace. The most reasonable assumption was that he came from somewhere in the Islamic world, though he showed no signs of comprehending the few words of Arabic addressed to him. For want of a better option he was escorted to the house of two resident Tunisian merchants who were, naturally enough, stunned to see a European march through the door. Fortunately, the Tunisians spoke basic Genoese and Castilian, so some rudimentary communication was possible. A famous dialogue ensued:

Tunisian: ‘What the devil brought you here?’

Degredado: ‘We came in search of Christians and spices.’

The answer would not have pleased the Tunisians, but as summaries go this was an admirably succinct account of the expedition’s aims.

Spices figured no less prominently in da Gama’s motivation than they had in Columbus’s voyage five years earlier. The Christians too were more than a matter of lip service; to some extent commercial and religious interests went together. Yet of the two the spices offered richer pickings, and there could be little doubt which mattered more in the minds of the crew and those who came after them. The anonymous narrator who has left the sole surviving account of the voyage goes straight to the heart of the matter:

In the year 1497, King Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, sent four ships out, which left on a quest for spices, captained by Vasco da Gama, his brother Paulo da Gama and Nicolau Coelho. We left Restelo on Saturday, 8 July 1497, for a voyage which we hope God allows to end in his service. Amen.

Their prayers were not in vain. Whereas Columbus was an entire hemisphere off track, the Portuguese had hit the motherlode.

When da Gama’s degredado splashed dazedly ashore in May 1498, the Malabar coast was the epicentre of the global spice trade; to some extent, it still is. Located in the extreme south-west of the subcontinent, Malabar takes its name from the mountains that sailors see long before the shore comes into view, a suitably international hybrid of a Dravidian head (mala, ‘hill’) grafted onto an Arabic suffix (barr, ‘continent’), the latter supplied by the Arab traders who dominated the westward trade from ancient times through to the end of the Middle Ages. The mountains are the Western Ghats, whose bluffs and escarpments form the western limit of the Deccan plateau. The coast, a low-lying, fish-shaped band of land squeezed between sea and mountains, was, and is, a centre of both spice production and distribution. Calicut was the largest but not the only entrepôt of the coast. A string of lesser ports received fine spices from further east for resale and reshipment west, onward across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Europe. From the jungles of the Ghats merchants brought ginger, cardamom and a local variety of cinnamon down from the hills, punting their goods through the rivers and backwaters that maze across the plain to the sea. Above all, they brought pepper.

Pepper was the cornerstone of Malabar’s prosperity: what the Persian Gulf today is to oil, Malabar was to pepper, with similarly mixed blessings for the region and its residents. The plant that bears the spice, Piper nigrum, is native to the jungles that cloak the lower slopes of the Ghats, a climbing vine that thrives in the dappled light, shade, heat and wet of the tropical undergrowth. Though it has long since been transplanted around much of the tropical world, connoisseurs of the spice claim that Malabar still produces the finest. Like practically every other aspect of life in Malabar, pepper’s cycle of harvest and trade moves to the seasonal rhythms of the monsoon (the word derives from the Arabic mawsim, ‘season’). In late May or early June the rains sweep in on a front of gusty south-westerlies from the Arabian Sea: the ‘burst’. Over the next few months the first blooms appear on the pepper vines as the upper slopes of the Ghats are drenched in a daily Wagnerian deluge of inky clouds and crashing thunderstorms. By September, the rain falls less heavily, and the clouds and mists boil away up the valleys and gorges. A long, sultry heat descends on the hills. In November, the winds flip 180 degrees, blowing mild and dry out of the north-east as the hot air of the central Asian summer is sucked southward, down the subcontinent from the Himalayas, across the Indian plain to the ocean. In this hot, dry atmosphere the pepper berries cluster and swell; their pungent, biting flavour ripens and deepens. By December they are ready for harvest. Walk any distance in rural Malabar before the return of the monsoon and you are likely to have to make a detour to avoid a patch of peppercorns left out to dry in any space available.

Thanks to the combination of spice and monsoon, when Malabar first emerges into history the coast was already a crossroads frequented by traders and travellers from around the Indian Ocean world. The spices were the end, the monsoon winds the means. There were communities of Chinese and Jews here from the early centuries AD, the latter constituting one of the oldest Jewish communities outside the Middle East. Long before then there had been visitors from Mesopotamia: pieces of teak – another attraction of the coast – were found by the archaeologist Leonard Wooley at Ur of the Chaldees, dating from around 600 BC.* By the time of Christ, when da Gama’s native Portugal was a bleak and barren wilderness of Lusitanian tribesmen peering out on the sailless waters of the Atlantic, Greek mariners were arriving in Malabar in such numbers that one recherché Sanskrit name for pepper was yavanesta, ‘the passion of the Greeks’. Thanks largely to its vegetable wealth Islam was established here from the seventh century onward; Indian Muslims thriving, settling and converting over half a millennium before their Moghul co-religionists stormed down from central Asia. Even in da Gama’s day there were a handful of intrepid Italian merchants who had arrived by the long and dangerous overland route from the Levant. When da Gama dropped anchor Malabar was the most important link in a vast and vastly profitable network, and had been so for centuries.

For those who profited thereby da Gama’s arrival represented an almighty spanner in the works; for the Portuguese, a coup de théâtre. Now for the encore. Surviving the voyage out was one thing, but the Portuguese had still to find their way through the perilous shoals of Malabar politics, in which respect they were utterly in the dark. It seems that da Gama had expected to find in India a situation similar to that the Portuguese knew from their trading voyages to West Africa, where they could barter trinkets of low value for stellar returns, and so was taken aback to find the rich and sophisticated Indians demanding payment in gold and silver. As with Columbus’s experience in the Americas, his misconceptions had tragicomic results. On his march into Calicut to meet its ruler, the Zamorin, da Gama was so overwhelmed by the proliferation of peoples and religions, and so confident of finding the eastern Christian lands of Prester John, that he mistook a Hindu image of Devaki nursing Krishna for a more familiar mother-and-son pairing. Though puzzled by the teeth and horns on some of the statues of the ‘saints’, he promptly fell to his knees and thanked the Hindu gods for his safe arrival.

This was, however, an isolated and definitely unwitting display of religious tolerance. With da Gama regarding himself as every inch the righteous crusader, and out to garner profits no matter the means, Indo-Portuguese relations were practically bound to get off to a rocky start. In his first meeting with the Zamorin, da Gama promptly set about aggravating an already fraught situation with a mixture of religious bigotry and peevish ignorance. The truculent tone of the new arrival might have been calculated to cause offence. The Zamorin was a civilised and sophisticated ruler used to receiving traders from around the Indian Ocean world and one, moreover, most definitely unused to the tepid tribute and paltry gifts – honey, hats, scarlet hoods and washbasins – offered by the Portuguese. Who were these uncouth newcomers that they should treat him, the Lord of Hills and Waves, like some naked barbarian chieftain?

On all sides there was confusion, misunderstanding and suspicion. Da Gama was briefly detained ashore, further fuelling his already ripe paranoia over the ‘dog-like’ behaviour (perraria) of the Indians. On board the Portuguese vessels there was a steadily mounting nervousness that the Moors had poisoned the Zamorin’s mind. These fears were justified, if self-fulfilling: it was after all only rational for the Moors, sensing an opportunity to nip this new threat in the bud, to have encouraged the Zamorin to imprison or indeed execute the ungracious newcomer.

The Zamorin, however, hedged his bets. He granted da Gama’s men freedom to trade, and through the months of July and August they carried on a desultory exchange in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination and distrust. After a summer of escalating tension, da Gama sailed for Portugal in bad odour, leaving a mood of foreboding behind. As he raised anchor, he angrily threatened a group of Moorish merchants, warning them that he would soon be back. He had every reason to be as good as his word, for he left with the fruit of the summer’s efforts, a respectable cargo of spice.

Unlike Columbus’s altogether less convincing souvenirs from the Indies, there was no doubting da Gama’s evidence. But spices aside, exactly what else he had found would not be perceived for several years. In his report to the king, da Gama painted a somewhat distorted picture. Even now he was convinced that Hinduism was a heretical form of Christianity. After two months in the country, he seems to have concluded that the unmistakable polytheism he had seen was some sort of misconceived Trinity. But what was clear to all was the prospect of great things to come, and King Manuel was not one to shirk such a golden opportunity. The doubters’ faction at court and the voices of caution had been silenced. The way to India and its riches lay open. Preparations were immediately put in place for a second, larger fleet.

It sailed on 8 March 1500 under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, his thirteen ships and more than a thousand-strong crew dwarfing da Gama’s scouting trip of three years earlier. If da Gama’s mandate was reconnaissance, Cabral’s was empire-building. Once in India some of the uncertainties and anxieties of the first voyage soon crystallised into ruthless imperial intentions. (En route to India Cabral discovered Brazil – another unforeseen consequence of the search for the Indies.) Arab and Gujarati traders, Jews and Armenians already established in the trade – all were infidels, ergo enemies. Contrary to a long-cherished notion of liberal and nationalist Indian historians, the Portuguese were not the first to bring violence to the ocean, but they certainly did so with unprecedented expertise. They were moreover the first to claim ownership over more than a localised corner of its waters, and to do so in the name of God. When Camões versified his countrymen’s feats he had Jupiter, in a Virgilian touch, dispense imperium to the conquering Portuguese: ‘From the conquered riches of the Golden Chersonese, to distant China and the farthest islands of the East, the whole expanse of the ocean shall be subject to them.’ And this, substituting ‘God’ for ‘Jupiter’, was exactly how King Manuel saw matters. On the king’s orders, Cabral was to seize control of the spice trade by any means necessary. Portugal’s work was God’s work.

For a time, it looked as if God was indeed on their side. Da Gama had made the gratifying discovery that Arab traders had no answer to the fearsome naval artillery of the Portuguese. Now it fell to Cabral to flex his muscles. On his arrival in Calicut he demanded that the Zamorin expel all Muslim merchants, which naturally the Zamorin refused to do. Calicut’s prosperity, after all, was built on the twin pillars of free trade and respect for foreign shipping. Relations went from bad to worse. As the Zamorin stalled, Cabral seized a large and heavily laden Arab ship preparing to sail for the Red Sea, provoking a riot in which fifty-three Portuguese trapped onshore were killed. In response, Cabral turned his artillery on the city. The savage two-day bombardment forced the Zamorin to flee for his life. Having had the temerity to resist the Portuguese diktat, Calicut and all within were now fair game. The Portuguese seized or sank all Muslim shipping they could lay their hands on; Muslim merchants were hanged from the rigging and burned alive in view of their families ashore.

Calicut’s fate was just a taste of things to come. In the years that followed, similar treatment was revisited on the city and on other Malabar ports, often provoked by local squabbles but all to the strategic end of establishing a royal monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean. Henceforth traders of all nations would require a permit to sail waters they had sailed freely for centuries. The goal was nothing less than to make the Indian Ocean a Portuguese lake. All competition would be taxed or blown out of the water.

And so, in their clumsy, bloody way, Portugal’s pioneers in the East set about building an Asian empire. It would last, in parts, for nearly five hundred years, the first of all European empires in Asia, and the longest-lived. Unlike its successors, however, this new empire was not based on the occupation of territory, the filling-in of the blank spaces on the map, so much as it was aimed at the acquisition of a network of trading stations and forts. The empire would rapidly diversify, but it is fair to say that spice provided the early impetus. What mattered was control over the centres of trade, above all the spice trade. In its formative years Portugal’s Estado da India was, as one historian has dubbed it, the pepper empire.

It was certainly spice that impressed Lisbon and its rivals. Looking back on the golden epoch of the conquests from an age of imperial retreat, the Jesuit historian Fernão de Queyroz (1617–1688) claimed that da Gama’s legacy and ownership of the spices in particular could not fail ‘to astound the world’. In Europe, it was the Italians who were most astounded, for it was they who stood to lose the most. By the time Asian spices arrived in Mediterranean waters the trade was effectively monopolised by a handful of big Venetian merchants, for whom da Gama’s démarche opened a terrifying prospect. Incredulity and caution on the first reception of the news of da Gama’s voyage turned to dismay when news came of a second and then a third expedition. In 1501 two Portuguese ships laden with spices arrived in Flanders and immediately set about undercutting the Italians who had long dominated the market. Venetian merchants in Alexandria and the Levantine ports and marketplaces soon found prices soaring, and for a few years the spice galleys returned empty. La Serenissima trembled. There was scant consolation in the sneering nickname conferred on Portugal’s King Manuel, the upstart ‘grocer king’.

