The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  VENICE AND BYZANTIUM

  Right next to the great Basilica of Saint Mark and the eponymous piazza is the long quay called the Molo. This is where everybody stands to take the stereotypical snapshot of the green lagoon with the sparkling white church of San Giorgio Maggiore in the background. If you want to buy a gondolier’s hat for your nephew or a Carnival cap for your niece, a dozen kiosks here will be happy to oblige. This is where you catch the ferry to the beach on the Lido or to visit the glassworks on Murano or make the trip to the airport. Ships have unloaded passengers and cargo here for a thousand years. It was from this wharf that each doge mounted his gilt-encrusted galley for the annual ceremony in which he married the sea. This has always been Venice’s front porch. Yet what is notable, though not immediately obvious, about the pier is its orientation: the Molo faces south and east. It turns its back on the European mainland, the terra firma of the barbarians, to look in the direction of Constantine’s glittering metropolis.

  When they originally built Saint Mark’s, it was no more than the doge’s modest private chapel, propped up right next door to his walled fortress. Its claim to fame was that it held the relics of Saint Mark the Apostle, stolen from a church in Alexandria in the ninth century. (Legend claims that the merchants sandwiched the remains between slices of pork to keep the caliph’s customs officials at bay.) Some two hundred years on, though, the city had come of age, and like every medieval city of ambition, it needed a grand church to announce her coming out. For a model, the Venetians turned, as they usually did, to Constantinople. They decided to crib the design from the Church of the Holy Apostles, not least because it had been commissioned by Constantine the Great. The doge could now boast of a church to rival the one built by a legendary Roman emperor, with bragging rights to relics just as good as any Byzantine church.

  Much of medieval Venetian culture was in fact stitched together from scraps imported from the East. Venetian law followed the Roman tradition of the Eastern Empire more than it did the legal approach of the mainland.*3 The design of war galleys and the idea of a state-managed arsenal were both largely derived from Byzantium. Taste in clothes, art, and food looked for inspiration to Constantinople. In Venice, Eastern styles of dress—richly brocaded and hanging loose from the shoulders—as well as Greek-inspired icons remained in favor long after the Florentines and Mantuans had turned to tight-fitting, form-revealing outfits and moved on to patronizing the likes of Botticelli and Leonardo.

  Venetians not only tried to dress like the Byzantines, they aped their eating habits, too. Not that every Eastern culinary innovation was immediately embraced. The imported fork, for example, was initially demonized as “an instrument of the devil.” When the doge’s son Giovanni Orseolo returned from Constantinople around 1004 with his Byzantine bride, Maria, she immediately elicited gossip not least because of the highly suspect implements in her trousseau. “She did not touch food with her hands,” wrote a scandalized reporter years after the event, “but the food was cut up into small pieces by her servants and she would pick up these tidbits, tasting them using a golden fork with two tines.” And as if her eating habits weren’t peculiar enough, Maria had a proclivity for bathing, in perfumed water no less! Some even blamed her arrival for the plague that devastated the city at the time. (This is not as far-out as it sounds, since the plague was, in fact, as much a Byzantine export as forks and perfume.) Forks were by no means an overnight success, but by the late thirteenth century, the delicate little implements (they were about the size of today’s oyster fork) were appearing in wills and inventories. You can see them in a Botticelli painting from the mid-fifteenth century in which two young women delicately hold these tiny forks, and later Venetian banquet depictions are littered with them. Though the sources don’t mention it, Maria must have brought her cooks, too. Imagine a finely drilled brigade of Parisian chefs arriving in a Wild West frontier town and you might get some sense of the scandal and wonder engendered by the spiced aromas that now wafted from the kitchens of the doge’s palace. Eleventh-century Venice still had a long way to go to keep up with the Byzantines.

  Even as western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Constantinople was the Mediterranean’s greatest and most cosmopolitan city. At its height, in the reign of the Emperor Justinian (527–565), the imperial capital likely exceeded half a million people (some estimates go as high as a million). No city in Europe would reach that figure for more than a thousand years! As late as 1204, when the Venetians were about to ravage their increasingly decrepit former mistress, one of their company was still awed by what he saw:

  Those who had never seen Constantinople before were enthralled, unable to believe that such a great city could exist in the world. They gazed at its high walls, the great towers with which it was fortified all around, its great houses, its tall churches more numerous than anyone would believe who did not see them for himself; they contemplated the length and breadth of the city that is sovereign over all others.

