By 1600, the peso, known as “pieces of eight” to English speakers, was a global currency. The coin was so readily available that during the American War of Independence, it was the base for the reserves guaranteeing paper money. In 1792, the new American Congress based the weight of the American dollar on the Spanish peso. The parity between the two was so exact that the peso remained legal tender in the United States until the 1850s.
The notorious Sir Francis Drake, known to the Spanish as The Dragon, was one of the most successful of the English, and Dutch, buccaneers who attacked Spanish ships from nationalist sentiment, religious fervor, and a desire for plunder.
IN CENTRAL ASIA, A DESCENDANT of Genghis Khan, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, ruler of Afghanistan, asserted his people’s claim over the Indian subcontinent. A hundred years later, Babur’s descendant would give India and the world one of its greatest man-made wonders: the Taj Mahal.
In 1524, the Indian Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of the Punjab, and Rana Sanga, leader of the powerful Rajput state of Mewar in northeast India, made a serious mistake. They invited Babur to invade northern India and help them dethrone Sultan Ibrahim, who sat on the throne of Delhi. Daulat Khan Lodi and Rana Sangha intended to use Babur to further their own ambitions for Sultan Ibrahim’s throne.
The Afghani Babur had his own ambitions. Descended on his father’s side from the Turco-Mongolian conqueror Timur (known in the west as Tamerlane) and on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan, Babur was a hard drinker, a poet, and a military adventurer. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had conquered and lost Timur’s capital of Samarqand—twice. He had seized Kabul and built a home kingdom for himself in Afghanistan. He didn’t much like India, but Afghanistan was poor and India was rich.
Babur helped the Indian rulers defeat Sultan Ibrahim, declared himself emperor at Delhi, and set out on a campaign in which he conquered a territory that extended across northern India from Afghanistan to the borders of Bengal and the Rajput desert. He never got a chance to establish real control over his vast new empire.
KHANWA, NORTH INDIA, 1528. Babur’s small army was eight hundred miles from their home in Kabul and surrounded by the much larger force of Rana Sanga and the Rajput confederation. Heat steamed from the ground. There was no grain for the men and no straw for their horses. Morale was low. Babur’s men longed for the cool mountains of home. Babur did too. India was a pit as far as he was concerned, but it was a rich pit, and with Allah’s help, it was going to be his.
Babur called his men together. Before them all, he promised Allah that he would give up drinking if he won the coming battle. Then he called on his men to join him in the pledge. Nearly three hundred men joined him. Together they poured all the wine into the village well and smashed the jugs.
Now they were ready for battle. And with Allah on their side, they would win.
IN DECEMBER 1530, BABUR’S oldest son, Humayan, fell seriously ill. Babur prayed to Allah to take his life instead of his son’s. After Humayan recovered, Babur fell ill. On December 26, Babur, the first Moghul emperor died.
For a time it appeared that Babur would be the last Moghul emperor as well as the first. All the enemies he had not had a chance to bring under control threatened his son Humayan’s claim to the throne. The new emperor fought for ten years, never completely able to subdue one enemy before another attacked. By April 1540, Humayan’s army was so demoralized that they fled in panic from forces led by Afghan Sher Shah Suri, better known as Sher Khan. Sher Khan declared himself the ruler of northern India, and Humayan took refuge with the ruler of Persia.
It looked as though the Moghul Empire was done, but Humayan did not give up. In 1555, he took advantage of a succession struggle between Sher Khan’s grandsons and re-captured Delhi on July 23.
Humayan did not enjoy Babur’s throne for long. On January 24, 1556, the second Moghul emperor, a drinker like his father, indulged in too much wine and bhang. Inebriated, he fell to his death on the steps of his private observatory, leaving his newly regained empire to his thirteen-year-old son, Akbar.
