by Jack Turner
Poverty is a lesser risk to the well-being of the soul than the rocks and flames Horace imagines in the Indian Ocean. The perils and costs of wealth outweigh the rewards. Horace, having none of it, will buck the world’s trend of getting and spending for the simple pleasures of Stoic philosophy.
For those inclined to agree, India and its pepper became almost paradigmatic. In the early imperial period, pepper served as a convenient symbol for the satirists, much in the way that junk bonds came to epitomise the greed of the 1980s. Persius claims that only sheer greed (avaritia) could account for the appetite for pepper, driving a trader to take the newly arrived spice from the camel’s back without even giving the thirsty beast a drink. In Dryden’s translation:
Nature is ever various in her Frame:
Each has a different Will; and few the same:
The greedy Merchants, led by lucre, run
To the parch’d Indies, and the rising Sun;
From thence hot Pepper, and rich Drugs they bear,
Bart’ring for Spices their Italian ware.
Persius’ fellow satirist Juvenal likewise saw in the spice trade all the risks and delusions of wealth. He claimed that a merchant with his cargo of pepper would cast off beneath an inky sky in the teeth of a tempest – ‘It’s only a summer storm!’ he declares – and for his folly be pitched overboard and swallowed by the waves, still clutching his purse between his teeth as he gasps his last breath. Where we might see heroic endeavour many Romans were more inclined to see greed and lunacy. To Pliny the Elder – who as a former naval commander might have been inclined to admire this sort of enterprise more than most – the voyage to India was no more than a grubby quest for loot, ‘and so India is brought near by a lust for gain’.
So it was that spices failed the moralists’ checklist of acceptability on all counts. They were expensive, enfeebling, Eastern, effeminising. And as if this were not enough, they lacked any evident nutritional value, their sole apparent function being to stimulate the appetite into new excesses of gluttony. Pliny drew these themes together, while affecting an air of lofty contempt for the taste for pepper then sweeping the empire. The spice never stuck to Romans’ ribs but merely tickled their palates:
It is remarkable that its [pepper’s] use has come into such favour: for with some foods it is their sweetness that is appealing, others have an inviting appearance, but neither the berry nor the fruit of pepper* has anything to recommend it. The sole pleasing quality is its pungency – and for the sake of this we go to India! Who was the first person who wanted to try it on his food, or who in his craving for an appetite was not content simply to go hungry?
It must have been galling for Pliny that his fellow Romans apparently paid him little attention, yet his complaint would ring down the ages – enduring, in fact, until our own day. Modern historians are less prone to make the same connection between luxury and decline, yet much ink has been spilt on the question of Rome’s balance of payments with India, although it would seem that the surviving economic data are too fragmentary or too biased for us to judge whether or to what extent the spice trade was in fact harmful to the Roman economy. In any case, the murky reality is arguably less important than the perception, which was crystalline. Even the equation of spicy Eastern luxury with Roman enfeeblement has rung some bells. E.H. Warmington, one of the authorities on Rome’s trade with India, worked himself into a flap in suggesting that ‘India with its manifold supplies of precious stones, perfumes and spices … contributed a very large proportion towards satisfying the luxurious inclinations of a Rome which had lost most of its ancient morality, and helped to increase certain tendencies which led to the downfall of the western Roman Empire.’
The merits of the case need not detain us. More interesting is the moralising thrust, which forms one of the central themes of the history of spice from the days of imperial Rome practically to our own time. All of these themes would in due course resurface, often, ironically enough, in the form of Christian polemics directed at the decadent empire. As spices were sought after, so too were they seen as an insidious cancer eating away at Rome’s personal and public vigour. (How the eastern half of the empire, which survived until 1453, was any less dissolute or less addicted to Eastern luxury than the western half is unclear. With its access to the trans-Eurasian caravan routes, there were more, not fewer, spices in Byzantium.) In this view it was not the barbarians or even the lead pipes, but all that spice that caused the fall of Rome.
