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

by Michael Krondl

  It’s worth noting that humoral medicine wasn’t the only game in town. Much like we turn to herbal medicine and yoga when more conventional medicine fails, people in medieval Europe turned to prayer, miracles, and magic when the humoral system couldn’t deliver the goods. Not surprisingly, this happened a lot. In any case, the line between healer and magician was often fuzzy. In 1403, five “sorcerers” were allowed to attempt to cure Charles VI of France. Unluckily for them, the king’s idea of a malpractice award was to burn the quacks at the stake. Other healers were accused of employing sorcery, astrology, and an assortment of other unorthodox medical techniques, though that didn’t stop them from having a successful practice.

  During the Renaissance, spices had their place in everyday medicine, but they also had more esoteric uses. In the sixteenth century, alchemy was all the rage. Alchemists operated on a more metaphysical plane than ordinary doctors and nutritionists, but their arcane insights often trickled down into general dietary theory. These protochemists are often caricatured as obsessed with turning base metals into gold, but many were more preoccupied with discovering a prescription for eternal life, while others had even more transcendent goals. One influential school, led by the Florentine physician and humanist Ficino and his protégé Paracelsus, came up with a notion of hyperawareness that they called the “spiritus,” which could be achieved through a very particular alignment of the humors. Through this “spiritus,” the melancholic individual (refined melancholia was naturally the prerequisite for genius) would be able to perceive the world without having to resort to more ordinary senses. In other words, transcendent genius could be achieved if you carefully calibrated the intake of your micronutrients. Of course, the highly concentrated humors in spices made them perfect for the job. Paracelsus, for one, was fond of a kind of metaphysical aromatherapy in which his spice-scented concoctions were meant to be inhaled rather than consumed. In one recipe intended to kick-start this “spiritus,” a potion of potable gold was perfumed with cardamom, cinnamon, mace, and cloves, along with flower and animal gland extracts.

  While the obscure concerns of Paracelsus were hardly of interest to the man in the street, many of the ideas filtered down to the popular press. Who wouldn’t want to find out the secret formula of a long and healthy life, especially in an era in which pestilence and disease were all too commonplace and a fifty-year-old person was considered a doddering relic?

  Yet even as the details of the venerable humoral system became available to the widest public ever, Galen’s theories increasingly came under attack from rival camps.

  SPICES LOSE FAVOR

  In one of Rembrandt’s more famous paintings, a group of lace-collared men huddles around a limp body entirely naked except for a skimpy loincloth. They are all bathed in a ghostly light that seems to emanate from the white cadaver at their center. One of the men, the only one with a plain collar and a hat, pries apart the dead man’s left arm with a pair of forceps, exposing the meat, muscle, and sinew beneath the skin. The picture, painted in 1632, is known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and depicts a scene that took place in the old spice-weighing tower in Nieuwemarkt. By this point, the building not only served to regulate the traffic in nutraceuticals like cinnamon and nutmeg but was also used by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons for their annual public dissection. Dissection had been made legal only a few years earlier, and there was still a level of prurient titillation to the rare occasions when the public was invited. The rule was that only the cadavers of convicted criminals could be pried open for inspection. This one had just been hanged for armed robbery. As the tangled innards of the thief ’s arm dangle from the end of the doctor’s instrument, the famed surgeon Nicolaes Tulp looks out, presumably to the assembled audience in the operating theater. Apparently, he was as skilled at wooing an audience as wielding a scalpel. He later held the position of city treasurer eight times and of burgomaster (mayor) four times.

  Surgeons did not used to be this highly esteemed. In medieval Europe, the messy business of surgery was often a sideline practiced by barbers and dentists, lowly professions compared to the learned ranks of physicians, who kept their clothes clean and handed out carefully penned prescriptions. People turned to surgeons only as a last resort. The Catholic Church had long had an issue with dissecting corpses, with the result that most surgeons had to learn on still-living patients—obviously with variable success. Yet once Holland had declared itself for the Protestant side, the taboo against cutting open cadavers was slowly relaxed, and doctors could finally study the subcutaneous world.