Akbar lived up to the title by which he became known in Europe, the Great Moghul. Over the course of his fifty-year reign, he expanded the empire’s boundaries across north and central India, from Afghanistan to the Deccan. Akbar the Great was more than just a conqueror; he was the true architect of the Moghul Empire. His reign was notable for his policy of religious tolerance toward his non-Muslim subjects. He was succeeded first by Jahangir, and later by his grandson Shah Jahan, whose story involves romance, tragedy—and a work of art.
Shah Jahan fell in love with his wife when he was only sixteen.
They met at the New Year’s Fair at Royal Meena Bazaar, a private marketplace in the palace gardens in Agra, where women of the royal household played at running market stalls. It was a rare chance for the women to meet and talk to men other than their relatives. Shah Jahan, then Prince Khurram, stopped to haggle over gems at a stall run by the prime minister’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Arjumand Banu Begum. By all accounts, it was love at first sight.
They were married five years later. The emperor Jahangir was so pleased with his son’s choice that he gave her the title Mumtaz Mahal, “Jewel of the Palace.”
Shah Jahan had other wives and concubines, but Mumtaz Mahal remained the love of his life. She was the only one of his wives to bear his children, and she traveled with him wherever he went, even on military campaigns.
In 1631, Shah Jahan was once again at war, and Mumtaz Mahal traveled with him, even though she was pregnant for the fourteenth time in nineteen years. She went into labor in the harem of the temporary encampment, 435 miles south of Agra. The baby was healthy, but Mumtaz Mahal did not survive. Shah Jahan sat by his beloved wife’s side and watched, helpless, as she died.
Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan
After her death, he built a magnificent tomb in her memory: the Taj Mahal.
Shah Jahan brought the best craftsmen to the capital to build the Taj Mahal and insisted on the finest materials: blue-veined marble from Jodhpur, crystal from China, turquoise from Tibet, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.
Shah Jahan did not live to see the work completed. Imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, he died a year before his masterpiece was done.
Aurangzeb would be the last great Moghul emperor.
THE TAJ MAHAL
The Taj Mahal, inspired by love, was an architectural and engineering tour de force built with rare materials imported from all over Asia.
Persian architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri is believed to be the principal designer of the Taj Mahal. Construction began in 1632 and was completed in 1653.
The Taj Mahal is located in the city of Agra, near the Yamuna river. Before beginning construction workmen excavated the three acre site, filled it with dirt to reduce seeping, and then leveled the surface fifty meters above the shore of the river.
Next they would build the tomb.
To transport raw materials more quickly and easily, workers made an inclined ramp of tightly pressurized earth. This fifteen-kilometer-long ramp was the lifeline of the whole construction process. To bring marble and other construction materials to the ramp, laborers used bullock carts with special wagons.
Engineers custom designed a pulley system to lift the huge marble pieces into place. They also designed a mechanical bucket system that used ropes pulled by animals to retrieve water needed for the construction from the nearby river. The water was collected in a massive storage tank and was distributed from there to several smaller storage tanks located at various parts of the construction site.
The tomb itself took around twelve years to complete. The surrounding structure, which includes the mosque, minarets, and gateways, took another ten years.
Approximately twenty thousand laborers worked on this building simultaneously. Artisans from different parts of India were hired to carve the marble flowers found throughout the building.
The total cost of the Taj Mahal was roughly thirty-two mill
ion rupees, a very large amount at that time.
The Taj Mahal is not only an architectural beauty but also an engineering wonder, inspiring architects and civil engineers around the world—five hundred years later.
Workers used more than 25 different kinds of stones for the exquisite inlay work
MAY 20, 1498. FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of Calicut, known as the “City of Spices,” the arrival of the Portuguese caravels was nothing new. India was on the way to everywhere. Merchant vessels carrying goods from one Asian market to another landed at the busy trading port every day during the season when the trade winds were favorable. They carried raw cotton, coffee, and attar of roses from the Islamic countries of the Persian Gulf; silks, tea, porcelain, and zinc from China; spices, sandalwood, and ivory from Southeast Asia.