  The city at the gates of the Bosporus had always been a magnet for people from across eastern Europe and western Asia. A Western Crusader described Constantinople’s melting pot in 1096: “Greeks, Bulgarians…Italians, Venetians, Romanians [the contemporary term for mainland Greece], Dacians [from today’s Romania], English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans, Arabs and people of all nations come together here.” Not surprisingly, the local culture was inflected by all these foreign accents and the city’s cuisine seasoned by flavors from across the empire.

  Byzantine kitchens largely depended on the abundant local fish and produce (much as Turkish and Greek cooking does today), but the imperial capital could also count on supplies of grain from far-off Crimea, cheese and wine from the Aegean Islands, and oil from mainland Anatolia. As far as seasoning goes, garum (garos in Greek), the fermented fish sauce so essential to ancient Greek and Latin cuisines, remained in favor here long after western Europe gave it up. The old Roman influence also showed up in a love of herbs, spices, and other exotic seasonings. The taste for spices, it seems, grew more pronounced over the years. Ancient Roman cooks had mostly limited their use of Asian condiments to black and long pepper (Piper nigrum and Piper longum), despite the fact that there was a more or less direct route that delivered spices from South India to Italy. Other aromatics were mainly used medicinally, though priests and embalmers found them handy as well. Tacitus informs us, for example, that after murdering his wife, Poppaea, in 65 C.E., Nero used a year’s supply of Rome’s cinnamon to bury her.

  In Byzantium, as the connection to ancient Rome faded, spices began to leach from the apothecary’s cabinet to the stewpot. This was remarked upon by an early Christian killjoy, Asterius of Amasea, around 400 C.E. “Becoming more elaborate as every day passes,” he notes with the usual religious ascetic’s breast-beating, “our luxury now impels us to plaster our food with the aromatics of India. Nowadays the spice merchant seems to be working not for the physician but for the cook!” Asterius was probably overstating the case so he could pep up his sermon. Spices remained important in the physicians’ medical kit, their therapeutic value appreciated perhaps even more than before as people became ever more familiar with the humoral system. If anything, the curative properties of the Asian exotics only enhanced their prominence in Byzantine cooking.

  A wide range of spices was used in the kitchens of Constantinople. Apparently, at least one of the emperors, Constantine VIII, was even an amateur cook, “a highly skilled mixer of sauces, seasoning his dishes with colors and flavors so as to arouse the appetite of all types of eaters.” Our source, a contemporary chronicler, adds that the imperial gourmet was addicted to food and sex and, as usual, came to a bad end. The flavors in the emperor’s pantry would be only partially familiar to us. Mastic, produced from the sap of trees on the island of Chios, was a great favorite used in bread and cakes but also as a kind of chewing gum to freshen breath. (Turks and Greeks still add it to chewing gum to similar effect.) Stora
x and balsam, produced in much the same way in the southern reaches of the Middle East, perfumed soups and wines. Spikenard, an extract of a leafy Himalayan plant, and putchuk, a plant from the highlands of Kashmir, were just two of the many Indian seasonings the debauched ruler mixed into his sauces and soups. He could also turn to black pepper, long pepper, ginger, cassia, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and the equally pricey sugar to arouse those jaded appetites. It’s hard to know just how much of these imported seasonings the high-living emperor stirred into his pots, but if we can trust the few recipes that actually give quantities, the seasoning was varied but not overly prodigious.

  It doesn’t seem that the fine spices we associate with medieval and Renaissance Europe were especially valued over other condiments in the middle years of the Byzantine Empire. More likely they were part of a multihued palette of local and imported seasoning. Perhaps they were not as exotic to the Byzantines, who were in constant contact with the spice-savvy culinary cultures of Persia and Baghdad. When the Byzantine army marched into the Persian palace at Dastagert in 626, we find out they looted about seventy-five pounds of aloeswood (another resinous compound used in cooking), but when it came to the silk, linen, sugar, and ginger they also pilfered, it seems they were not sufficiently impressed to bother noting the quantities. Spices certainly fetched a good price in Constantinople, but they were assuredly less expensive than in Venice, and vastly less so than in France or England. Was there perhaps less snob appeal to spices because they were relatively affordable here?