  In the Middle Ages, the inside of the human body had been as much a terra incognita as the far-off Indies, and the first explorers of hearts and spleens made discoveries that were often just as surprising as those made by da Gama and Columbus. What they found often contradicted what they’d read in the erudite textbooks of Galen’s apostles. But perhaps more important, it was the empirical approach of Tulp and his colleagues that made the Galenic model—that exquisitely constructed house of cards built of deductive reason—wobble at its foundations. Over and over in seventeenth-century texts, you read the revolutionary refrain that since the ancients had lived in another time and place, they could hardly be regarded as the source of all knowledge. The humoral system was not yet thrown out the window, but it was precariously balanced on the ledge, with competing systems making its hold on medical orthodoxy ever more tentative. What happened then is just what happens today when medical opinion begins to shift: the public got confused. As far as spices went, who knew where they were now supposed to fit in the people’s diet?

  Whereas spices’ overseas origin had once been a selling point, now it became controversial—at least, in some quarters. The Portuguese and Castilian voyages in search of Christians and spices had come home with reports of hundreds, if not thousands, of plants nobody in Europe had ever heard of and plenty of specimens, too. Dietitians and naturalists had the prodigious task of sorting them all out so they could be plugged into the humoral system. Many of the new plants were viewed with suspicion. (Famously, tomatoes and potatoes were long considered toxic.) Arguments simmered about whether imported plants and medicines were well suited to Europeans. According to the xenophobic camp, when God created the world, he had provided all that was necessary for each group of people in their own backyard—thus, local medicines like chamomile and henbane were better for curing local ills than exotic cloves and nutmeg. Conveniently, this happened to align with the opinions of those Calvinist preachers who regarded the likes of cinnamon and cloves not as missives from paradise but as the harvest of a pagan and hedonistic soil. As such, they were sure to beguile men away from a decent, God-fearing life, a life that could come only from a diet of homegrown turnips and spice-free cheese.

  While the religious climate in the Netherlands may have become more tolerant toward slicing into cadavers, Protestants and Papists alike became ever more puritanical when it came to the pleasures of living flesh. Eating well (however that was defined) was increasingly seen as the problem rather than the solution, as it had been earlier. The diet books make this change in medical opinion abundantly clear. Ken Albala, an American food historian who has studied the early nutrition guides, points to a shift from fifteenth-century books—which are generally tolerant and, at times, even promote the pleasures of the table (Platina’s bestselling De honesta voluptate et valetudine means “On Honest Pleasure and Good Health,” after all)—to a more preachy and uptight approach that has no use for fine cooking. In 1530, Luis Lobera de Ávila, a Spanish dietitian, could still advise his readers to “eat all that is most delectable and delicious for it is also the most nourishing.” By the seventeenth century, you are more likely to read opinions such as those of Leonard Lessius, the author of a popular lifestyle guide, who ranted against “lickorish cooking” and “curious dressing of meats.”

  The change in medical fashion was no doubt accelerated by the technology of printing itself. The arrival of mechanical printing didn’
t merely mean a cheaper, quicker alternative to hand-lettered manuscripts. It bore about as much relationship to the earlier technology as Google does to a card catalog. Printing fundamentally changed the way people learned about the world. Without (relatively) cheap Bibles, the Reformation is unthinkable; without copies of cookbooks rolling off the presses by the hundreds of thousands, the coming Europe-wide revolution in fine dining would likely have been no more than a localized uprising.*52 Because of its volume, the business of printing books always needs new products, new ideas. By its very nature, it cannot recycle the same information over and over—as was the case in the days of few and precious manuscripts. After all, just how many reprints of Galen can your customers buy?

  It’s more than likely that the same mechanism we see in today’s diet-book racket got its start in the Renaissance. Then, as now, publishers were always on the lookout for someone with a bright idea that would resonate with the public. If the book sold, other authors imitated it. As consumers tired of the same old thing, a new (or repackaged) idea came along, and everybody jumped on the new bandwagon. This may explain, at least in part, why, long before anyone could imagine an Atkins diet, nutrition trends came and went for no reason other than a shift in fashion. Naturally, the changes came faster and faster as more publishers increased production and as more people could read and afford to buy books.