This Manuel knew full well. In letters to various crowned heads of Europe, penned within days of da Gama’s return, King Manuel crowed his success, styling himself ‘Lord of Guinea, and of the Conquest, the Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’, and boasting of the vast profits that would now flow through his kingdom – and away from Venice. Among the recipients of these letters were the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law; given the poor returns of their own investments in spices they must have found it particularly galling to learn of Manuel’s successes among the glittering riches of the glorious East, at a time when Spain’s explorers were still scraping around a scattering of heathenish Caribbean islands. This Manuel fully appreciated, so for good measure he had his letters printed into pamphlets for public consumption. One particularly gloating missive invited the Venetians to come and buy their spices at Lisbon, and indeed, in the desperate year of 1515, they had no alternative.

For a time it looked as though events in far-off Malabar had sparked a revolution in the old Mediterranean order. During the summer of da Gama’s return the Florentine Guido di Detti gloated that the Venetians, once deprived of the commerce of the Levant, ‘will have to go back to fishing’. The Venetians feared as much themselves. In July 1501 the Venetian diarist Girolami Priuli estimated that the Portuguese would make a hundred from every ducat they invested; and there was no doubt that Hungarians, Flemish and French, Germans and ‘those beyond the mountains’, formerly wont to come to Venice for spice, would now head for Lisbon. With this gloomy prognosis in mind he predicted that the loss of the spice trade would be as calamitous ‘as the loss of milk to a new-born babe … The worst news the Venetian Republic could ever have had, excepting only the loss of our freedom.’

For all those who envied Venice its riches it was an appealing prospect, but they were to be disappointed. As far as business was concerned, the Venetians were no babes in arms. In the longer run, Portugal’s grasp of the spice trade proved more shaky than it had at first appeared. Historians long accepted Manuel’s boasting at face value, taking it for granted that da Gama’s voyage succeeded in neatly redirecting the spice trade from the Indian into the Atlantic Ocean, but this was far from being the case. After a few disrupted decades, as the shock of early Portuguese conquests reverberated back down the spice routes, Alexandria and Venice staged a comeback. In the 1560s there were so many spices for sale at Alexandria that a Portuguese spy suggested Portugal should abandon the Cape route altogether and ship its spices via the Levant in order to cut costs. So great was the flow of illicit spices through the Portuguese blockade that there was speculation that the Portuguese viceroy was in tacit revolt against the king.

That Portugal failed to monopolise the spice trade is not, in retrospect, so remarkable. Even with their fearsome cannons, the Portuguese effort to lord it over the Indian Ocean, so far from home, was an extraordinary act of hubris, and Manuel’s vainglorious titles little more than a fantasy. With their religious bigotry and cavalier attitude to established networks the Portuguese rapidly accumulated enemies who would in due course cost them dear. Though they were unable to face the Portuguese ships in a shooting match, smaller, swifter Arab vessels enjoyed remarkable success in avoiding the blockade and generally raising costs. For the Portuguese crown every fort, every cannon and every man under arms represented a loss of profits. Violence was bad for business. Beset by enemies on the outside, the Portuguese empire proved remarkably porous from within. Subject to strict rules, compelled to buy and sell at prices set by the crown, and facing the likely prospect of an early death from some foul disease, shipwreck or scurvy, the Portuguese in India, most of whom had gone east to enrich themselves, had few legal means of doing so. Endemic smuggling, corruption and graft were the inevitable result. There were too many temptations to plunder, and little to stop it. The costs of the pepper empire raced ahead of returns. For all the sound and the fury (and the poetry), this was a creaking, leaking empire – ‘There is much here to envy,’ as one of da Gama’s descendants summarised matters.

In May 1498, however, all such future complications were far from the minds of da Gama’s crew. There were more pressing matters to attend to. As they walked dumbfounded through the streets of Calicut, ogling the rich houses of the great merchants, the huge warehouses bursting with spice, the mile-wide palace and the rich traders passing on their silken palanquins, they naturally thought they had hit the big time. Their first priorities were getting rich quick, or simply making it home. Da Gama contrived to make this already daunting task infinitely more difficult by sailing too early, before the monsoon winds had shifted. The crossing to Africa, three weeks’ sailing on the outward leg, now took three months. Thirty crewmembers died of scurvy, leaving a mere seven or eight able-bodied mariners for each vessel. The third caravel was abandoned, ‘for it was an impossible thing to navigate three ships with as few people as we were’. By the time they finally returned to Lisbon, only fifty-five of the 170 or so who had set forth remained. Da Gama himself survived due to the hardiness of his constitution and, in all likelihood, the superior quality of the officers’ rations (the nutrients in the wine and spices reserved for officers may have made the difference). Among the casualties was his brother Paulo, who died in the Azores, only a few days’ sailing from home.

Even in purely financial terms, the initial results were less spectacular than had been hoped. The two ships that returned to Portugal were compact, designed for discovery, not cargo. As a result the expedition came back with a substantial but scarcely earth-shattering haul of spices. The survivors brought little more than curios, in some cases paid for, quite literally, by the shirts off their backs. But in the heady days of da Gama’s return, when the king himself hugged this once obscure nobleman and called him his ‘Almirante amigo’, any future problems were far from anyone’s mind. For if da Gama’s experience foreshadowed the extreme hazards of the sea route to the Indies, it also gave a stunning demonstration of its promise. As they offered prayers of thanks in Bélem, where they had knelt two years earlier, all the survivors had reason to hope that the spices da Gama brought back were harbingers of greater things to come. The financiers rubbed their hands; from Antwerp and Augsburg the great banking houses of Europe looked on remote little Portugal with new interest.

What was clear was that the old order had been rattled, and there was good reason to believe that it would shortly be turned on its head. A decade after da Gama’s arrival in India an itinerant Italian by the name of Ludovico Varthema travelled through the Portuguese Indies and beyond, witnessing in person the prodigious infancy of Europe’s first Asian empire. He spoke for many in 1506: ‘As far as I can conjecture by my peregrinations of the world … I think that the king of Portugal, if he continues as he has begun, is likely to be the richest king in the world.’ At the time, it seemed a reasonable surmise. Measured by the spicy mandates of their missions and in the assessment of the day, Columbus looked the failure, and da Gama the success.

Debate and Stryfe Betwene the Spanyardes and Portugales

Behold the numberless islands,

scattered across the seas of the Orient.

Behold Tidore and Ternate,

from whose fiery summit shoot rippling waves of flame.

You will see the trees of the biting clove,

bought with Portuguese blood …

Camões, The Lusiads, 1572

As the competition between Spain and Portugal for the spices of the East escalated into an all-out race, not all the victories went Portugal’s way; nor was the competition, though always bitterly contested and often bloody, wholly without agreements and treaties. But like its modern counterpart the fifteenth-century treaty could have unpredictable effects – on occasion not so much preventing conflict as redirecting or even provoking it. This gloomy fact of international life has its prime late-medieval exemplar in the treaty of Tordesillas, signed by ambassadors of the two Iberian powers in the north-western Spanish town of the same name on 7 June 1494.

In its planetary terms the treaty of Tordesillas was perhaps the single most grandiose diplomatic agreement of all time. Following Columbus’s return in 1493, the Spanish crown moved quickly – by the standards of fifteenth-century diplomacy – to clarify the scope of any future voyages: who was entitled to discover what. The issue was referred to the Vatican, the ultimate arbiter of matters earthly and divine, and later the same year Alexander VI duly issued a papal bull on the matter. To Spain he granted sovereignty over all lands west of a line of longitude running one hundred leagues (about 320 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain had title to the lands visited by Columbus, while the Portuguese retained the right to their discoveries along the West African coast.

For Portugal, however, this was not good enough. Sensing some national bias on the part of the Spanish-born pontiff, Portugal’s King João II demanded a revision, which was duly achieved after prolonged negotiations in Tordesillas. In effect, the pontiff’s planetary partition was shunted west. According to the new, revised terms, each Iberian power was assigned a zone either side of a line of longitude running 370 leagues (about 1,185 miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. To the Portuguese went all lands to the east; to the Spanish everything to the west. They agreed, in effect, to divide the world between them, as neatly as an orange split in two.

Cut and dried as the arrangement seemed, the treaty muddled as much as it clarified, and its ambiguities and uncertainties meant it was pregnant with the seeds of future conflict. Critically, and fatally for any treaty, it was impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy when its signatories were in breach of its terms. With the invention of chronometers sufficiently precise to measure longitude still several hundred years in the future, there was no way of accurately measuring the division. The demarcation was for all intents and purposes a legal fiction. Navigators heading west into the Atlantic had to rely on dead reckoning to determine whether they were in the Spanish or the Portuguese zone.

More seriously, the framers of the treaty, like everyone else in 1494, laboured under serious delusions concerning the shape of the world they purported to parcel up. In the short term, this worked to Portugal’s advantage: ignorance of the shape and extent of the lands visited by Columbus, in particular the great eastward bulge of the South American continent, gifted Lisbon legal tide to Brazil. But Brazil was at this stage regarded as little more than a supply stop on the road to India. More pressing was the dispensation on the other side of the planet. The real prize in everyone’s minds was control of the fabulous, far eastern Indies. Who did they really belong to, Spain or Portugal? (The possibility that the Indies might belong to the Indians did not enter the equation.)

It was here that the unanswered and effectively unanswerable questions of Tordesillas were the stuff of Portuguese nightmares. The world being round, it was self-evident that the line of division ran in a great circle, all the way round the globe. When João succeeded in revising the treaty, in effect he gambled on giving Spain hundreds of leagues of Asian waters in return for more of the Atlantic and the right to Africa. But more in the west meant less in the east. The question was, where lay the slice? Where was the ‘anti-meridian’, and who owned the tide to the Spice Islands? Cosmographers could argue the point endlessly, debating the circumference of the earth with arcane and ingenious suppositions, but there was no way of knowing who was right.

With fleets setting off every year, and the pace of discoveries accelerating, the issue could not long remain academic. Indeed, as discoveries in the East proceeded apace, the debate became more complex and more fraught with geopolitical implications. After da Gama’s first voyage in 1497, successive Portuguese expeditions pressed deeper into the heart of maritime Asia. The first stop was the island of Sri Lanka and its cinnamon. In 1505 the first Portuguese expedition extracted ‘tribute’ of 150 quintals of cinnamon from the king of Gale – the first of a sorry string of similar, steadily escalating exactions.* Six years later the Portuguese crossed the Bay of Bengal and seized, after a brief and bloody siege, the entrepôt of Malacca. Dominating the straits of the same name between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, Malacca was the richest port of the East, its prosperity dependent, like Singapore’s today, on a position astride a natural bottleneck. Here Gujarati, Arab, Chinese and Malay ships came to trade for spices and all the exotica of the East (the name is probably derived from the Arabic malakat, ‘market’). Malacca was the choke point through which all Eastern spices headed west. In the judgement of the first Portuguese arrivals it was the richest seaport in the world. A few years after its fall the adventurer and chronicler Tomé Pires (c.1468–c.1540) claimed, with the hyperbole typical of these years, that ‘whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’.

Even now, however, the real prize lay still further east, somewhere in what the Malays called ‘the lands below the winds’. From somewhere in the scattered islands of the archipelago came the most elusive and costly spices of all: cloves, nutmeg and mace. In 1511 all that was known by the Portuguese was that they came from the mysterious ‘Spice Islands’, at this stage more a vague yet alluring notion than a place on the map; there were, in fact, no European maps of the Moluccas, or none worth navigating by. The obscurity shrouding the islands did not prevent, but rather engendered, speculation. For what limited intelligence they could garner the Portuguese had to rely on the second- or third-hand reports of Arab, Javanese and Chinese navigators, plus the extremely sparse accounts of one or two European travellers who claimed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to have been there. Most painted a picture of a place straight out of Sinbad’s voyages. The cosmography of Kaswini (c.1263) located the clove on an island near Borneo, whose residents had ‘faces like leather shields, and hair like tails of pack-horses’. They lived deep in the mountains ‘whence are heard by night the sounds of the drum and tambourine, and disturbing cries, and disagreeable laughter’. The eleventh-century traveller and geographer Alberouny of Khiva told tales of a fabulous island of Lanka:

When ships approach this island, some of the crew row to shore, where they deposit either money or such things as the natives lack, such as salt and waist cloths. On their return the next morning, they find cloves in equal value. Some believed that this barter was carried on with genii; one thing was, however, certain: no one who ventured into the interior of that island ever left it again.

Other Arab accounts of the islands were still vaguer and more vivid, as with Masudi’s (890–956) Meadows of Gold:

No kingdom has more natural resources, nor more articles for exportation than this. Among these are camphor, aloes, gillyflowers [cloves], sandal-wood, betel-nuts, mace, cardamoms, cubebs and the like … At no great distance is another island from which, constantly, the sound of drums, lutes, fifes and other musical instruments and the noise of dancing and various amusements are heard. Sailors who have passed this place believe that the Dajjal [the Antichrist of the Muslims] occupies this island.

