by Jack Turner
A flowery, snowy, couch is born forth for him,
Covered with lofty cedar, and adorned with fragrant Cyprus:
Sprinkled with violets, strewn with lilies.
Behold him adorned with flowery roses,
Looking on the various plants with glad eyes.
Balsams are there, and many aromas are ground,
Nard and myrrh shine palely, and strong cinnamon burns …
There are a thousand spices, their several odours intermingle,
The savour of nectar fills even to highest heaven.
The following verse sees Odilo transferred to eternal life:
Availing himself of these delights, Odilo is made new again.
The force, in not so many words, was metaphysical, even magical – a sentiment a Roman, or for that matter an Egyptian, would have found quite familiar.
By Jotsaud’s day, however, the desire to preserve the worldly remains was becoming increasingly hard to reconcile with dogma. By the central Middle Ages, Church doctrine hardened in its view that the body was worthless, mere dross sloughed off by the immortal soul. Yet the custom of spicing the dead endured, apparently for more pragmatic reasons. Perfuming the dead was by now an essentially social rite, and here too spices met a need, offering several attractions over more primitive methods, not the least of which must have been the aesthetic one of concealing the smell of a decaying corpse. Europe’s only home-grown preservatives were salt, wine and vinegar; failing them, the body was simply boiled, as befell archbishop Reginald of Cologne in 1167, dying en route through the high Alps, far from any spicer. Lacking the necessary equipment and unable to get the body home without it putrefying, his followers had no choice but to ‘cook’ the bishop in boiling water. But this was a very inadequate method, and left the corpse in bad shape, mere bones and bishop stock (and requiring, presumably, a large cauldron).
On purely pragmatic grounds spices represented a far more attractive and practical option. Around the turn of the millennium cinnamon and pepper in particular were a regular feature of noble burials. When the emperor Otto I died at Merseburg in 973, he was seasoned with spices, as the formula put it, then taken to Magdeburg to be buried. Often the sources are explicit that the incentive was simply to enable transport of the corpse from one place to another, or to counteract the heat of the season. When St Wicbert died in 962 the monks of the abbey of Gembloux, ‘fearing lest the heat of the summer should cause harm to the holy body’, removed and buried his entrails, sprinkling salt and various fragrant spices on his remains, ‘which can repel the putrefaction of the decay of the body’. Like Wicbert, senior prelates, nobles and kings frequently wanted to be buried in their home chapels or in an abbey or monastery they had founded, requiring preservation for a last, posthumous journey. One who failed to make it back was King Charles the Bald (823–877), who had the misfortune to die while returning from an expedition to Italy, hundreds of miles from the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, the traditional burial ground of the French kings. His companions eviscerated the body and carried out what sounds like a fairly agricultural attempt to embalm it with wine and unspecified aromatics, but in spite of their best efforts by the time the funeral cortège arrived at Nantua the king smelled so bad that he had to be buried on the spot.
More fortunate was the crusader King Baldwin I, the Frankish king of Jerusalem, the account of whose death suggests the extraordinary importance the medieval nobleman attached to the correct treatment of his earthly remains. Sensing his end draw near while on an expedition in Egypt in 1118, Baldwin implored his entourage to take him back to Jerusalem, where he could lie alongside his brother. His fellow crusaders objected, pointing out the difficulties: the weight of his corpse, the distance to travel, the unbearable heat of the Egyptian summer. Alarmed, Baldwin pressed the point, describing the procedure he wished them to follow in minute detail. First they were to slice open his stomach with a sword, remove his entrails and thoroughly salt his insides. The body was then to be rolled in carpet or cowhide. But the knights were still squeamish. Finally Baldwin entrusted the task to his cook, the loyal Addon, making him swear by the love he held for him that he would diligently carry out the task of his gutting, specifying that he was not to overlook his eyes, nose, ears and mouth, which should all be ‘seasoned with balsam and spices’. True to his vow, Addon carried out the task entrusted him, and Baldwin’s body made it back to Jerusalem more or less in one piece, leaving only his entrails to lie in infidel ground.
As Baldwin was at pains to point out, the honours due medieval nobility extended into the grave. Even posthumously, the medieval nobleman or senior prelate was concerned with keeping up appearances. In death as in life spices suited noble instincts. They were a last opportunity to show the nobleman as belonging to a class apart, as though death was not quite the leveller that he was for lesser mortals. Moreover, as Baldwin was doubtless well aware, his spiced obsequies echoed those of the paragon of paladins and exemplary crusader, the dead and double-crossed Roland. The eleventh-century poem of Charlemagne’s invasion of Spain, Chanson de Roland, tells of the hero’s last stand in the pass of Roncevaux, where he is betrayed and hopelessly outnumbered by infidels, whereupon he blows his own brains out by blasting too hard on his horn, and dies. The bodies of Roland and two other noble companions are returned to Charlemagne, who orders them washed in spices and wine. The fictional Roland’s real-life suzerain Charlemagne was similarly spiced after his death in 814, and buried in the cathedral of Aachen. His body was perfumed and seated in a golden chair, dressed with a diadem and gold chain, armed with a gold sword and carrying a golden gospel in his hands and knees, ‘and they filled the tomb with perfumes, spices, balsam and musk and treasures’.