Palate
Decline, Fall, Survival
The pepper tree grows in India, on the flanks of Caucasus. Seen from the ground, its leaves resemble those of the juniper. The forests are guarded by serpents, and when the pepper is ripe the inhabitants of that region set them on fire. The serpents flee the fire, which blackens the pepper. For pepper is white by nature, although it has several fruits. The immature variety is called long pepper; what is untouched by the fire is white pepper; and the pepper that has a rough and wrinkled skin gets both its colour and its name from the beat of the fire.
St Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), Etymologiae
Even as Rome weakened and fell, the demand for spices endured, but at a vastly reduced level. It is often claimed that the barbarians who conquered the empire had no taste for the refinements of life, but this is far from being the case. In fact an eager appetite for spice survived in those isolated corners of Europe where trade and civilisation outlasted the Roman collapse. Contrary to the stereotypes, ancient and modern, the barbarians themselves were hugely interested in the luxuries long enjoyed by Romans, not least their spices. Europe’s chief obstacle was finding the means to pay for them.
Even Christians acquired the taste – though Christians, as we shall see, had as many if not more reasons to be wary of spice as the most stoic Roman. Once Christianity became the official religion of the empire senior churchmen had access to the cursus publicus, or government post, the imperial network of inns and warehouses supplying food, transport and accommodation to all senior officials travelling on state business. A warrant granting access to the cursus survives from AD 314, addressed to three bishops en route to a Church council at Arles. When they arrived at an inn along the routes the bishops could expect to be supplied with lodging, horses, carriages, bread, oil, chickens, eggs, vegetables, beef, pigs, sheep, lambs, geese, pheasants, garum, cumin, dates, almonds, salt, vinegar and honey, along with an impressive array of spices: pepper, cloves, cinnamon, spikenard, costus and mastic.
Warrants such as this one could be presented at any of the inns on the empire’s vast network of highways. Since the document stipulates that the bearer was entitled to demand his provisions without delay, it would seem that the well-heeled traveller could expect to find spices even outside the major centres. The state made similarly spiced provision for bishops en route to the great council at Nicaea. Evidently the exigencies of Church business overrode any qualms the bishops may have had about the mortification of the flesh.
Junketing bishops aside, plenty of other Romans knew spices in an age of decline. Trade continued. In 337 Constantine received an embassy from the Indians ‘who live near the rising sun’, and a little later his nephew Julian the Apostate received emissaries from various Indian nations, Sri Lanka and a mysterious island off the west coast of India, possibly the Maldives. An imperial edict of the western emperor Honorius describes the bustling commercial life of Arles in 418: ‘All the famous products of the rich Orient, of perfumed Arabia and delicate Assyria, of fertile Africa, fair Spain, and brave Gaul, abound here so profusely that one might think the various marvels of the world were indigenous in its soil … it unites all the enjoyments of life and all the facilities of trade’ – this less than a decade after successive tides of barbarian hordes had swept through Gaul and reduced its major cities to ashes. It is not until late in the fifth century that the very last Roman coins in India finally peter out.
In these centuries pepper in particular was still familiar as a foodstuff,
at least to a certain class. The Gallic poet Ausonius (c.310–c.395) mentions it in an epigram entitled ‘On Food’, and around 350 Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius makes numerous references to pepper and other spices in his Opus Agriculturae. He used the spice when making vinegar and flavoured cheese, mixed with thyme. To Palladius ‘pepper’ was practically synonymous with ‘condiment’. Even in the calamitous fifth century, when the frontiers collapsed and the barbarians swarmed across the empire, the grammarian and philosopher Macrobius could assume familiarity with the spice. In one of the dialogues of his Saturnalia, Caecina Albinus has a question for his learned friend: ‘Tell me, please, Disarms, why mustard and pepper, if applied to the skin, penetrate it and make a sore, but, when eaten, they do no harm to the substance of the belly?’