Embroidered as these fictions were, the sixteenth-century reality lagged not far behind. For the spices of these fables grew only on two tiny archipelagos, each of which is barely larger than a speck on the best modern map. Needless to say, no such maps existed in 1500. To locate them among the 16,000 or so islands of the archipelago was to find a needle in a haystack.

The northernmost of those specks is the home of the clove, in what is today the province of Maluku, in the easternmost extremities of Indonesia. Each of the five islands of the Moluccas is little more than a volcanic cone jutting from the water, fringed by a thin strip of habitable land. From the air they resemble a row of emerald witches’ hats set down on the ocean. Ternate, one of the two principal islands, measures little more than six and a half miles across, tapering at the centre to a point over a mile high. In the phrase of the Elizabethan compiler Samuel Purchas, Ternate’s volcano of Gamalama is ‘angrie with Nature’, announcing its regular eruptions by spitting Cyclopean boulders into the atmosphere to an altitude of 10,000 metres, like the uncorking of a colossal champagne bottle. A mile across the water stands Tidore, Ternate’s twin and historic rival, like Ternate a near-perfect volcanic cone, barely ten miles long, its altitude a mere nine metres less: 1,721 metres to Ternate’s 1,730. From the summit it is possible to see the other three Moluccan islands, marching off in a line to the south: Motir, Makian and Bachan beyond. Together they represent a few dozen square miles in millions of miles of islands and ocean. At the start of the sixteenth century and for millennia beforehand they were the source of each and every clove consumed on earth.

The nutmeg was equally reclusive. Provided the winds are right, a week’s sailing southward from Ternate will bring the well-directed traveller to the tiny archipelago of the Bandas or South Moluccas, nine outcrops of rock and jungle comprising a total land area of seventeen square miles (forty-four square kilometres). Here, and here alone, grew the nutmeg tree.

Size and isolation conspired to keep the Moluccas’ obscurity inviolate. The first European with a plausible claim of having seen nutmegs in their natural state (though many have doubted his account) was the early-sixteenth-century Italian traveller Ludovico Varthema (c. 1465–1517). He found the islands savage and menacing, and the people ‘like beasts … so stupid that if they wished to do evil they would not know how to accomplish it’. Spices aside, there was practically nothing to eat. He made a similarly disparaging assessment of the northern Moluccas, where the people were ‘beastly, and more vile and worthless than those of Banda’. The Portuguese historian João de Barros (c.1496–1570) considered the land ‘ill-favoured and ungracious … the air is loaded with vapours … the coast unwholesome … a warren of every evil, and contain[ing] nothing good but the clove tree’. But regardless of their vapours and ‘rascal’ inhabitants, the Moluccas’ cloves, nutmeg and mace were sufficiently tempting to lure traders across the planet.

Portugal’s first expedition in search of the Moluccas left in 1511. In December of that year, shortly after the fall of Malacca, António de Abreu set off in charge of three small vessels. With the assistance of local guides, the Portuguese found their way to the Bandas, where they filled their hulls to overflowing with nutmeg and mace. With no room remaining for cloves, de Abreu resolved to return to Malacca with two of the expedition’s three ships, leaving behind a companion by the name of Francisco Serrão to carry on the search without him.

The northern Moluccas were a more elusive goal for the Portuguese, although in time they would prove a more valuable asset. After various tribulations, including shipwreck in the Banda Sea and getting hopelessly lost among the islands, Serrão eventually made it to Ternate in 1512, on a junk stolen from pirates on whom he turned the tables. Forming an alliance with the sultan of the island, he worked his way into local favour by assisting Ternate in its desultory conflict with neighbouring Tidore – a condition as constant as the annual visitation of the monsoon. The original Lord Jim, he married a local woman (who may have been a daughter of sultan Almanzor of Tidore; if so, an adroit act of marriage diplomacy) and built himself a small fort and trading post – it still stands – from which he sent back a steady stream of cloves to Portugal. He would remain in the Moluccas for the rest of his life.

On the surface, everything was going Lisbon’s way. The immediate and troubling question was whether the Portuguese had any legal claim to their conquests. To many experts the possibility of Spanish ownership under the terms of Tordesillas looked like a probability. At the time the earth’s circumference was still greatly underestimated, no one having the slightest inkling of the vast breadth of the Pacific. All authorities agreed that the Spice Islands lay only a few days’ sailing west of the Mexican coast, a misconception that would not be corrected for several years. According to the document regarded at the time as the single most authoritative description of the world, the Suma de Geografia of Martim Fernandez de Enciso, written in 1519, the eastern meridian as defined at Tordesillas fell at the mouth of the Ganges – which made the Moluccas Spanish.

While the cosmographers speculated, troubling reports and rumours filtered in. The sheer distance they had to travel from India east to the Moluccas had come as an unpleasant surprise to de Abreu and Serrão. Given the great distance they had covered, it seemed not at all unlikely that they had passed out of the Portuguese hemisphere, into Spain’s. The secrecy with which the Portuguese shrouded their voyages served only to encourage further speculation; one reason why so few contemporary maps survive is that they were treated with the secrecy of classified documents. The Spaniards smelled a rat. To many it looked as if the Portuguese were not conquerors, but trespassers.

One of those who shared this suspicion was a Portuguese nobleman from the remote province of Trás-os-Montes, Fernão de Magalhães, or, as he is known in the English-speaking world, Magellan. A veteran of Portugal’s early years in the Indies, he had waded ashore at the conquest of Malacca alongside Serrão, whose life he had saved. When his friend sailed east to the Moluccas Magellan headed west, to India and then back to Portugal. But he never renounced his ambition to revisit the Indies, and the Spice Islands in particular. Over the course of the next few years he and Serrão maintained a regular correspondence via the junks Serrão sent back laden with cloves from Ternate. It was clear from Serrão’s letters that the Moluccas lay a good deal further east than the Portuguese authorities would publicly admit. Largely on the basis of his communications with Serrão, Magellan’s suspicion that the Moluccas lay in the Spanish half of the globe grew to conviction.

Conviction soon ripened into action. Magellan wrote to Serrão that he would come and join him soon, ‘if not by the Portuguese way, then by Castile’s’: that is, he would sail west from Europe to the Spice Islands, avoiding the Portuguese zone entirely. The idea seemed eminently feasible. Provided his assumptions about the circumference of the earth were correct, the voyage would be shorter than the long trip around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Technically, in strictly navigational terms, there was nothing stopping him; politically, on the other hand, the idea was dynamite.

In its essentials, of course, Magellan’s plan was nothing new: the idea of a westward voyage to the Spice Islands was the same as Columbus’s scheme a few decades earlier, the chief difference being that Magellan was aware of the chief obstacle in his way, in the form of America. Sailing west across the Atlantic, he aimed to drop down south around the bottom of South America or through a south-west passage, then cruise west to the Spice Islands. Only the outlines of what happened next are clear. As with Columbus before him, the first problem was securing the necessary capital. Back in Portugal, all Magellan’s efforts to finance his scheme ended in failure. Perhaps feeling personally slighted by the king’s refusal to grant him a pension, at some point disenchantment with Portugal and King Manuel set in. He may have been a casualty of court bickering and intrigue – a common fate for returnees from the Indies. Whether or not he divulged the full extent of his suspicions to the king is uncertain, but unlikely. If he did, the king would rather not have known: he had no interest in raising any more doubts over his claim to the Spiceries. Either way, having failed to generate any interest in his plan, Magellan went to Spain in search of richer pickings. Abandoning the land of his birth, he arrived in Seville on 20 October 1517.

Success across the frontier was not long in coming. Freed from the encumbrances of Portuguese court politics, Magellan joined forces with Cristóbal de Haro, the Portuguese agent of the Fuggers, the German banking dynasty that had provided the Portuguese crown with capital for the early spice fleets. Like Magellan, de Haro had also abandoned Portugal in search of a more cooperative royal client, his relationship with Manuel having soured, perhaps as a result of the king’s clumsy efforts at price fixing and insistence on a royal monopoly on all trade in spices. Between the two of them, the exiles from Portugal had the capital and the requisite expertise. By 1519, over increasingly shrill protests from the court in Lisbon, they secured the third element necessary for success, in the form of the backing of the Spanish crown.*

Of all the great voyages of the age of discovery, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe has good claim to be the greatest, whether in terms of the privations endured or the sheer audacity of the enterprise. Five black ships sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519, with a complement of about 270 men. Ambitious as it was in conception, the journey was hugely complicated by its commander’s innocence. There were volumes of speculation, but as yet no one knew where or for that matter whether the American continent ended, nor, if there was one, where the purported passage was to be found. Magellan may have imagined that the River Plate fitted the bill, but sailing upstream they soon found the water turning sweet and their way blocked. Exploring dozens of bays and inlets, each time they were forced to turn back in disappointment. The expedition was racked by fear, ennui and fatigue. Tensions between Magellan and his Spanish captains culminated in a mutiny at midnight on Easter day, suppressed by the execution of one of the mutineers; another was left to the tender mercies of the natives. Only as winter lifted, after yet more fruitless searches up every inlet, did Magellan finally lead the survivors through the maze of sea and islands at the southern tip of the continent, passing through a desolate fire-bearing country – Tierra del Fuego, as he dubbed it – then through 325 miles of icy squalls, mists and fogs in the straits that now bear his name. This was, already, an astonishing achievement, but it came at a price. When they entered the Pacific on 28 November 1520, only three of the original five ships remained.

The survivors found the new ocean calm, whence ‘Pacific’. Its tranquillity, however, was deceptive. Like Columbus before him, Magellan had premised his plan on a mistaken assumption of the earth’s circumference, but in this case almost catastrophically so, with the upshot that he had no inkling of the vast expanse of ocean still ahead of him. For fourteen weeks the survivors inched north and west, tormented by fickle winds and consumed by doubts, their food and water all but gone, forever imagining that the Moluccas were just over the horizon. (As it was, they were extremely lucky to have taken a course assisted by a westward current – an oceanic conveyer belt. Had they sailed a little further to the north or south they would almost certainly have perished.) When supplies ran out early in the crossing, the crew was reduced to a diet of ship’s biscuits softened in rancid water; when the biscuits were gone they mixed sawdust with rat droppings and chewed on the leather of the yard arms with teeth that rattled in their blackened, scurvy-ridden gums. When land was finally sighted on 6 March 1521, the crew had been still further reduced by malnutrition, sheer exhaustion and despair. They had survived no fewer than ninety-nine days without fresh food or water.

Next came the absurd and ignominious anti-climax. Soon after arriving in the territory of the modern Philippines, Magellan threw away his life in a pointless skirmish with what the chronicler of the expedition calls ‘an almost naked barbaric nation’. It was an utterly ludicrous death, the result of trying to impress a local chieftain with the power of Christian arms, the more ironic for coming at the end of such a hellish crossing. ‘Thus did this brave Portuguese, Magellan, satisfy his craving for spices.’

Even now, however, the survivors still had much sailing ahead of them. With no clear idea of where they were or where to look they visited ‘an infinity of islands, always searching for the Moluccas’. Finally, Magellan’s Malay slave (a relic of his time in the Indies) identified the unmistakable twin cones of Ternate and Tidore rising above the horizon. While the small Portuguese garrison on Ternate looked on in astonishment and dismay, the crew fired their cannons in joy and proceeded to neighbouring Tidore, where they bought cloves ‘like mad’. The narrator’s relief is palpable: ‘It is no wonder that we should be so joyful, for we had suffered travail and perils for the space of twenty-five months less two days in the search for Molucca.’

After a brief stop for rest and resupply, the shrinking band of survivors made plans for home. At this point Magellan’s flagship, the Trinidad, sprang a serious leak in its worm-eaten bottom. The crew repaired the hull as best they could and made an unsuccessful attempt to sail back across the Pacific to Mexico, but after a fruitless battle against adverse winds and currents they were compelled to return to the Moluccas, whereupon ship and crew were promptly captured by the Portuguese. Only four crewmembers would ever see Spain again.

Meanwhile the other surviving vessel, the Victoria, headed west.* There were still another nine months of hard sailing before the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned north, passing along the entire western length of Africa and across the Straits of Gibraltar, to Spain. On 6 September 1522 the Victoria limped into its home harbour of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, fourteen days short of three years since leaving. Of the expedition’s original complement of over 270 only eighteen had survived. A harbourside observer commented that the ship was ‘more full of holes than the best sieve, and these eighteen men more fatigued than the most exhausted horses’.

