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.