But for Vasco da Gama and his crew, landing at Calicut was nothing short of astonishing. Theirs was the first Western ship to land in India. India was as rich with trade possibilities as they had dreamed. Every crew member had collected money and valuables to trade for silk and spices.
The local Hindu ruler warmly welcomed da Gama, but the welcome did not last long. The time came for da Gama to present his gifts to the king: twelve pieces of striped cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, six pottery basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two casks of honey. Even da Gama could see that his presents were out of place in the wealthy and sophisticated Indian court.
SOMETHING TO TRADE?
As Vasco da Gama learned, the real problem for European trading companies in Asia was finding merchandise to trade for Asian luxury goods. For the most part, Asians did not want what Europeans had to sell. Some products were too expensive. Most, such as the heavy woolen cloth for which England was famous, were not useful or appealing. What interested Asians most were the precious metals from Spanish America. Forty percent of the New World’s silver flowed into India and China each year.
The Hindu ruler was insulted. Cheap cloth and trinkets might please the tribal peoples of West Africa, but when merchants came to his court asking for permission to trade, they brought him gold. Da Gama hastily tried to explain that he and his crew were explorers not merchants. That made no sense to the king. There was nothing to discover. The city of Calicut and the kingdoms of Hindustan were where they had always been, at the heart of a complicated trade network that stretched from China to Arabia.
BY 1511, PORTUGAL WAS WELL on its way to replacing Venice and the caravan trade as Europe’s primary purveyor of spices and silk.
The new sea route was dangerous. More than a quarter of the ships that sailed from Portugal to the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1634 were lost at sea, but the potential profits outweighed the risks. Instead of seizing and holding large areas of land, the way the Spanish did in the Americas, the Portuguese created a trading-post empire, controlling the sea routes with a series of armed forts from the Azores to Macao. They seized any foreign ships that tried to sail to the Indian Ocean, and sentenced their crews to work in the galleys of Portuguese ships. Suspected spies were arrested and sent to Lisbon for trial.
The Portuguese spice monopoly was divided into two parts. The “Indian pepper contract” allowed merchants to buy spices in Asia, but required them to sell them to the Portuguese king at a fixed price. The “European contract” allowed merchants to buy pepper from the Portuguese king and resell it. For many years, Portuguese merchants brought the spices from Asia, but the Dutch, who owned the largest merchant fleet in Europe, controlled their distribution.
The illustrations in Linchoten’s book Voyages in East Asia were less accurate than his descriptions of the countryside.
The Dutch lost their privileged position in the spice trade in 1580 when Phillip II of Spain conquered Portugal. Suddenly Spain’s enemies became Portugal’s enemies, especially the Protestant regions of the Netherlands, which had revolted against Spanish rule, and Protestant England, which gave the Dutch rebels financial support. No longer able to buy spices from Portugal, Dutch and English privateers captured Portuguese spice ships in the shipping lanes around the Cape Verde islands, the Azores, and the Canaries, just as their Caribbean counterparts captured Spanish galleons laden with American silver.
Dutch merchants knew that piracy was not a permanent solution to their lost access to the Portuguese spice markets. The real answer was establishing direct trade with the Indies. So in 1592, a group of Dutch merchants sent a spy disguised as a trader to acquire information about the Portuguese spice routes.
Before he returned, the Dutch received the information they needed from a source they never expected.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was a Dutch Catholic who worked for a merchant in Lisbon. In 1583, he took the job of secretary to the new archbishop of Goa, the Portuguese capital in India. As secretary to the archbishop he had access to information regarding trade routes and market conditions. He also questioned every European traveler who passed through “golden Goa” about the Asian countries further east. When the archbishop died in 1589, Linschoten headed home to the Netherlands. He spent the next four years sailing on Portuguese ships and working for a Portuguese merchant in the Azores.
When he finally reached the Netherlands in 1592, he had all the information the Dutch needed to know to challenge Portugal’s control of the spice trade.