By his premature death, Magellan had forfeited the fortune and glory for which he had abandoned his country; as a Portuguese in the service of Spain he won only the opprobrium of his motherland and the suspicions of his adopted country. (Had he lived to return to Spain he would, almost certainly, have fallen foul of court intrigue.) The honours went to the survivor who piloted the Victoria back into Sanlúcar, a native of Guetaria by the name of Juan Sebastián de Elcano, one of the participants in the mutiny against Magellan at Port St Julián. But to the survivor went the spoils. Elcano was rewarded with a coat of arms with the device of a globe set above two cinnamon sticks, twelve cloves and three nutmegs, flanked by two Malay kings grasping branches of a spice tree, blazoned with the motto ‘Primus circumdedisti me’ – ‘You were the first to encompass me’.

As the durable Spaniard had outlasted his Portuguese commander, so it seemed on the larger stage of diplomacy. When the Victoria limped back into harbour the tables appeared to have been turned. With a claim staked on Tidore, the Spanish crown now had a physical presence to back up its theoretical claim to sovereignty over the Moluccas. Yet even now there were more twists and turns in store. The border town of Badajoz was the scene of fierce debates between Spanish and Portuguese diplomats, the key issue the still unanswerable question of the Moluccas’ exact longitude. (As a matter of fact, they were indeed in the Portuguese zone, though that could not be confirmed for many years yet.) The Spanish pointed to their presence on Tidore; the Portuguese called them trespassers; the Spanish flung back the same insult. Talks ground on, one futile deposition succeeding another. In the end, a settlement came not from the diplomats but from the accountants of the royal treasury in Madrid. By the terms of the treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, the impecunious Spanish monarch, deaf to the pleading of his counsellors, traded his claim to the Spice Islands for the sum of 350,000 ducats, so as to pay for the ceremonies attending his forthcoming marriage. The Spanish claim to the Moluccas, purchased with so much ingenuity, sweat, cash and blood, was sold to fund a royal wedding.

It was an ignoble end to the enterprise. Many voices – among them de Haro’s – were raised in protest at the king’s short-termism. With the annual profit from the islands estimated at 40,000 ducats, the settlement represented less than a decade’s return. Compounding the investors’ disappointment was the fact that so far these profits had failed to materialise. Even the return of the Victoria had brought de Haro and the other investors little cheer. Among the quayside celebrations, one of the interested parties prepared a breakdown of the expedition’s costs and returns in a document unearthed three hundred years later by the scholar Martín Fernández Navarrete. Known as the ‘discharge document’, this unadorned summary of inputs and outputs makes for fascinating reading. Though at only eighty-five tons the second-smallest vessel of the expedition, the leaking hold of the Victoria yielded 381 bags of cloves, the legacy of the frantic buying that followed its arrival on Tidore. The net weight was calculated at 520 quintals, one arroba and eleven pounds: 60,060 pounds, or 27,300 kilograms. There were also samples of other spices: cinnamon, mace and nutmeg, plus, oddly, one feather (a bird of paradise?).

In the debit column alongside is a listing of expenses: weapons, victuals, hammers, lanterns, drums ‘para diversión’, pitch and tar, gloves, one piece of Valencian cochineal, twenty pounds of saffron, lead, crystal, mirrors, six metal astrolabes, combs, coloured velvets, darts, compasses, various trinkets and other sundry expenses. Taking into account the loss of four of the five ships, the advances paid to the crews, back pay for the survivors and pensions and rewards for the pilot, it emerges that once the Victoria’s 381 bags of cloves had been brought to market the expedition registered a modest net profit. For the investors it was a disappointment, paltry in comparison with the astronomical returns then being enjoyed by Portuguese in the East; but it was a profit nonetheless. The conclusion must rate as one of accountancy’s more dramatic moments: a small hold-full of cloves funded the first circumnavigation of the globe.

The Scent of Paradise

It is an orchard of delights. With all the sweetness of spices. Paradise as described in the Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem written c.1325.

Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, the three standard-bearers of the age of discovery, were spice-seekers before they became discoverers. Many lesser names followed where they had led. In the wake of their first groping feelers into the unknown, other navigators, traders, pirates and finally armies of various European powers hunted down the source of the spices and squabbled, bloodily and desperately, over their possession.

After the early successes of the Iberian powers, the spice trade took a Protestant turn. At the close of the sixteenth century English and Dutch traders made their first appearance in Asian waters, impelled by a desire for spice, as Conrad would phrase it, that burned in their breasts ‘like a flame of love’. Better organised and more ruthless than any traders yet seen in Atlantic or Asian waters, they fought off the Catholic powers, each other and all Asian rivals and smugglers for the advantage of bringing spices direct to Amsterdam’s Herengracht or London’s Pepper Lane.

At the hands of the northern newcomers Portugal’s Estado da India endured a protracted, undignified senescence, though it was barely a century old. Raiders preyed on the corpse and lopped off the choicest pieces. The first Dutch ships called at the North Moluccas in 1599, returning to Amsterdam low in the water from the weight of the cloves they carried: ‘So long as Holland has been Holland,’ one crewmember claimed, ‘such richly laden ships have never been seen.’ The English followed them east in 1601, James Lancaster leading a fleet under the auspices of the newly formed ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ – better known as the East India Company.* Sailing from the Javanese port of Bantam, an English pinnace reached the Bandas and their nutmeg groves in March 1603. Others followed, setting sail in vessels with such optimistic names as Clove or Peppercorn. With a toehold on the tiny islands of Ai and Run, James I was, for a time, proud to style himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. For the sake of their nutmeg the latter two tiny islands shade Bermuda as England’s first overseas possessions.

Though these early voyages enjoyed mixed results, malaria, scurvy and inexperience taking a heavy toll, the northern intruders soon struck at the ‘Portingall’ with devastating swiftness. The first assets to go were the remotest, the distant Spice Islands. Here a handful of Portuguese, having long since incurred the loathing of the Muslim population, clung on in a state of permanent siege in a string of mouldering forts. Ternate fell in 1605. Shortly after the Dutch seized the Portuguese fort on Ambon, midway between the North and South Moluccas. Worse was to come, as the conquests of da Gama and his successor Albuquerque (1453–1515) were steadily rolled back. In the disastrous decade of the 1630s, Ceylon and its cinnamon forests fell to combined Ceylonese-Dutch forces – a marriage of convenience the Ceylonese would soon have cause to regret. The Portuguese Jesuit Fernão de Queyroz claimed the Dutch were ‘so disliked by the Natives, that the very stones will rise against them’, but his prediction of independence was some three hundred years premature. Malacca, the bottleneck and entrepôt of the East, surrendered to the Dutch in 1641; the pepper ports of Malabar followed in 1661–63. Spices were now, in effect, a Protestant concern.

The drama was played out on a global stage. The golden age of discovery was also the golden age of European piracy, when freebooters could plunder their way to royal favour and enrichment. The talismanic figure in this respect was Sir Francis Drake, whose Golden Hind was only the second ship to circumnavigate the globe. On the way he called at Ternate in 1579, sailing off with a cargo of cloves and agreement from Sultan Babu to reserve the trade in cloves to the English. For his part, Drake promised to build forts and factories, and ‘to decorate that sea with ships’. It was a bargain that would never be fulfilled, yet the treaty was more far-reaching in its ramifications even than the lordly haul of stolen Spanish silver and gold that had the Spanish ambassador in London demanding Drake’s head. With such dizzying profits in the air, Drake’s treaty with Babu sent shivers of excitement up the spines of the investors, and would-be imitators lined up to follow his lead. In view of the effect the treaty seems likely to have had on the merchants of London, culminating in the formation of the East India Company two decades later, Drake’s agreement with Babu was quite possibly the single most lasting achievement of his voyage.

Like Drake, these spice-seekers were seldom chary of robust methods. A spice ship represented a fortune afloat, and from a strictly commercial point of view it was considerably cheaper and easier to plunder the returning ships than to make the long and dangerous voyage for oneself. Galleons and caravels returning from the Indies ran a gauntlet of pirates and raiders, lurking in the Atlantic to deprive the exhausted and disease-depleted crews of their precious cargoes. One such haul was witnessed by Samuel Pepys in November 1665, when as Surveyor-Victualler to the Royal Navy he inspected two captured Dutch East Indiamen. On board he saw ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world – pepper scatter[ed] through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees – whole rooms full … as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life’.

By now, however, this was a token victory for the English, since their own outposts in the Spice Islands had long since gone the way of the Portuguese before them. One English merchant in the Moluccas reported that the Dutch ‘grew starke madde’ at having to share the proceeds from the Moluccas’ cloves and nutmeg. Accordingly, in February 1623 the staff of the English factory on the central Moluccan island of Ambon were rounded up, tortured and killed. Their fate had been foreshadowed a few years earlier by the destruction of the English outpost on the nutmeg island of Run, which was then denuded of its trees for good measure. The ‘crying business of Amboyna’ prompted an outburst of pamphlets, anti-Dutch tirades and even a play by Dryden (Amboyna – admittedly, not one of his better works; Sir Walter Scott considered it ‘beneath criticism’), its jingoistic huff periodically recycled ever since. The affair was finally tidied up with the signature of the treaty of Breda at the conclusion of the second Anglo – Dutch war of 1665–67. The English renounced their claims in the Moluccas in return for acknowledgement of their sovereignty over an island they had seized from the Dutch, the (then) altogether less spicy New Amsterdam, better known by the victors’ name of New York.*

In the longer term, however, such seizures and horse-trading, while spectacular, were unsustainable. There was more to be made from commerce than plunder – a distinction those at the sharp end of the spice trade would not perhaps have recognised – and by now the lion’s share of that trade was in Dutch hands. After several decades of mercurial, spasmodic English forays in the first half of the 1600s, but without any consistent investment from London, by the middle of the century the Dutch had emerged as the uncontested masters of the spice trade. They had achieved what the Portuguese had sought in vain: dominance in the trade in pepper and cinnamon, and a near total monopoly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.

Under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oosrindische Compagnie (VOC), the problems that beset the trade were gradually ironed out. The bandit capitalism of the early days evolved into a more recognisably modern and permanent system. The market-disrupting cycle of gluts and shortages was succeeded by a ruthlessly efficient monopoly. The catastrophic losses of life and shipping along the African coasts were reduced to a sustainable level. Much of the risk was taken out of the business. Whereas the finances of Portugal’s Estado da India never made the leap out of medievalism, hamstrung by clumsy royal monopolies and endemic corruption, the annual fleets setting off from the Zuider Zee were backed by the full panoply of joint stock companies, shareholders and boards of directors. In time the East India companies of the Dutch and their English rivals grew into the armies and administrators of formal imperialism.

Such were, very briefly, the bloody, briny flavours of the spice age. But if the discoverers marked the beginning of a new era, so too they marked an end, for even their efforts formed part of a grand tradition. In his opening stanza Camões claimed that da Gama and his Christian spice-seekers ventured into ‘seas never sailed before’, but in fact the spice routes had been navigated for centuries, albeit not by Europeans, or at least not very many of them. As tends to be the way with pioneers, even the discoverers had precedents. Asia’s spices had been familiar in Europe long before Europeans were familiar in Asia – because someone, or rather various someones, had been to get them. Besides the disconcerting Moors who accosted his envoy on the beach, da Gama had the deflating experience of finding Italian merchants active along the Malabar Coast – some selling their services to Muslim rulers – and there had been others before. In this sense the discoverers’ achievements, however epic, were essentially achievements of scale. Neither the voyages nor the tremendous, transforming appetite that inspired them emerged from thin air. When da Gama and his contemporaries raised anchor spice was a taste that had already launched a thousand ships.

Had any of the protagonists in this vast and ancient quest been asked why this was so, some would have offered, if pressed, much the same functional answer as that given by modern historians: profit. The reputation of fabulous riches clung so closely to spices that some, as we shall see, considered them tarnished by the association. (Columbus himself was deeply embarrassed by the potential imputation of grubby, worldly motives to his quest, and was accordingly at pains to find some way of justifying the enterprise in terms of the spiritually worthy spin-offs: to retake the holy sepulchre, to finance a new crusade, to convert the heathen.) But if the medieval spice trader were asked why spices were so valuable and so sought after, he would have given answers that seem less intelligible to the modern historian than such reassuringly material arguments. In this regard the charms of spices admit no easy explanation, nor would our forebears have found the matter much less perplexing. Indeed part of their attraction, and the source of much of their value, was simply that they were inexplicable. Before Columbus and company remapped the world, spices carried a freight that we, in an age of satellites and global positioning systems, can barely imagine. Emerging from the fabulous obscurity of the East they were arrivals from another world. For the spices, so it was believed, grew in paradise.