  By the middle years of the seventeenth century, it seems that readers were fed up with diet books, and the market for these self-help works dried up. It may be that all the competing medical systems of the time just made the public throw up its hands and give up on the experts. Maybe people were sick of being nagged about what they should eat and just stopped listening. Or perhaps it was merely that another cycle of the publishing business had come full circle.

  All this religious, scientific, and intellectual ferment was going on as Europe was embroiled in yet another round of her murderous wars. Philip’s crusade against the Dutch was only one among many. In the center of Europe, what had begun as a campaign against Czech Protestants in 1618 spun out of control, drawing in every major power in Europe. The Thirty Years’ War, as it would come to be known, careened across the center of the continent like an insatiable tornado. In its wake, cities lay devastated, fertile plains burned to ashes, whole economies collapsed. When it wiped out the Republic’s customers in central Europe, it was the war, not the Portuguese or Dutch, that delivered the coup de grâce to Venice’s ailing spice trade. But everywhere in Europe, the political system was realigned. Christendom had entered the seventeenth century dominated by one militantly Catholic superpower, Spain. By the time the bloodbath was over, the states that emerged—most notably, France and Austria—were much more interested in keeping their borders intact than in crusading against Protestants or Moors. Europe’s lines of demarcation hardened along nationalist lines. Countries increasingly came to be defined by language and cuisine as much as by creed.

  The wars of religion had implications for scientists, cooks, and publishers as they had for politicians and priests. In Catholic Italy, the proudly independent medical faculty in Padua was brought to heel by the pope’s Jesuit watchdogs. As a result, it quickly lost its primacy to more progressive Protestant European schools, such as the Dutch university of Leiden. Notoriously, Galileo was forced from Padua after repeated run-ins with the Inquisition. Many alchemists and astrologers went underground, lest they be accused of practicing necromancy—a serious charge that could get you sent to the stake. Then, in concert with the religious zealotry, witch trials swept the continent during the later years of the Reformation. This wave of persecution peaked in what some historians have called a “witch-hunting craze” of the hundred years between 1550 and 1650. (The Salem witch trials were a distant echo of this Europe-wide phenomenon.) Not surprisingly, physicians who knew what was good for them tried to distance themselves as much as possible from any of the occult arts that had once been part of their medical kit.

  So what did all this tumult mean for the consumption of spices in Europe? In the short term, not much. Outside of France, late-seventeenth-century recipe collections seem just as enthusiastic about cooking with spices as they had a hundred years before. Just look at the penchant for spice in De verstandige kock. Nutmeg and cloves also still show up regularly in physicians’ medical kits. But increasingly, national cuisines started to diverge. And in France, which had now overtaken Italy as Europe’s style-setter, the fashion in spicing was changing. In Versailles, well-spiced cuisine lost its cachet. Elsewhere in Europe, fashionistas took note. None of this happened overnight or everywhere, but the seeds of what we might call modern European cooking (and consequently, American cooking, too), with its emphasis on local seasonings, were planted just as the Dutch East India Company was raking in its greatest profits from the bloodstained nutmeg groves.

  THE GOLDEN AGE LOSES ITS LUSTER

  Despite Jan Coen’s mostly terrible reputation today, there is no shortage of streets and other landmarks named after him across the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, he has lent his name to a major tunnel and a harbor nearby. Coenhaven (the harbor) is a short bicycle ride from the Centraal Station. The route takes you past the old wood harbor where the timber for the East Indiamen arrived. These days, the old jetties are lined with crusty barges converted into houseboats, festooned with planters and children’s swing sets that glow magenta against the leaden sky. When you look ahead, giant cranes hover above container ships, like enormous praying mantises readying for combat. Coenhaven is like any other modern harbor, with rows of low, sprawling warehouses painted with gray and more gray. But sniff the air. The usual salt and diesel harbor smell mingles here with the darker, loamier scent of cocoa. Amsterdam long yielded preeminence to the superior modern harbor at Rotterdam, but it nonetheless manages to lead the world in cocoa imports. Still, Coen’s harbor with its scattering of cargo ships is no more than a shadow of the old port packed with hundreds of ships, in the radiant days when Amsterdam’s spice imports made her the envy of the world.