Marco Polo had used his experiences in Asia to write the first book for armchair travelers. Three hundred years later Linschoten wrote a travel guide for merchants, Voyages to the East Indies. In it, he described the trade routes, including the weather conditions at different times of the year. He noted where ships could resupply with fresh water and vegetables. He reported on the customs in different Asian countries from India and Japan. He even included up-to-date maps. Most important, Linschoten revealed that the feared Portuguese navy had deteriorated so much that it defended the trade routes primarily with its reputation. The sea routes to the east were open.
SPICES
Pepper, the most prized of all the spices in the sixteenth century and still the mainstay of the international spice trade, is the fruit of a climbing vine (Piper nigrum) indigenous to the mountains of Kerala on India’s Malabar Coast. It is harvested as unripe berries for green peppercorns or as ripe red berries that are dried to produce black pepper. (The berries sold as pink peppercorns aren’t pepper at all, but the berries of an evergreen tree from the Peruvian Andes.) Pepper contains a stimulant, peperine, and is the only spice that can be absorbed through the skin. Once as valuable as gold, today pepper is an inexpensive condiment, grown throughout tropical Asia.
Cloves are the dried flower buds of an evergreen tree (Syzgium aromaticum). The name clove comes from the Latin word for the nails that the spice resembles. Cloves originally grew only on a few small volcanic islands in the Indonesian archipelago.
Nutmeg and mace both come from Myristica fragans, a bushy tree native to the South Moluccas, islands within Indonesia. The tree produces a yellow, plumlike fruit with a glossy brown seed the size of a marble, covered with a bright-red, lacy covering, the aril. The spices come from the seed, which is hulled and left to dry. Once dried, the aril is removed and broken into “blades” of mace. The inner seed is the nutmeg.
Columbus sought a new trade route to India and China to obtain coveted spices, such as cinnamon and black pepper. Of course, Columbus didn’t reach the “Indies,” but he did bring some exotic new spices back to Spain, including chili (red) peppers, and a dried, unripe fruit of the plant Pimenta dioica that combined the flavors of cloves, pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and was later called allspice.
In 1595, the first Dutch ships sailed east with a copy of Linschoten’s Voyages on board. Their goal was Java, which Linschoten had identified as a source of spices that was not part of the Portuguese trading network. They returned with a cargo of pepper. Over the next six years, fifteen more Dutch fleets sailed to the Indies in search of pepper.
Linschoten’s book did not give the Dutch an advantage in the spice trade
for long. In 1598, it was published in German and English. Editions in French and Latin soon followed. Queen Elizabeth signed the charter for “The Company of Merchants of London trading in the East Indies” on December 31, 1600. Other nations quickly chartered their own East India companies. The race for spice had begun.
FEBRUARY 5, 1637. ALKMAAR, Holland. Local tavern owner Wouter Winkel was dead. Normally, his seven orphaned children would become wards of the local orphanage until they were old enough to work for a living and then would be sent to a mill or workshop to learn a trade. But Winkel had a hobby that would give his children a more comfortable life—thanks to what grew in the garden next to his inn.
The Dutchman had gotten involved in buying and growing tulips early, when they were of interest to only a few passionate connoisseurs. At the time of his death, Winkel owned more than seventy rare tulips and about thirty thousand azen of less-valuable bulbs. The collection was a fine one, possibly the best in the Netherlands. Winkel had owned bulbs of some of the most valuable tulips in the Netherlands: an Admiral van Enkuizen, two Viceroys, five Brabasons, three bulbs of the Rosen Admiral van der Ejck, an Admiral Liefkens, a Brown and Purple, a Paragon Schilder, and seven bulbs of the increasingly popular Gouda. Most amazing of all, he had owned the bulbs themselves, instead of a future promise of a bulb. They were planted in a garden next to his inn.
The trustees of the local orphanage decided to auction off the collection on behalf of the orphaned children. It had taken months for the bureaucracy of the children’s court to approve the sale, but the timing couldn’t have been better. In the months since Winkel’s death, tulip prices had doubled—twice.
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