That this was so was something more than a pious fiction. It was, in fact, something close to gospel truth, an article of faith since the early years of the Christian religion. One of many highly intelligent and educated believers was Peter Damian (1007–1072), the Italian Doctor of the Church, saint, hermit and ascetic in whose turbulent life the great issues of the eleventh century, somewhat in spite of himself, converged. In his hermitage at Fonte Avellana, in a bleak wilderness of rocks and crags in the central Apennines, he dreamed of that gentle place where, by the fount of eternal life,

Harsh winter and torrid summer never rage.

An eternal spring puts forth the purple flowers of roses.

Lilies shine white, and the crocus red, exuding balsam.

The meadows are verdant, the crops sprout,

Streams of honey flow, exhaling spice and aromatic wine.

Fruits bang suspended, never to fall from the flowering groves.

That paradise smelled of spices was, for Damian, something more than a passing fancy. His words and spiced imagery alike were lifted directly from the Apocalypse of Peter, an early Christian work, now discarded as apocryphal but widely read in the Middle Ages. Damian himself returned to the theme in a series of letters to his friend and fellow cleric St Hugh (1024–1109), abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Cluny, at the time the intellectual and spiritual centre of Western Christendom. To Damian, the shelter of Cluny’s cloister was a ‘Paradise watered by the rivers of the four Evangelists … a garden of delights sprouting the manifold loveliness of roses and lilies, sweetly smelling of honeyed fragrances and spices’.

The belief in spices’ unearthly origins is crucial to understanding their charm – and their value. For if paradise and its spices were fair, so the world in which Damian lived was, so far as he was concerned, irredeemably foul. Among his other works is the Book of Gomorrah, one of the bleakest visions of humanity ever penned. In Damian’s eyes the entire race was mired in baseness, its sole, slender hope a Church that was itself sunk in moral squalor and loathsome homosexuality. The priesthood was addicted to every variant of rampant lust, racked by ‘the befouling cancer of sodomy’. Bishoprics were bought and sold, lecherous priests openly took wives and handed on their livings to their bastard offspring, and a corrupt and venal papacy was despised and disregarded by the secular powers. From his retreat in the wilderness Damian looked out on a world populated by a race of degenerate Yahoos. Paradise seemed a long way away.

Yet its aromas were there, as it were, right under his nose. Spices were a taste of paradise in a world submerged in filth; they were far more than mere foodstuffs. And this reputation endured even as knowledge of the wider world expanded and travellers penetrated, glacier-pace, some of the dark spaces on the map. Jean, sire de Joinville (c. 1224–1317) provided a fairly typical explanation of the spices’ arrival from the East. In his day, and long before and after, Egypt was the prime intermediary between the Near and the Far East, and as such Europe’s prime supplier of spice. After the capture of the crusader army in 1250 Joinville was held in an Egyptian dungeon as a prisoner of the sultan, awaiting the payment of a hefty ransom. Though he had seen the Nile carry off the bloated bodies of his companions, mown down by plague after the battle of al-Mansurah, he was prepared to believe in the river’s unearthly origins, and that it might carry more pleasant flotsam:

Before the river enters Egypt, the people who are so accustomed cast their nets in the river in the evening; and when morning comes, they find in their nets those goods sold by weight that they bring to this land, that is, ginger, rhubarb, aloes wood, and cinnamon. And it is said that these things come from the terrestrial Paradise; for the wind blows down the dead wood in this country, and the merchants here sell us the dead wood that falls in the river.

This from someone who, unlike the overwhelming majority of Europeans, had wet his feet in its waters.

And yet Joinville’s account was something more than a fabulous yarn spun by a returning traveller out to dazzle the folks back home. Judged by the standards of the day, his passed for relatively informed opinion; he had moreover a willing audience, many of whom would have seen it as impious to believe otherwise. For although no one had been there, few doubted the existence of the terrestrial paradise from where, according to an ancient tradition, some of the fruits of a lost Eden still trickled through to a fallen humanity: ‘Whatever fragrant or beautiful thing that comes to us is from that place,’ said St Avitus of Vienne (c.490–518). That spices grew in Eden’s garden of delights was no more than the literal truth, inasmuch as the vocabulary for delights and spices was one and the same. The connection was explained by St Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) in what was possibly early-medieval Christendom’s single most influential description of the East and the terrestrial paradise: ‘Paradise … is called in Hebrew “Eden”, which is translated into our own language as Deliciae, the place of luxury or delight [equally, the exotic delights and dainties themselves]. Joined together, this makes “Garden of Delights”; for it is planted with every type of wood and fruit-bearing tree, including the Tree of Life. There is neither cold nor heat but eternal spring.’ Unfortunately for humanity, however, this paradise was hedged in with ‘flames like swords, and a wall of fire reaching almost to the sky’.

As Joinville appreciated, with such barriers separating supply and demand, the exact means of that transfer were necessarily obscure, and the source of much speculation. According to the Book of Genesis, in Eden was the fountain that ‘went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground’. Translated to medieval cosmography, biblical exegesis held that this fountain was the source of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Phison (or, to some, the Ganges). St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) concluded that the rivers circumvented the flames by passing underground before re-emerging. It was via these rivers that spices arrived.

Thus when Joinville looked on the waters of the Nile and came up with his colourful explanation of its harvest, he was merely reconciling the biblical truth to what he had seen with his own eyes. By unknown means and ferried by unknown hands, on streams flowing from another world, spices arrived from a place known only from Bible and fable, washing up in the souks of Cairo and Alexandria and thence to the markets of Europe like so much cosmic driftwood.

Or, perhaps more to the point, like gold dust. For mystery meant profitability. In a stroke of medieval marketing genius, there was even a spice that took its name from its purported origins, the grains of paradise that appear in spicers’ account books from the thirteenth century on. In medieval times grains of paradise, or simply ‘grains’, cost more than the black pepper of India. Sharp to the taste and now confined to speciality shops, the spice is in fact the fruit of Aframomum melegueta (also Aframomum granumparadisi), a native of West Africa, where it was purchased by Portuguese traders on their voyages down around the continent’s western bulge, or else freighted by caravan across the Sahara, along the gold and slave routes of Timbuktoo. By the time ‘grains’ arrived in Europe their credentials were burnished and their origins forgotten. Paradise made for as plausible an origin as any other.

That spices have all but lost their lustre in the twenty-first century is in large measure because much of the mystery has gone out of the trade and the places where they grow. Paradise survives not as a place, but as a symbol. Yet for centuries spices and paradise were inseparable, joined together in a relationship whose durability was guaranteed by the fact that it could not be disproved. The few known facts added up to a baffling puzzle that invited colourful explanations. Hardly anyone involved in the trade knew who or what lay beyond the last transaction, and much the same held true all along the spice routes. None but the first few handlers of these transactions had any idea where their goods originated; few had any idea where they were bound; and none could view the system in its entirety. Trade was a piecemeal business, passed on from one middleman to another. Perhaps the greatest wonder of the system is that it existed at all.

For between harvest and consumption Europe’s spices travelled a long and fragile thread. The spice routes mazed across the map like the wanderings of a black ant, criss-crossing seas and deserts, now appearing then abruptly vanishing and reappearing, forking and branching with the rise and fall of cities and empires, outbreaks of war and fluctuating demand. When the visiting King and Queen of Scotland celebrated the Feast of the Assumption at Woodstock in 1256 with no less than fifty pounds each of ginger, pepper and cinnamon, four pounds of cloves, two pounds each of nutmeg and mace and two pounds of galangal,* their seasonings had travelled journeys the diners could barely guess at, acquiring an air of glamour and otherworldiness that we can only with difficulty imagine.

No spices were more travelled or more exotic than the cloves, nutmeg and mace of the Moluccas. Served to the visiting monarchs in a glass of spiced wine, all that can be known with any degree of certainty is their origin. After harvest in the nutmeg groves of the Bandas or in the shadow of the volcanic cones of Ternate and Tidore, next, most likely, they were stowed on one of the outriggers that still flit between the islands of the archipelago. Alternatively, they may have been acquired by Chinese traders known to have visited the Moluccas from the thirteenth century onwards. Moving west past Sulawesi, Borneo and Java, through the straits of Malacca, they were shipped to India and the spice-marts of Malabar. Next, Arab dhows conveyed them across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. At any one of a number of ancient ports – Basra, Jiddah, Muscat or Aqaba – the spices were transferred onto one of the huge caravans that fanned out across the deserts to the markets of Arabia and on to Alexandria and the Levant.

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 and 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

2 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.

That the centurions hankered for a little variation from the dreary German diet of roasted meat and porridge is no great surprise. In fact they were far from alone in enjoying their exotic seasonings, even in the outermost bogs and forests of the barbarian north. In England a century or so after Christ, soldiers stationed at the fort of Vindolanda regularly seasoned their meals with Indian pepper as they peered over the battlements of Hadrian’s Wall at the Caledonians; some of the inscribed wooden tablets recording their purchases still survive. Such concrete evidence confirms a fact that many Roman writers mention, but one that in the absence of physical evidence seemed barely credible: that before the time of Christ, a traffic in spices stretched across the Indian Ocean, from far beyond the easternmost reaches of imperial power, north and west across Europe to the outer reaches of the Roman world. And therein lay the roots of a culinary tradition that would endure long after the legions had crumbled and Rome itself lay in ruins.

The Romans were not the first Europeans to eat pepper, but they were the first to do so with any regularity. Locally-produced seasonings had been used in the Mediterranean world since at least the time of the ancient Syrian civilisation of Mari, late in the third millennium BC, where inscriptions on clay tablets record the use of cumin and coriander to flavour beer. When Rome was still a village, Greek cooks knew a host of different seasonings. Cumin, sesame, coriander, oregano and saffron are all mentioned in Greek comedies of the fourth and third centuries BC, but as yet no Eastern spices. It was not that the spices were unknown, nor that no one had yet thought to eat them, but rather that their exorbitant cost rendered them too precious for consumption by all but the very wealthy. There is a fragment by the Attic poet Antiphanes dating from the fourth century BC: ‘If a man should bring home some pepper he’s bought, they propose a motion that he be tortured as a spy’ – from which not much can be extracted other than a vague allusion to high cost. Another fragment contains a recipe for an appetiser of pepper, salad leaf, sedge (a grassy, flowering herb) and Egyptian perfume. The philosopher Theophrastus (c.372 – c.287 BC) knew pepper, but the context makes it clear that the spice is still the concern of the apothecary, not the cook.

Three centuries later pepper was still an elite taste among the Greeks. According to Plutarch, one admirer was the Athenian tyrant Aristion, who was happy to feast even as his subjects starved. When a Roman army besieged Athens in 86 BC the cost of wheat soared to 1,000 drachmas the bushel, whereupon the chief priestess of the city approached the tyrant to beg for one-twelfth of a bushel of wheat. Callously, he sent her a pound of pepper instead.

All that would change with the Romans. That a Roman soldier could share the taste even in the outer reaches of empire depended on one of Rome’s more stupefying technical achievements, and it marks the moment when the spice trade between Europe and Asia first emerges in clear view. Over 1,500 years before Vasco da Gama sailed his three small caravels to India, the Romans had done the same, but in bigger vessels and on a much grander scale. And as with da Gama after them, a strong aroma of spice hung over their exploits.

By the time of the geographer Strabo (c.63 BC – C.AD 24), writing a few decades before the legions decamped from the Lippe, an annual fleet numbering some 120 ships set off for the year-long round trip to India. The outlines of their journey are described in the document known as the Periplus, a pilot’s guide to sailing in the Indian Ocean. Written by an anonymous Greek-speaking sailor sometime in the first century AD, the Periplus describes each step of the journey, identifying which harbours to stop in and which goods to acquire. His readers were the long-distance traders and trampers who serviced the ports and markets in what he calls the Erythraean Sea, by which he meant the huge expanse of water encompassing both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean beyond.

There were two main trade routes within this vast expanse of water, each beginning at one of several ports along the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea. The first dropped down the African coast as far south as Mozambique, calling at the ports and trading stations that received products from the hinterland: ivory, incense, skins, slaves, ebony, exotic animals and gold. The second and longer voyage, and the conduit by which Rome obtained its spices, turned east across the ocean to India. The ships that sailed it were some of the behemoths of ancient navigation, immense ocean-worthy freighters displacing up to a thousand tons. One writer compared an Indian freighter to ‘a small universe in itself … equivalent to several ships of other nations’. On board were crews of marines to protect the valuable cargoes from the pirates who plagued these waters until modern times. Picking their way south through the reefs and rocks of the Red Sea, the fleet fanned out at the Bab el Mandeb, the bottleneck where Africa and the Arabian peninsula converge. Some made their last landfall on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, near present-day Aden – the same place where the India-bound steamers of the Raj would stop for coal, telegraphs and water some two thousand years later. Others sailed on south to Cape Guardafui, Africa’s easternmost point, where the Horn juts east into the Indian Ocean. In ancient times, the cape took its name from the traffic that paused here: the Cape of Spices. At this point the ships on the Africa route turned south, and the India-bound vessels turned their prows east.