  In the beginning, the VOC business model worked sufficiently well to make a lot of seventeenth-century Amsterdamers rich enough to build fancy houses and fill them with exquisite paintings, but it had a fundamental built-in flaw. It did not take into account that spices are not the same kind of trade good as herring and beer, that the demand for luxuries like pepper and nutmeg was not based on price but rather on more ineffable, even metaphysical, attributes; fashion is fickle. Once the Dutch had figured out how to take over the supply side of the equation, they assumed that demand would just keep on growing. The trouble was that spices, once they had been turned into an ordinary commodity and lost their symbolic resonance, had only a marginal place in the modern, postmedieval world.

  In the seventeenth century, the chocolate that scents Coenhaven’s briny breeze, as well as tea and coffee, came to be the new darlings of the in-crowd. The new tropical imports were sometimes even hyped in the same words as the old Asian seasoning. In much the way that some spices had earlier been prescribed to increase mental agility, the stimulating effects of tea and coffee in particular were recommended to the movers and shakers of the new rational age. They certainly had none of the fusty and sensuous associations of the Oriental scents or the soporific effects of spiced wine and beer. Heavily spiced beverages, in particular, lost market share to the modern stimulants. Admittedly, chocolate (the drink) had a reputation that was a little more ambiguous than the other brews, perhaps because it had arrived in Europe by way of the decaying Madrid court, but as Amsterdam came to dominate the cacao business, it, too, became a staple in any modish drawing room. The VOC got into the coffee and tea business as well, but it was never able to control the market as it had for the fine spices. As the demand for the East Asian condiments sagged, the shine began to wear off Amsterdam’s golden age.

  There were many factors that led to Amsterdam’s slow slide from her perch atop the world. In much the same way that the city’s initial ascent was not wholly d
ependent on the East India trade (compared to Lisbon, say), her tumble down had many causes. But the drop-off in the spice business was symptomatic of problems all around. Unlike Venice, which managed to reinvent herself as an amusement park, giving the city its long half-life, or Lisbon, which rose again in the eighteenth century on an updraft of Brazilian gold dust, Amsterdam mostly lapsed into obscurity and relative poverty by the mid-1700s. The ambitious expansion plan for the ring of canals that built the Herengracht for the booming seventeenth-century city was left uncompleted and only partially populated until the industrial age.

  Given the fact that Amsterdam had made its fortune during the years of conflict with Spain, the trouble began with a short-lived fashion for signing peace treaties. The first bit of bad news came in 1648, when word circulated on the Dam that an end had been declared to the Spanish war. To make things worse, the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe had finally ground to its weary conclusion that same year. Three years later, the English stopped slaughtering one another in their Civil War. Now, all of a sudden, Europe’s great powers could pause to turn their greedy heads upon the riches of the minute republic.

  Spain was out of the picture for good, but now England was feeling her oats. In a series of wars between 1652 and 1678, the new naval superpower gnawed off chunks of the Dutch empire from Malaysia to Manhattan. In mainland Europe, the French invaded the Netherlands itself. Wars against Louis XIV’s armies were bad enough, but what really hurt the economy of the Hollanders was when one Dutch business after another was expelled from the Sun King’s realm in the name of French protectionism.

  All over Europe, absolutist monarchs and their ministers were entranced with the economics of mercantilism, subsidizing exports and cutting off imports. The French founded their own East India Company so that they wouldn’t have to buy spices imported by foreigners. They set up a little colony at Pondicherry, on India’s southeast coast, to supply their pepper ships and even tried to seduce the ruler of Ceylon away from the embrace of the Dutch. But as one Frenchman pointed out, “No lover is as jealous of his mistress as the Dutch are of their trade in Spices,” and the maneuver ended in failure. Virtually all of Europe’s pepper continued coming through Amsterdam and London, and the Netherlands alone controlled all the cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves that reached Europe’s shores. And yet, while it does not appear that Dutch spices were particularly singled out for sanctions by the Versailles government, it does seem awfully coincidental that heavily spiced cooking loses favor among the elite in France, and only in France, during just this period. You have to ask, how seemly would it have been to serve food highly seasoned with the foreigners’ spices to the king and his mercantilist ministers? Still, mercantilism can at best offer only a fragment of the explanation for the French revolution in cooking of the sixteen hundreds.