  All the same, in Constantinople, spice dealers made a good living off these exotic roots and berries for well over a thousand years. Some traveled as far west as Burgundy to peddle their wares, and at least one Byzantine merchant was apparently spotted at the court of Ceylon sometime around 550. Typically, though, most of the profits fell in the laps of other middlemen who controlled a network spanning more than eight thousand miles across a continually reconfigured chessboard of shifting nations and inconstant religions. For cloves and nutmeg, the long voyage began in the Moluccas, a minute archipelago of volcanic outcroppings in Southeast Asia, where Indian and Chinese traders loaded their ships for the three-thousand-mile sail to India’s pepper coast. At the end of that trip, the resident merchants—Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and Jews—exchanged silver and gold for pepper and nutmeg before loading up the waiting dhows. The little ships, once filled, would flit with the autumn winds across the Indian Ocean and into the Red and Arabian seas. Once more, the spices were reloaded, this time onto thousands of camels, which marched like never-ending columns of ants across the dusty plains to deliver their scented booty to their spice-hungry sovereigns in Egyptian Alexandria and Byzantine Trebizond, on the Black Sea. Then finally came the Mediterranean galleys and Constantinople. After the seventh century, all the overland routes were under Islamic rule, but at least the last leg was run by the Byzantines. But not for long. The Venetians were waiting in the wings.

  It should be noted that the Venetians weren’t the only ones to muscle in on the Mediterranean spice trade. The Genoese and even the Pisans gave them a good run for their money. Still, in the end, the fishermen from the boggy lagoon prevailed.

  MERCHANTS AND PIRATES

  Look at a map of the Mediterranean and you’ll see a body of water broken up into numerous gulfs, inlets, and estuaries. If you consider it as a whole, though, you’ll notice the sea divides more or less neatly in two uneven halves: the smaller, western Mediterranean, which ends at the Italian boot, and the larger, eastern half, which lies south and east of Sicily. Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, sits more or less in the middle of the northern coast of the eastern half, perched like a spider above the web of sea-lanes in the Aegean and strategically located to control all traffic with the Black Sea. On the arid southern coast, the great city of Alexandria is located at the very western end of the fertile Nile Delta, the outlet of the caravans bringing pepper and other luxury goods up from the Red Sea. Venice is positioned at the very northwest corner of the Adriatic, the largest gulf of the eastern Mediterranean and just across the Alps from the German-speaking lands. From Venice, it’s more or less a direct shot down the eastern Adriatic coast, skimming mainland Greece, past the island of Crete, and then straight down to Egypt. This voyage is easily the most direct path between the spice emporia of the Orient and the silver mines in the heart of Europe.

  Controlling this route became the dominant foreign policy concern of the rulers of the Republic of Saint Mark from the moment they began to send their galleys out of the Aegean. To safeguard its program, the city gradually expanded its sphere of influence, first by setting down trading colonies in ports along the route, then strong-arming them into protectorates, and finally, especially after 1204, seizing them outright as colonies. If you travel this route today, you can still see mini-Venices all down the Dalmatian coast, and plenty of Greek towns in the Aegean continue to be overshadowed by the wrecks of Venetian citadels.

  The merchants who ran the Venetian state often resorted to the techniques they had learned in the salt trade. This meant that no one who interfered with the Republic’s business was off-limits. The Venetian navy was sent to fight Italian city-states just as often as any other interlopers. In particular, the wars with Genoa came almost as regularly as the tides throughout most of the Middle Ages as the two cities wrestled for control of the eastern Mediterranean. But violence wasn’t always the best approach. When the doges calculated that sending in the battle triremes was a bad bet, the city’s agents arranged for all sorts of deals and exemptions, even if it meant negotiating with ostensibly hostile Muslim potentates.

  While the motivating spark for the city’s imperial expansion was the need to protect the spice route—whether the odiferous cargo was coming from the Black Sea, the Levant, or Egypt—the trade network that resulted from the policy involved just about anything that could be loaded onto a vessel. So Bohemian silver might be exchanged for Slavic slaves in the Crimea, who were in turn traded for pepper in Alexandria, which was then bartered for Florentine wool in Venice, from whence it was shipped to Trebizond and sold for ginger, which could be used to buy Apulian grain in the south of Italy and sent on to Venice, where it then fetched a good price in Bohemian silver. Consequently, Venetian merchants, no matter what was in their ship’s hold, benefited from the bases established to further the pepper trade.