According to the Periplus, the next stage of the journey was pioneered by a Greek sailor by the name of Hippalus. In the age of sail all navigation in the Indian Ocean was – to some extent, still is – overshadowed by the annual cycle of the monsoon. From May to August the summer monsoon blows hard and wet out of the south-west, unpredictably and occasionally furiously. By late August, the blustery squalls weaken into stiff breezes and the occasional storm. By September the summer winds splutter and falter, forgetting their outbursts and fading into indecisive squalls and calms.

Next comes a complete transformation. From November to March the winter monsoon wafts unfaltering dry, balmy zephyrs from the north-east, as reliable and as regular as any trade wind. With the right timing, outward or inward bound, ships were guaranteed a following wind in the starboard quarter. To Hippalus went the credit for recognising this annual pattern, thereby unlocking the secret of navigating in the Indian Ocean. Armed with his insight, the Romans sailed across the belly of the ocean to India, bustling over in anything from twenty to forty days. While still out to sea they were warned of the imminent approach of land by the swarms of red-eyed sea snakes that welled up around the hull, a mariner’s guide in these waters to this day. Soon after a blue-green blur lifted out of the sea, the cordillera of the Western Ghats.

The Romans called at any one of nineteen ports in which, in the words of the Periplus, ‘great ships sail … due to the vast quantities of pepper and malabathron’.* In return for manufactured goods such as glassware and works of art, tin and Mediterranean coral – much prized in India for its imputed magical properties – and above all bullion, Rome’s traders brought back ivory, pearls, tortoiseshell, diamonds, onyx, agate, crystal, amethyst, opal, beryl, sapphire, ruby, turquoise, garnet, bloodstone, emerald and carnelian. There were silks trans-shipped from China, parrots for a senator’s menagerie and tigers, rhinoceroses and elephants destined for public slaughter in the arena. There were spices from the north, costust† and nard from the Himalayan foothills, and still others arriving from further east (including, quite possibly, Moluccan cloves and nutmeg, although there are questions over their identification in Rome before the fourth century AD). But it was pepper that was Malabar’s chief attraction.

Rome’s spice traders were pointed in the right direction by less celebrated forerunners. Before the Romans arrived there were Greeks; and someone, presumably, had shown the Greeks the way. Tales of India had filtered west since the time of Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BC), and Greek travellers had known the land route to the north of India from at least the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great. In 325 BC Alexander’s admiral Nearchus sailed from the Indus back up the Persian Gulf and up the Euphrates to Babylon. Around 302 BC one of Alexander’s successors apparently sponsored two voyages from the Euphrates to India and its spices. However, the first hard evidence of any European involvement in regular seaborne trade with the spice-bearing south of the subcontinent dates from the time of the Greco-Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies (305–30 BC). Successors to the Egyptian fragment of Alexander’s empire, the Ptolemies had sporadic commercial exchanges with India, though these exchanges were probably in Arab (and Indian?) hands. They exchanged ambassadors with the Maurya emperors Chandragupta II (ruled C.321–C.297 BC) and Asoka (ruled c.274–c.232 BC). Back in Egypt Ptolemy II’s (ruled 285–246 BC) triumphal procession of 271–270 BC featured Indian women, oxen and marbles.

According to the geographer Strabo, the first European to attempt to establish serious commercial contacts with India was a certain Eudoxus of Cyzicus, an entrepreneurial Greek who made the acquaintance of an Indian shipwrecked somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea. Around 120 BC Eudoxus was in Alexandria when the regime’s coast guards brought a half-dead Indian sailor to the court of Ptolemy Euergetes II. Most likely the castaway came from the Dravidian south of the continent, or possibly even Ceylon, since by this stage an interpreter for one of the northern languages could have been found without too much difficulty. Before long the enigmatic arrival acquired a sufficient command of Greek to interest Eudoxus in the possibility of going to India himself.

Armed with first-hand knowledge of Indian waters, Eudoxus made two trips to India to buy spices and other Eastern luxuries, returning on each occasion with a rich haul of exotica, much to the delight of the king, who promptly requisitioned the lot. Frustrated, and anticipating an idea that would captivate the geographers of medieval Europe, Eudoxus attempted to circumvent the problem by circumnavigating Africa. On the first attempt he made it no further than modern Morocco, where his crew mutinied and he was forced to turn back. Undeterred, he set out a second time, taking with him seeds to sow crops and some dancing girls to keep his crew amenable. Having sailed west beyond the straits of Gibraltar neither Eudoxus nor the dancing girls were ever heard of again, but he deserves at least a mention in any history of navigation, for his is the first name in a tradition that culminates with Vasco da Gama.*

Whereas history records Eudoxus as a flamboyant failure, Rome’s approach to the problem of reaching India and its riches was, characteristically, a good deal more effective. Following the defeat and suicide of Cleopatra, the last of the Greco-Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies, the emperor Augustus annexed Egypt to the empire in 30 BC, thereby granting Roman merchants direct access to the Red Sea. Flushed with the spoils of empire, and with an emergent class of the Roman mega-rich demanding new and more exotic luxuries, Roman merchants now had the incentive, the opportunity and the means to establish themselves as a serious presence in Indian Ocean trade.

They wasted no time, and spared no means. Within a decade of Egypt’s conquest a bustling traffic was underway. New ports were constructed on the Red Sea shore, and wells were dug along the caravan routes crossing the desert from the Nile to the coast. Most likely the impulse for this expansion came from competition with Eastern powers already established in the trade, among them the commercial empire of the Nabataeans, an Arabian people that had grown rich on the ancient caravan traffic from Arabia and beyond – the splendid ruins of Petra are the most visible reminder of their wealth. Further south, the Romans faced competition from the trading powers of the Hadhramaut, successors to the trade and caravan routes once travelled, if the Bible is to be believed, by the Queen of Sheba. No sooner had Egypt been subjugated than an army under the command of the prefect of Egypt was dispatched to sack ports along the Arabian coasts. The likely incentive for the expedition was much the same as the one that had earlier spurred Eudoxus, and that would remain a perennial catalyst of the spice trade for the best part of another two millennia: the desire to circumvent – in this case, to rub out – the middleman. This obscure expedition was apparently the first war launched by a European power for the sake of the lucrative Eastern traffic, but it would not be the last.

With the way to India now wide open to Roman shipping, East and West began to develop a clearer image of one another than had ever been possible. Roman emperors regularly received Indian ambassadors. Augustus apparently exhibited a tiger in 13 or 11 BC For their part, the Indians were evidently reasonably familiar with Rome, and impressed by what they saw. At Ara, in north-eastern India, there is an inscription of King Kanishka in which he refers to himself as ‘Caesar’. Contacts were deepening, yet from the distance of Rome India still appeared as a hazy mix of fact and fantasy, as in Apuleius’ (c. AD 124–C.170) description:

The Indians are a people of great population and vast territories situated far to our east, by Ocean’s ebb, where the stars first rise at the ends of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews, Nabataean merchants and flowing-robed Parthians, past the Ituraeans* with their meagre crops and the Arabs rich in perfumes – wherefore I do not so much wonder at the Indians’ mountains of ivory, harvests of pepper, stockpiles of cinnamon, tempered iron, mines of silver and smelted streams of gold; nor at the Ganges, the greatest of all rivers and the king of the waters of the Dawn, running in a hundred streams …

The merchants who went there knew better, but it was not in their interest to be too forthcoming about what they saw – one reason, perhaps, why aside from the unadorned listing of ports and products in the Periplus no first-hand account is extant. Surviving Indian sources describe the foreigners’ trading stations and warehouses as ‘residences of limitless wealth’. There are references to Western converts to Buddhism and Greek mercenaries in the employ of Indian rulers. An Indian poet writes of his ruler’s taste for Greek wine. Greek carpenters built a palace for an Indian king. At Muziris, the principal entrepôt on the coast, the Romans erected a temple to the emperor Augustus: an act of pious patriotism, perhaps, or a reminder of the long arm of the metropole. Its ruins lie somewhere under the modern town of Cranganore, on the banks of a river sprung from a maze of backwaters, by which the pepper arrived, via porter, buffalo and barge, from harvest further inland. Ancient Tamil poets describe Muziris as a scene of heaving activity: a town that ‘offers toddy as if it were water to those who come to pour there the goods from the mountains and those from the sea, to those who bring ashore in the lagoon boats the “gifts” of gold brought by the ships, and to those who crowd the port in the turmoil created by the sacks of pepper piled up in the houses’. To visit Malabar today it is easy to imagine that the scene that greeted the Romans cannot have changed much since antiquity. In the spice quarters of Malabar the tourist still sees the same scenes of pulsating energy: haggling merchants and a harbour crowded with boats from the backwaters, unloading their cargo of spices. The occasional buffalo pushes its way through the crowd while porters scurry to and from the warehouses, bent double under sacks of cardamom and pepper.

With the right timing the return leg was a sleepier affair than the outward journey. Once the spices had been bought and loaded onto the ships nothing remained for the Romans but to wait for the monsoon winds to shift in their favour and, sailors being sailors, to knock back the toddy like water. With the gentle north-easterlies of the winter monsoon in their sails, Rome’s spice fleets retraced their route eastward across the ocean, then north up the Red Sea. The cargoes were unloaded on the Egyptian coast, then transferred onto caravans that angled back across the desert to the Nile. During the course of one such crossing a returnee from the Indian voyage carved graffiti that may still be read on the walls of the Wadi Menih: ‘C. Numidius Eros made this in the 38th year of Caesar’s [Augustus’s] rule, returning from India in the month of Pamenoth.’ In modern terms the year was 2 BC in the month of February or March, precisely the time when the fleets were expected back on the winds of the winter monsoon.

Having made landfall in Egypt, the sailors were back among the familiar sights and sounds of the Roman world. When the caravans reached the Nile, their cargo was loaded onto barges and freighted downstream to Alexandria, the chief port of the delta, where the spices were transferred onto a bulk freighter. The run from Alexandria to Rome was the home stretch, the most heavily trafficked trade route of the ancient world. Apart from supplying Rome with its pepper, this was the route by which the Egyptian grain arrived and kept the plebs quiescent. A few weeks’ sailing brought the pepper to Rome’s great port at Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber. From here it was shipped upriver for distribution and sale in the city’s ‘Perfumers’ Quarter’, the vicus unguentarius.

Between harvest in Malabar and consumption in Rome, the pepper had come a distance, as the crow flies, of well over 5,000 miles; considerably more once the twists of the long and winding journey are taken into account, down around the great dogleg of Arabia, shipped and reshipped from buffalo to barge and ship to caravan. This was, by some distance, the longest trade route of the ancient world. Yet in Rome itself only the faintest of traces remain of the heroic efforts that went into getting the pepper from harvest to consumption. In the time of the emperor Trajan (AD 98–117) spices, collectively known as the pipera, or peppers, were sold in a market built into the flank of the Quirinal Hill, of which several walls and arches are still standing. Until the end of the Middle Ages the memory of the spices once sold here endured in the name of the ancient road still visible from the Via di iv Novembre, like many other ancient names corrupted via the medium of medieval Latin but easily recognisable as the Via Biberatica. Further along the Forum are the remains of the horrea piperataria, the spice stores constructed by the emperor Domitian in AD 92. By Domitian’s day the inflow of Eastern spices had become so great that a new store was needed over an older and by now inadequate portico dating from the reign of Nero (AD 54–68). Here Rome’s pepper and other spices were kept in a convenient central location, right in the heart of the ancient city. Two thousand years on and the assiduous visitor can still see the remains of Domitian’s pepper warehouse, now no more than a few crumbling, shin-high walls and unimpressive piles of rubble, disappearing beneath the sprawling ruin of the Basilica of Constantine. They are, frankly, not much to look at, yet if there were such a thing, they would merit a mark on the culinary map of Europe. For the ruins of the horrea represent a beginning of sorts, as the oldest visible reminder of the serious advent of Eastern spices in European cuisine, the beach-head from which spices went on to conquer the palates of the Western world.