Though few could afford to go out in such style, Charlemagne’s burial typified the aspirations of the class he headed: the twin imperatives of piety – buried with a Bible in his hand – and luxury, in the form of gold and spices.* Thus although the theological significance of the mortal remains had been downgraded, the need to demonstrate status remained as pressing as ever, and so too the usefulness of spices to that end. If anything, the social and indeed the political imperative increased over time. With its steady emergence as a class apart, acutely conscious of its dignity and identity, the nobility relentlessly sought to advertise its superior status in ritual, not least the rituals of death. Many of the consumers whose demand was a major impetus for the revival of the trade, and the vast broadening of Europe’s intellectual and physical horizons, were already dead.
As Charlemagne’s and Baldwin’s deaths suggest, that demand was felt most acutely at the pinnacle of society. Most particular on this point were the kings of France, whose bodies were put on posthumous display in the abbey of Saint-Denis, an opportunity for a last parade of magnificence after the body had been washed with wine, vinegar and spices. The ritual gave the dead monarch’s subjects a last chance to render homage, or to see for themselves that he was truly dead. In 1307 the body of Edward I of England lay embalmed and displayed on a bier for four months, by the end of which period he presumably required some potent deodorants. Whereas Nelson came back from Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy, the dead King Henry V ‘was embalmed and dressed with rich spicery and ointments … shut fast in a chest and carried down to Rouen, where a dirge and mass were said for him, with the most solemnity that might be ordained and done in Holy Church’.
As with any other conspicuous royal ritual, the expense could be huge, and the king’s credit – he was, after all, a corpse – doubtful. When King Edward I lay dying at Lanercost Abbey in 1307, the apothecaries supplying the court readied a supply of spices and incense for the imminent embalming. Their bill (a big one) was apparently not paid, since the following year the widow of one of the king’s spicers lodged a petition, pointing out that her late husband was still owed a near-identical sum by the deceased king.
Over time, however, the costs of embalming came down. By the fourteenth century, spices were becoming more
readily available, and the once-royal custom was increasingly mimicked by the lesser nobility. The final entry in the account books of Robert d’Artois, a noblemen of the Pas-de-Calais, records the purchase in 1317 of two pounds of powdered ginger, cinnamon and cloves for his corpse (at a cost of sixteen sous). By the fifteenth century it was not unheard of for criminals’ heads, once they had been removed by the royal executioner, to be preserved and exhibited pour encourager les autres. Typically the severed head was parboiled and seasoned, though apparently with cheaper aromatics such as cumin. Owing to the exceptional circumstances, slightly better treatment was given to the head of Thomas More, cut off by order of Henry VIII and cooked in water before being set on a spike on London Bridge. There it stayed for a month, before being taken down to make room for new arrivals and returned to More’s daughter. In the words of Thomas Stapleton, one of More’s early biographers, ‘Margaret Roper [More’s daughter] … as long as she lived kept the head with the greatest reverence, carefully preserving it by means of spices, and to this day it remains in the custody of one of his relatives.’ Stapleton was writing in the Armada year of 1588. At some stage not long afterwards, More’s family deposited his head in St Dunstan’s church in Canterbury, where it was seen, still in reasonable condition, when the vault was opened in 1837; and there, presumably, it still remains. If and when the vault is reopened, it will be possible to see how well Margaret’s spices did their job.
Odd as the idea might seem, then, from the ancient world and through the Middle Ages spices smelled not only of other worlds but of worlds to come. In some unrecoverable sense, just as the wealthy dead smelled of spices, so spices smelled of death. The overlap was particularly pronounced in Latin, since the vocabulary was the same. To prepare a corpse for burial was literally to ‘season’ or ‘spice’ it, condire, whence condimentum, or seasoning. Moreover the materials used on the embalmed were standard kitchen seasonings. We have seen that when Baldwin I died he entrusted the treatment of his body to his cook; when Henry I died in Normandy in 1135 his butcher was given the job of dealing with the corpse and getting it back to Reading abbey more or less in one piece. In Roman times, the dual meanings and purpose of spice were material for a sort of gallows humour. In his defence of vegetarianism, the historian Plutarch compared the gourmet’s habit of eating his meats and fishes spiced and seasoned with wine and vinegar to eating an embalmed corpse. Martial regarded cinnamon and cassia as ‘redolent of funerals’. He accuses a certain Zoilus of filching the grave goods: ‘Shameless Zoilus! Give back from your grubby pockets the unguents, cassia and myrrh, redolent of funerals, and the half-cremated frankincense that you filched right from the pyre itself, along with the cinnamon you snatched from the Stygian couch. Your grimy hands learned their wickedness from your feet – since you were once a runaway slave, small wonder you’re a thief!’