At first glance, references such as these suggest that little had changed since the heyday of the trade in the days of the early empire. Yet the continued availability of spices concealed more subtle and enduring shifts. For one, the cost had soared. In Pliny’s day, when the trade was at its zenith, pepper was some 250 to 280 times cheaper than gold by weight; by 301 the ratio had slipped to ninety to one. Finds of Roman coins in India begin diminishing in frequency after the reign of Caracalla (211–217). The disappearing currency and the price hike alike had much to do with the fraying of the empire’s eastern periphery. Through the turbulent years of the third century, the empire suffered one disaster after another along its eastern borders, rendering the Eastern traffic hazardous, and ultimately all but impossible. The Red Sea littoral came under the control of the Blemmyes, a hostile African tribe, and Rome’s direct route to India had been cut. Trade passed into the hands of the Arab middlemen, which is where it would remain until after Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India.
New means of supply entailed new perceptions. Now that no more Roman fleets sailed to India on the monsoon, the spice lands once familiar to Horace’s ‘tireless merchant’ slipped off the horizons of European spice traders into medieval realms of fantasy and the unknown. The Indies retreated beyond what the medievalist Jacques Le Goff has called a ‘dreamlike horizon’, and there they would stay until the age of discovery. St Jerome (c.347–420) knew of merchants who, on leaving the Red Sea and entering the Indian Ocean,
arrive in India after nearly an entire year, at the river Ganges (which Holy Scripture names as Phison), which flows around the entire land of Evila, and is said to bear many types of spices from the fountain of Paradise. Here are found carbuncles, emeralds and shining pearls, for which desire burns in the breasts of noble women; and mountains of gold, which it is impossible for men to approach, because of gryphons, dragons and huge-bodied monsters: so that it might be disclosed to us what type of guards avarice has.
This mingling of ignorance and pious wariness set the tone for the next thousand years.
As Rome frayed before it fell, when the barbarians finally arrived at the gates they found the spice trade greatly reduced from its glory days of the first and second centuries. Their impact on the long-distance luxury trade was mixed. On the one hand, the barbarians shattered the prosperity and order on which trade depended; on the other, they inherited the taste. The Gothic invaders who overran the dismembered western empire took particularly to the Romans’ pepper. In 408 Alaric, king of the Goths, besieged the city of Rome into submission, and the terrified Senate sent out envoys to negotiate a humiliating ransom. In return for their lives and a lifting of the siege Alaric agreed to accept five thousand pounds of gold, 30,000 pieces of silver, four thousand robes of silk, three thousand pieces of fine scarlet cloth, and three thousand pounds of pepper – a revealing comment on the relative values of these luxuries. The conspicuous prosperity of the Roman cities acted like a magnet for the roving Germanic armies, drawing them like so many flies to a carcass. In this sense the moralists who detected in Rome’s luxurious ways the harbingers of decline were, after all, onto something.
Yet if spices accompanied Rome on its long road to ruin, they were not wholly unmarked by the experience. During the last centuries of empire the very idea of spice ripened into something at once richer and more obscure than the pipera and condimenta of imperial Rome. The word species was now first employed as an umbrella term signifying a great many high-value, readily transferable and generally low-volume goods, as distinct from the ordinary or bulk items of commerce. Along with an implication of high cost, the word conveyed a sense of extraordinariness, of special distinction. Run-of-the-mill or home-grown flavourings did not qualify. Alongside the pepper, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, there were pearls, fine linens and cottons, silks from China, the purple dye once reserved for senators and emperors but now worn by bishops. The species included other rare and expensive goods like panther skins, leopards, lions, ivory from Africa, furs trans-shipped from Parthia and Babylon, chattering parrots from India and Africa, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, tortoiseshell from the tropics. There too were all the legendary gemstones of the Indies: ‘hyacinth stone’, beryl, bloodstone, carnelian, sardonyx, diamonds and emeralds. More salient than function or botany, cost was what made a spice a spice. In the marketplace as in the mind, spices came surrounded by riches and exotica.