In the centuries that followed the construction of the spice stores, Rome’s energies waxed and waned, the empire contracted, was overrun by barbarians and finally collapsed. The volume of traffic and consumption that fuelled the trans-oceanic spice trade would not be seen again for over a thousand years. Yet both the taste and the traffic endured. When Rome faltered the Arabs took over, and the Indian Ocean became a Muslim lake, home to the seaborne civilisation that gave rise to the tales of Sinbad and his voyages to the magical realms of spice, giant birds and monsters, genii and gold. Spices were acquiring the romantic, glamorous freight they have carried down to the present day. And although the flow of spices into Europe slowed to a trickle and at times all but disappeared, it was never quite halted. The pepper left behind in Germany by a Roman soldier is the first faint spoor of an ancient tradition, perhaps the oldest continuous link between Asia and Europe and one that has survived, battered but intact, ever since.

Of Spiced Parrot and Stuffed Dormice

Long-life spiced honey wine, given to people on a journey: put ground pepper with skimmed honey in a small container for spiced wine, and when it is the time for drinking, mix some of the honey with the wine. It is suggested to add a little wine to the honey mixture, so the honey flows more freely.

Apicius (first century AD). De Re Coquinaria

The vast wealth and reach Rome acquired in the first century BC transformed the classical idea of spices, and the uses to which they were put. Though even in Roman times cuisine was only one of the many uses of spice – and not always the most important – one result of the direct trade with India was that costs plummeted, with the result that spices entered the diet more frequently. A revolution in the way spices were used and viewed was underway.

The first world empire, Rome also boasted the first global cuisine. By the time of Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), Rome’s cosmopolitan tastes had reached such a pitch that he talks of the flavours of Egypt, Crete, Cyrene and India appearing in Roman kitchens. There were dissenters: Plutarch (AD 46–c. 119) writes that even in his day there were some who had not acquired the taste, but they were, apparently, a minority. Pepper in particular was widely used, with contemporary literary sources taking familiarity with the spice for granted. A schoolboy’s textbook featured a talking pig by the name of M. Grunnius (‘Grunter’) Corocotta, who obligingly asks to be well cooked with pepper, nuts and honey. Archaeology reinforces the impression of a widespread taste. Silver pepperpots (piperatoria) dating from the early imperial period onward have been found practically all over the Roman world, at Pompeii, to the south in Corfinium and Murmuro in Sicily, at Nicolaevo in Bulgaria, at Cahors, Arles-Trinquetaille and Saint-Maur-de-Glanfeuil in France.

Neither the silverware nor its contents were for everyone, as numerous literary references make clear. In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the scabrous tale of the hero Lucius’ transformation and adventures from human to ass and back again, pepper is referred to as a ‘choice delicacy’, fit for a banquet. While still in asinine form, Lucius amazes his owners by eschewing hay and tucking into the sort of food an ass would be least likely to eat, namely meats seasoned with laser (another costly seasoning), fish cooked in some exotic sauce and fattened birds in pepper. The epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis, generally known simply as Martial (c.AD 38–103), writes of pepper in a quintessentially aristocratic pairing of wild boar, generous Falernian – the most prized and expensive vintage of the Romans – and ‘mysterious garum’, a highly esteemed fish sauce. Martial balks at the expense, complaining that his cook has used up a ‘huge mound of pepper’. ‘I have a more modest hunger,’ complains the penniless poet.

For the more solvent, pepper’s air of exclusivity made the spice an ideal gift. It was customary to distribute pepper at the great midwinter festival of the Saturnalia – a ritual not unlike Christmas gift-giving, whereby favours could be curried, debts acknowledged and generosity displayed.* Martial writes of an influential Sabine lawyer’s largesse: three half-pounds of incense and pepper along with hampers from all over the Mediterranean filled with Libyan figs and Tuscan sausages. One Saturnalia Martial himself received some pepper, although this was a lesser gift than he had hoped for. A stingy patron’s generosity has dried up:

You used to send me a pound of silver; now it’s down to half a pound, But of pepper. Sextus: my pepper doesn’t cost me quite so much.

And yet the pepper was no trifle: if the spice was widespread this did not make it commonplace. In a satire addressed to an indolent student, Persius (AD 34–62) writes of pepper belonging in a ‘wealthy larder’, along with hams, gifts from fat Umbrians and tokens of gratitude from clients – in other words, not the sort of thing a poor scholar ought to be feeding himself, such as lentil soup and porridge. Martial implies that what was out of a labourer’s reach fell within the budget of the cook-employing classes:

So that bland beets, a workman’s lunch, actually taste of something, How often the cook turns to wine and pepper!

Elsewhere, he advised pepper served with figpecker, a small bird esteemed by the Roman gourmet:

When by chance a shining, waxy, broad-loined figpecker comes your way,

If you have any taste, add pepper.

Martial reserved a special bile for stinginess, a failing for which he lambasts a certain Lupus, whose gift of a ‘farm’ amounted to less than a window-box ‘that an ant could eat in a single day’:

In which you might find no vegetable

Other than Cosmus’s leaf and uncooked pepper,

Where you couldn’t lie a cucumber straight,

Nor a snake stretch itself out. *

When in due course Martial finds himself without a patron – unremarkably, perhaps, given his propensity to bite the hands that fed him – he frets whether his latest publication will end up as scrap, used as a ‘cowl’ to wrap fried tuna, incense or pepper, the equivalent of finding one’s book remaindered (the custom survives in the Middle East and the Caucasus, where spices are still sold in cones of newspaper). Robert Herrick (1591–1674) borrowed the notion for a book of his own:

[T]hy injur’d Leaves serve well,

To make loose gowns for Mackerel,

Or see the Grocers in a trice,

Make hoods of thee to serve out Spice.

It was also Martial who started a long tradition of figurative use of spice, concerning a dinner guest more light-fingered or ‘peppery handed’ than Autolycus, patron of thieves. The conceit has survived in European languages in one form or another ever since, as in Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s challenge to Viola in Twelfth Night: ‘I warrant there’s vinegar and pepper in’t.’ Or the OED’s complaint of a misused servant: ‘My master pepered my ars with well good speed.’

As with its figurative uses, so it was at the table, where pepper apparently served much the same role as it does today, as a more or less universal seasoning. Concerning spices’ other culinary applications, reliable information is in short supply. The one significant exception is the cookbook known by the unspectacular title of De Re Coquinaria, or Cookery Book, the sole example of the genre to have survived from antiquity. Both the author and the date of composition are unknown, although traditionally it has been ascribed to a certain Apicius, a legendary gourmand of the first century AD. The version we have has passed through the hands of a compiler who rewrote the book in his late Latin of the fourth or fifth century. Most commentators tentatively date the original to the second century AD.

On the evidence of Apicius, it would seem that the Romans liked it hot. The De Re Coquinaria is as suffused with spices as, say, a more modern Italian cookbook is with olive oil. Pepper alone appears in 349 of the book’s 468 recipes. Spices are used to enliven vegetables, fish, meats, wine and desserts. The very first recipe is for a ‘spiced wine surprise’, followed by travellers’ honey-spiced wine. There are spiced salts ‘for many purposes’, including one mix for ‘digestion, and to move the bowels’, the latter including white and black pepper, thyme, ginger, mint, cumin, celery seed, parsley, oregano, arrugula, saffron, bay leaf and dill. The mix is described as ‘extremely mild, more than you would think’.

Mixtures such as these were evidently added after cooking, and many recipes end with the directive to ‘sprinkle on pepper and serve’ – no great change there. To modern eyes the most striking use of spices is in a huge variety of sauces, both hot and cold, either cooked as an integral part of the dish or added afterwards. There was a sharp sauce to cut the fat, made of cumin, ginger, rue, cooking soda, dates, pepper, honey, vinegar and liquamen, a fermented fish sauce much loved by the Romans. A digestive sauce helped the meat go down with the sharp-sweet combination of pepper, cardamom, cumin, dried mint, honey, liquamen, vinegar and various other aromatics. There was a green sauce of pepper, cumin, caraway, spikenard,* ‘all types of mixed green herbs’, dates, honey, vinegar, wine, garum and oil. Another was served cold with poultry, consisting of pepper, lovage, celery seeds, mint, myrtleberries or raisins, honey, wine, vinegar, oil and garum. Some sauces were more complicated, using spices with all manner of trussed and embellished meats: kid, lamb, suckling pig, venison, boar, beef, duck, goose and chicken. There were even dormice stuffed with pepper and nuts – presumably a fiddly operation. There was a peppery sauce for ‘high’ birds (literally ‘goatish’), by which the author meant not putrid but gamey. To subvert lettuce’s flatulent properties Apicius suggests a pepper sauce of vinegar, fish sauce, cumin, ginger, rue, dates, pepper and honey.

While most of Apicius’ seasonings grew within the empire, the Eastern spices occupied a prominent place in his spice rack: most conspicuously, ginger, cardamom and of course pepper. There is a learned debate on the possibility of others; some have speculated whether clove and nutmeg lie hidden under unfamiliar names. One notable absentee is cinnamon. Apart from a solitary reference in Pliny’s Natural History to a recipe for cinnamon-spiced wine, in Roman times the spice appears to have been reserved for more elevated purposes – a subject we shall return to.*

The Roman table, then, was apparently not so bizarre as some have been willing to believe. The De Re Coquinaria offers the same discordant mix of the strange and the familiar as one finds with so many other aspects of Roman civilisation. Minus exotica such as parrot, flamingo and dormouse, there is much here that would not be out of place on the average twenty-first-century table – in recent years there have appeared several editions of the work adapted to the modern kitchen. Many of Apicius’ seasonings can still be found in any well-stocked spice cupboard, and even the fermented fish sauces that revolted some early commentators were probably not so far removed from Vietnamese or Thai fish sauces, or for that matter the pungent anchovy relish much loved by English gents in the age of Queen Victoria. His spiced wines are not at all dissimilar to the mulled wines and vermouths still around today, and some of the spiced sauces are startlingly reminiscent of the pungent and sharp sauces enjoyed by the European nobility in medieval times and beyond. It would seem that the art of the sauce has been a perennial feature of elite cuisine, from Apicius’ day down to our own.

Even the notion of sweet-spiced desserts is not as odd as it might at first sight appear. To round off a meal Apicius suggests a variety of spiced desserts such as a peppered wheat-flour fritter with honey, or a confection of dates, nuts and pine nuts baked with honey and a little pepper. The spice is still used to add tang to sweet confections such as pan forte, now a speciality of Siena, but once widespread through medieval Europe. Were it possible to trace the ancestry of this Italian dessert the path would lead, I suspect, back to ancient Rome.

Palate

Spice for Trimalchio

If Atticus feasts in style, be is considered very grand. Juvenal, Satires (AD 100–127)

One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavour.

M.F.K Fisher, Serve it Forth, 1937

Familiar is not, however, how most modern readers have seen Apicius. In the last few centuries his book has provoked more bafflement than admiration, particularly in the matter of spice. ‘Perhaps the craving for excessive flavouring is an olfactory delirium, a pathological case, as yet unfathomed like the excessive craving for liquor, and, being a problem for the medical fraternity, it is only of secondary importance to gastronomy’ – such was the verdict of one of his nineteenth-century editors. And this opinion is fairly representative of the received wisdom on Roman food. Until very recently, the ancient Roman meal was generally considered on a par with other notoriously lurid displays served up for public consumption, along the lines of gladiatorial bloodbaths and public crucifixions: harsh and brutal, more a subject for revulsion than emulation or serious study. Apicius’ cookbook in particular is regularly cited as proof of rampant excess in the kitchen, nowhere more than in the taste for overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings.

Well, maybe. But it is a confident judge who reaches a verdict on the cuisine of an entire civilisation on the basis of one cookbook, and in fact there are good reasons for reading Apicius with due caution. The physiology of the human palate has not evolved appreciably in the last two millennia, and it is no more likely that the Romans regularly seared their mouths with spices than we do. Nowhere does Apicius give quantities for his recipes: all we know is that the end result was spicy, but we don’t know how spicy. Doubtless if a recipe for an Indian curry were transcribed in the same manner it would provoke similar confusion among those for whom Indian food is as alien as Roman food is to us.

In any case it is more than a little naïve to read the text simply as a practical cookbook, since its nominal author was himself a figure of some notoriety. According to a version of events circulating in the first century AD, Apicius supposedly ate his way through a vast fortune before finding himself down to his last ten million sesterces: still a healthy bank balance, but not enough for this gourmand, who took poison rather than live on a limited budget. To the satirist Juvenal (c.AD 55–c. 127) his name was mud. Christians were still more prejudiced: to the Church father Tertullian (c.AD 155–C.220) Apicius’ greed was legendary, contributing an adjective of his own for his trademark seasonings; to Sidonius (c.430–c.490), ‘Apician’ was another word for ‘glutton’. The notoriously debauched and luxurious Emperor Elagabalus (ruled AD 218–222) is recorded as having had a high regard for his works, a detail the author of the Augustan History slipped in as mutually revealing, and damning. There was in short nothing neutral about Apicius; his name carried none of the comforting, homely associations of an Elizabeth David or a Delia Smith. In any case, the contents of the cookbook that bears his name were of practical interest only to a relatively narrow segment of Roman society. Most of the population of the empire lived at or not far above the level of subsistence, and on the grounds of cost alone Apicius’ more celebrated recipes—boiled, spiced flamingo, for instance – were out of their reach.