  All the same, it was the spices that were critical to keeping Venice Inc. in the black. This was widely recognized, and the administration kept tight control of the details of the spice trade. To ensure the safety of the cargo, spices could be transported only in an armed convoy referred to as the muda. The muda had a legal monopoly on spices for some two hundred years, starting in the 1330s. Armed galleys were designed and built in the Arsenale, the massive government shipyard, exclusively for this lucrative trade and were then leased to the highest bidder. He, in turn, was required to accommodate even small-time merchants at standardized rates. As a result, in 1423, Doge Tomasso Mocenigo estimated that Venetians of all stripes invested some ten million ducats in the spice trade, annually reaping an impressive profit of some four million, and this at a time when government revenues were less than one million!*4

  As in Byzantium, the European definition of what was called a spice was rather loose in those days, encompassing perfumes, medicines, and even dyes along with the likes of cinnamon and ginger. A list of purchases by the Venetians in Damascus in the early fourteen hundreds gives a good idea of what was in demand. The Italians loaded up on what we would call “spices” of varying qualities, including black pepper and long pepper, five kinds of ginger, galingale (similar to ginger), zedoary (related to turmeric), nutmeg, mace, cloves, clove stalks, three types of “cinnamon,” cubebs (a kind of pepper), cardamom, but also several varieties of incense, dyes, and a half dozen drugs and other chemicals, some thirty items in all. But this long list is a little misleading, since most of these Oriental exotics were traded in minute quantities. The only two co
mmodities that were traded in bulk (making up some 50 to 65 percent of the Damascus spice purchases) were pepper and ginger. And pepper was king. In the fifteenth century, Venetians imported some five pounds of pepper for every two pounds of ginger. Moreover, the quantity of black pepper traded was typically more than all the other spices combined. Accordingly, when Venetian doges fretted about keeping their sea-lanes safe and their ships well provisioned, they were mostly concerned about the flow of the wrinkled black berries from Malabar.

  Most traders made a perfectly good living buying and selling more mundane commodities, so why the obsession with spices? The short answer is money. On average, Venetian traders earned a net profit of some 40 percent from spices. The great Florentine bankers of the time were getting half that return on investment. Other merchandise might earn 15 to 20 percent if you were lucky. And although certain commodities, especially grain in times of famine, could occasionally be more lucrative, the market for spices remained nice and steady, fat years and lean. Moreover, you did not need a huge investment to enter the market. As a young man with limited resources, a twenty-something merchant could get on a boat to Egypt and return with a couple of sacks of pepper and still make it worth his while. To make a similar profit on grain, you would need to invest serious money, hire an entire ship, and fill it with literally tons of wheat.

  But spices had something else going for them, a seldom-remarked quality that may explain why pepper, in particular, was the bait that drew so many Venetian galleys to trade with the infidel and later lured the Spanish and the Portuguese to distant oceans. Spices don’t spoil—or at least, not quickly. We are so used to nibbling Chilean grapes and chomping on shrimp from Thailand that we may forget how difficult it used to be to transport all but a few specialized commodities over any great distance. There would have been no demand for Indian-grown pepper in medieval Europe if the dry little berries had not been light enough and sufficiently nonperishable that they could withstand being shipped halfway across the world. For a bale of pepper to get from Quilon to Cologne, it would likely endure months of transportation by ship, camel, and mule, interrupted by many more months of storage in every port along the route—and all this without a noticeable decline of quality. Pepper, in particular, is remarkably stable and can be stored up to a decade as long as it’s kept reasonably dry. Imagine trying to ship a sack of mangoes halfway across the world or lugging a crate of china across the Alps. And while Asian spices were never really worth their weight in gold, they were a whole lot lighter for those camels to carry! The only other goods that were worth transporting over such a long distance were precious stones and silk. Marco Polo’s trading family, for example, seems to have specialized in pearls and such when they trekked across Asia in the late twelve hundreds. The problem with jewels, though, was that they were relatively pricey even at the point of purchase, and thus, the potential for profit was inevitably smaller. Spices, on the other hand, were a cheap agricultural commodity that was easily obtained by low-skilled foragers in the forest. This explains why princes and businessman could get away with jacking up the price 1,000 percent between the time the dried condiments left Asia and their arrival at the Adriatic port.