This lush medley of associations was transferred direct from the world of late Rome to its conquerors. Emerging from the forests and the steppes, the barbarians had no word of their own for the goods they coveted, and so they adopted the terminology of the vanquished. The sixth-century laws of the Franks, Visigoths and Alamanni all mention a spicarium, a warehouse where high-value goods were stored. By this route the word entered the ferment of late Latin and Germanic dialects that in turn evolved into today’s Romance languages. Hence, in short, the terminology that persists into the third millennium, at root unchanged since late antiquity: Spanish especia, Portuguese especiaria, French épice, Italian spezia. As the barbarians borrowed so they burnished. In these centuries of breakdown and isolation, spices’ air of mystery intensified. In Visigothic Spain, Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) was willing to believe that the pepper plant was guarded by serpents that were put to flight by harvesters setting the undergrowth ablaze, from which the peppercorns acquired their distinctive black and wrinkled appearance. Isidore’s version of how pepper got its colour was endlessly recycled until well into the sixteenth century. Spices continued to flow into Europe, but their origins were now firmly lodged in the realm of the fantastic.
It was, of course, precisely this mix of mystery and cost that helps explain why they were so special. Luxury may have been considered a deadly sin,* but it was also a marker of status. For this reason spices were often included with official correspondence, a practice that endured late into the Middle Ages. On several occasions spices helped lubricate Rome’s humiliating embassies to the barbarians. In 449, an emissary to Attila the Hun from the emperor Theodosius II (ruled 408–450) presented Indian gems and pepper to one of Attila’s subject queens – doubtless the barbarian diet benefited from a little spice. In 595 a praetor in the service of the Byzantine emperor Mauricius (ruled 582–602) sent gifts of pepper, cinnamon leaf, costus and cassia to the Avar chieftain Chajan, the barbarian professing himself delighted with the gift.
While such ceremonial uses of spices are relatively well documented, information on their culinary applications is in short supply. Somehow the image of the bloodthirsty Hun savouring a perfect blend of exotic flavours does not ring true. Attila used Eastern luxuries to pay off his various subject chiefs, but even at banquets he insisted on the traditional steppe diet of grilled flesh. Historians are now chary of the expression ‘Dark Ages’, but in a gastronomical sense the implied slight seems fully deserved. Along with all the other refinements of life, cookery suffered from the fall of empire. Brillat-Savarin’s vision of an age of ‘fierce mouths and scorched gullets’ seems, on the whole, justified.
In what had been Roman Gaul, the Frankish dynasty of the Merovingians (476–750) certainly ate spices, but apparently – this judgement on the basis of extr
emely few sources – with less sophistication. The poet Fortunatus of Poitiers (c.540–c.600) portrays the women of Merovingian Gaul as having a taste for the refined novelties of cooking (the men were another matter). The few recipes to have survived from the period are crude versions of Roman archetypes. One of the very few culinary sources from this period is a treatise on dietetics by Anthimus, ambassador of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths in Italy from 493 to 526. Anthimus knew ginger, cloves and pepper, though spices appear far less frequently in his recipes than in the De Re Coquinaria of Apicius, on which they are otherwise modelled. As with his Roman prototype, if he knew cinnamon, he didn’t eat it. But for the other spices he has a heavy hand. For a piece of beef to be braised or roasted, he recommends no fewer than fifty peppercorns, further spiced with cloves, costus and spikenard. Reading Anthimus one does not have the impression of being in the presence of a gourmet. He is at pains to stress that his main concern is with health – whether and how the food is good for you; how to cook it so as to avoid any harmful consequences – and not, apparently, with the creation of a particular taste.
Most references of these centuries betray a similar bias towards practicality over pleasure. Yet if the early Middle Ages offer precious little evidence of an epicurean culture, there was certainly plenty of enthusiasm for spice. The contemporary cookbook by the splendidly titled ‘Vinidarius, the Illustrious Man’ assumes the spices’ ready availability. Written in either the fifth or the sixth century, it now survives in a single manuscript copied in the eighth century, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The manuscript begins with a summary of spices ‘that you ought to have at home so that nothing is lacking for seasonings’. Along with a range of locally available aromatics, pepper, ginger, cloves and cardamom are regarded as indispensable.