Which was, in all likelihood, precisely the point. For like the flamingo, spices were an expensive taste. Only pepper was reasonably available to a sizeable part of the population, and even pepper, as we have seen, carried an air of exclusivity. In his Natural History Pliny gives a list of spice prices that were probably fixed by the state. Black pepper was the cheapest at four denarii the pound, white pepper nearly double that at seven. A pound of ginger cost six denarii, the same quantity of cassia anything from five to fifty. By far the most expensive were various grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from thirty-five to three hundred denarii the pound, in its pure form a whopping 1,000 to 1,500. At this time a citizen soldier earned a wage of 225 denarii per annum, and a little later a free day-labourer could earn about two denarii per diem. In the days of the early empire a pound of black pepper, the cheapest and most available spice, would buy forty pounds of wheat, representing in the order of a few days’ wages for a member of the ‘working class’. A pound of the finest cinnamon oil would cost a centurion up to six years’ work.

They at least would not have been pouring on the spice with a heavy hand. And even for those with the money, there is plenty of evidence that Romans knew when their food was over-spiced. The irony of the now traditional images of Roman food as an exercise in baroque excess is that they were in large part the product not of Rome’s enthusiasm for bingeing but its reticence, the credit for which is due to Christian polemicists, who were virtually obliged to portray Rome as a vast, gluttonous sink – culinary history, like any other form of history, is written by the winners. But in fact a great deal of Roman writing on food is couched in the sort of language we might associate more with Zen minimalism than with a Lucullan banquet. In his eleventh Satire Juvenal lays out the criteria of the morally blameless meal: modest, rustic and home-grown, it will not break the bank. The service is simple and unaffected, without any indecent floorshows. A bracing reading of epic poetry is entertainment enough. One of the letters of Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus, who repeatedly scorned invitations to simple meals of lettuce, snails and wheatcakes chez Pliny for the flashy delights of oysters, sows’ innards, sea-urchins and Spanish dancing girls (can we blame him?). In Pliny’s opinion the ideal meal should be ‘as elegant as it is frugal’.

In this respect Pliny was far from alone – particularly, it would seem, on the subject of seasonings and spices. The comedies of Plautus (c.254–184 BC) and Terence (c.105–c.159 BC) are sprinkled with references to seasonings (condimenta), one of their stock characters the boastful cook who can reel off all the exotic flavours at his disposal: Cilician saffron, Egyptian coriander, Ethiopian cumin and, most tempting of all, silphium of Cyrene. This North African aromatic, ultimately harvested to extinction, turned Roman gourmets weak at the knees.* There was even a musical comedy on the topic. And when the seasonings were overdone the Romans were capable of expressing themselves with a forcefulness that makes even the most hostile restaurant review seem a model of restraint. In Plautus’ Pseudolus, first produced in 191 BC, a pimp by the name of Ballio goes to hire a cook from the ‘Cooks’ Forum’ (or ‘crooks’ forum’, as the tight-fisted Ballio calls it). Through his preening chef, Plautus has fun at the expense of all the trendy cooks who employ all the latest spices and ‘celestial seasonings’, the names of which are pure fantasy: cepolendrum, maccidem, secaptidem, cicamalindrum, hapalocopide, cataractria. The names of some of these mock Greco-Latin pastiches are vaguely menacing: secaptidem, for instance, sounds like something that cuts or slashes through you (from secare, to cut or sever), and the unappetising cataractria evokes a waterfall, a portcullis, a sluice, or a type of seabird. For such mockery of novelty for novelty’s sake to get a laugh the culinary scene must have been reasonably diverse and sophisticated. (The inflated language of Plautus’ cook often comes to mind when I’m looking over the menu of a fashionable new restaurant.) Trying to justify his high fee, the cook declares of his rivals that ‘They don’t season with condiments, but with screech-owls, that devour the guests’ innards alive.’

Which is not the sort of language one would expect of a culture accustomed to drowning out its flavours with overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings. And in fact there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Rome’s apparent addiction to spices, one that has more to do with the social than the strictly practical purpose of cookery. In Rome no more than in any other developed culture can one explain habits of cooking merely in terms of function, any more than other fashions such as dress or language can be accounted for in such narrowly utilitarian terms. Historically, people have eaten spices not simply because they taste good, but also, and sometimes more importantly, because they look good. ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ wrote Brillat-Savarin. For most of their history spices spoke unequivocally of taste, distinction and wealth.

For a wealthy Roman the dinner table (technically, the couch, the dining table being a medieval innovation) was one of the most effective stages on which he could display his sophistication and generosity. Public or semi-public events such as the banquet offered the perfect opportunity for flaunting them, where the cost and flamboyance of a dish were a proclamation of opulence and liberality. At his banquets the emperor Elagabalus mixed together jewels, apples and flowers, tossing as much food out of the window as was served to his guests. He ‘loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, claiming it was an appetiser for the banquet’. He fed foie gras to his dogs, served truffles in place of pepper, ground pearls on the fish and dished up gold-encrusted peas.

Elagabalus was an extreme and indeed a pathological case, yet his appetites exemplified an ingrained tendency of Roman society. Romans of a certain class generally took an uncomplicated attitude to the relationship between wealth and happiness, an ethos well summarised by Apuleius: ‘Truly blessed – doubly blessed! – are those that trample gems and jewellery underfoot.’ A single adjective, beatus, sufficed for both wealth and happiness. To those inclined to agree, display at the table was nothing less than a social imperative. Only the poor or miserly patron stinted in his hospitality, at the expense of influence and regard, whether in his own eyes or the client’s. Juvenal’s fifth satire is addressed to the contemptible client who accepts second-rate hospitality and a miserly meal of fish bloated on Tiber sewage, ‘like some public buffoon’. Even the host’s satirically sentient lobster disdains such ignoble guests.

For those keen to avoid such a fate, whether a host out to impress or a client on the receiving end, spices were a godsend. They were expensive and exotic, not far behind the gems Elagabalus tossed from his window. Elagabalus himself perfumed his swimming pool with spices. They were the ideal accoutrements of the flashy gourmands who, in Juvenal’s words,

scour air, sea and land for tasty morsels,

and cost is never an object; pry more closely, and you find

the more they spend, the greater their pleasure.

It was doubly impressive that spices were, in nutritional terms, superfluous: prime examples of what Lucan (AD 39–65) saw as ‘what luxury, frenzied by an inane love of display has sought out throughout the entire globe, unbidden by hunger’. The Romans certainly did not invent gastronomic snobbery, but they raised it to a high art. Athenaeus (c.AD 200–?) dedicated a book to the subject, The Deipnosophists or Banquet of the Learned, a fifteen-volume marathon of recherché commentary on matters gastronomic through the course of a night-long banquet.

In social terms, then, the cost of spices was less a liability than an asset. They were moreover ideally suited for the equally ancient inclination to pretentiousness. One of the Satires of Horace (65–8 BC) mocks an absurdly affected banquet hosted by a certain Nasidienus Rufus, who waxes lyrical over the dinner he serves. For the appetiser there is wild boar ‘captured while a gentle south wind was blowing’. Pepper – the white variety is de rigueur – features in one of the main courses, a dish of lamprey served in a sauce of live shrimp, described by the host in language worthy of a modern gourmet magazine. His lamprey,

he said, was caught while still pregnant; had it been taken later, the flesh would have been inferior. These are the ingredients of the sauce: extra-virgin olive oil from Venafrum; fish sauce from Spain; a five-year-old wine, but Italian-grown, and added during the cooking – if you add it after the cooking a Chian vintage suits best – white pepper, not without a little vinegar, made from fermented wines from Lesbos. I who was the one who first pointed out that you should boil arugula and bitter elecampane* in the sauce; whereas Curtillus prefers sea-urchins, unwashed …

For Nasidienus it was apparently the sheer difficulty of obtaining ingredients that counted. Elagabalus refused to eat fish while at the coast, yet demanded it when he found himself far inland. The emperor’s insistence on novelty could take a sadistic turn:

By way of entertainment he used to propose to his guests that they should invent new sauces for seasoning the food, and he would offer a great prize to he whose sauce he liked, even giving him a silk robe which was at that time regarded as a rarity and an honour. If however he disliked the sauce, he would order that its creator would have to keep eating it until he came up with a better one.

But it is a character from fiction who is most closely identified with the Roman penchant for culinary exuberance. The Cena Trimalchionis, or Trimalchio’s banquet, is a mid-first-century work by Petronius (?–c.AD 66), bon vivant, courtier and style-consultant to the emperor Nero – a position that presumably left him well-informed on the subject of lavish dinners. The action of the Cena revolves around a dinner laid on by Trimalchio, a fabulously wealthy parvenu who has made a pile from speculative voyages – exactly, as it happens, the milieu of the India trader. (Similarly engorged characters reappear many centuries later, in the time of the Dutch and English East India companies.) Trimalchio’s guests are treated, if this is the mot juste, to a banquet of toe-curling vulgarity. The meal is part theatrical stunt show, part gastronomic marathon. There is a daunting variety of courses, the only common element a stress on the exotic, the unexpected and the bizarre. One guest tries the bear meat and ‘practically spews her guts out’. Another, impressed, whispers to his neighbour that everything – even the pepper! – is home-grown (without a greenhouse, a botanical impossibility). If you want hen’s milk, Trimalchio can get it. He orders mushroom spawn from India and serves boar stuffed with live birds that fly out when the beast is cut open. There are dormice seasoned with honey and smoking sausages resting on a silver grill above ‘coals’ of plums and pomegranates. A slave brings in a basket containing a wooden hen atop a pile of eggs, at which point Trimalchio wonders out loud if the eggs are half-cooked. The narrator tries to crack one and finds it made of pastry. He is about to toss it aside, thinking there is nothing worthwhile inside, when he fishes about within and pulls out a figpecker swimming in peppered egg yolk.

The spice, evidently, was in keeping with the flashy and expensive display. Another dish, borne in by four slaves, consists of heaped plump fowls topped with sows’ bellies. Perched at the apex is a hare to which wings are attached in imitation of Pegasus, the winged steed of myth – the effect not unlike a broiler hen trussed up as Superman. Live fishes flop about this pile of flesh in a slew of peppered wine sauce. The spicy sauce is little better than the bear meat, but then a display of taste was never the host’s intention.

Thanks in no small measure to the brilliance of Petronius’ creation, the lurid hues of Trimalchio’s debauch continue to shape modern images of the Roman meal. But as Trimalchio’s unfortunate guest is at pains to point out, to many Romans this was all a bit much. A powerful purist aesthetic ran through Roman culture, indeed was basic to a cherished if increasingly tarnished self-image until the final days of the empire. Viewed in this light not merely spices but for that matter all seasonings were superfluous, luxurious and even harmful fripperies. The correct purpose of food was nutrition; all else was vanity. Cicero (106–43 BC) was of the opinion that the best spice for his dinner was – or should be – hunger. He even claimed that he preferred the smell of earth to that of saffron. In his Tusculan Disputations he relates the salutary tale of the visit to Sparta of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, a town famous in antiquity for the quality and sophistication of its cooks. Spartan food was equally stereotypical, but to the other extreme. This was, in short, an encounter made to order for edification: the archetypal rich sybarite meets the dour ascetics, famed for their renunciation of all pleasure. On being served a stodgy black broth Dionysius complains that the meal is not to his taste, whereupon the Spartan cook puts the visitor in his place: ‘Small wonder,’ he replies, ‘for the condimenta are lacking.’ ‘And what condimenta are they?’ asks the visitor, obligingly walking into the trap. ‘Honest toil in hunting, sweat, a run to the Eurotas [the local stream], hunger and thirst,’ is the tart response, ‘for with these things the Spartans season their feasts.’

Self-evidently, the message of such exemplary incidents ran deeper than a straightforward declaration of personal preferences. To Romans such as Cicero, how and what you ate was an issue of the utmost ethical importance. Diet was a yardstick of, and in some sense shaped, moral worth. It was Trimalchio’s point inverted: you were what you ate. And what a shocking contrast present indulgence formed to the rugged heroes of the past! Historians and satirists never tired of comparing contemporary debauch with ancient virtue. Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of Pyrrhus, is reported to have cooked his own vegetables. The emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, liked his dinner plain and unaffected; the Stoic Cato declared that he only ate meat so as to be strong enough to fight for the state. The past was tough, frugal and pristine; the present, luxurious and bloated.

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