Spice: The History of a Temptation

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.*