This whiff of the grave was for that matter an association that applied not only to spices but to all perfumes; there was a hint of formaldehyde in the air, as it were. In another epigram Martial complains that a dinner host gave his guests a decent perfume, but no food:
The perfume you gave your guests yesterday was,
I admit, a good one; but you didn’t serve them anything to eat.
To smell good and go hungry – very droll.
He who does not eat but smells good, Fabullus,
Seems like a dead man to me.
The Spice of Life
Abbot Eberhard’s Complaint
The apothecaries keep preserved and Alexandrian ginger, such as befit cold complexions.
John Garland, c. 1180–c.1252
The millennium was new, but Abbot Eberhard was old. Old, weary and ill. In the depths of an icy Bavarian winter, he languished in his cell in the ancient abbey of Tegernsee, his insides grumbling, his head spinning, his limbs feeble. He had tried all the herbs and potions of the monastery’s resident doctor, but to no avail. There was nowhere to turn but to a local noblewoman, a patron of the monastery, for help. His letter conveys something of the spicy, rugged flavour of medieval medicine:
As my infirmities are perilous, because I am forever frail, I beseech you to send me the ingredients for a healing potion, including some nutritive cloves with other spices, such as are necessary for this remedy. Indicate in writing how this potion should be taken, and with what precautions I should follow, and whether I will vomit it out from above, or expel it from below. If I am restored to health, know that I am hereafter your dedicated servant, for the simple reason that I am still alive. And if you would be so good, please send some deer kidneys or something of the sort, because chewing on the toughness of lean meat with my teeth, for they are worn, gives me nothing but pain. Wherefore, if possible, that the potion should come before Lent, I beseech you.
The effectiveness of the cure, and whether he received his shipment before Lent, are unrecorded.
As Eberhard’s letter attests, spices were used to preserve living bodies as well as dead – or, as in Eberhard’s case, bodies somewhere between the two. In the medieval mind spices and medicines were effectively one and the same. Not all drugs were spices, but all spices were drugs. The identity was reflected in vocabulary: the late Latin term for spices (pigmenta) was practically synonymous with medicines, and so it remained through the Middle Ages. Apothecary and spicer were effectively one and the same: ‘One who has at hand for sale aromatic spices and all manner of things needful in medicine,’ in the words of a fourteenth-century manuscript at Chartres cathedral. The apothecary took his name from the Greek term for a warehouse where high-value goods such as spices were stored. Even today an Italian word for pharmacist is speziale. He is the direct descendant of the medieval spicer (speciarius) whose wares were among the most sought after and esteemed medicines of the age.
Without appreciating the medicinal freight that spices carried, the European appetite for them is simply unintelligible. They came recommended by the authorities in an apparently limitless number of permutations, a hodgepodge of inheritances that survived from antiquity and far outlasted the Middle Ages. A work compiled at the watershed of those two epochs, the fifth-century Syriac Book of Medicines, illustrates the sheer variety of the medical applications of spice, and the quasi-religious faith in their efficacy. Pepper alone is prescribed for a bewildering array of illnesses: to be poured in the ears for earache and paralysis; highly recommended for sore joints and excretory organs; for abscesses of the mouth and pustules in the throat; for general debility, blackening and nubbing of the teeth; for cancer of the mouth, toothache, gangrene and stinking secretions; for a lost voice or a frog in the throat; for coughing up pus; for lung diseases; mixed with jackal fat for chest and internal pains; as a soporific; for heart disease and a weak stomach; for constipation and sunburn; for sleeplessness, insect bites, ‘bad burps’ and poor digestion; for a cold stomach, shivers and worms; for a hard liver, a sore liver, wind and dysentery; for jaundice, hard spleen, loose bowels, dropsy, hernias and a general ‘evil condition’. None of these prescriptions, to my knowledge, has been shown to have the slightest basis in medical fact. But the fact that they would not have done the least good did not stop physicians from elaborating endless variations on the theme. Viewed over the longer term, the history of medicine is more a matter of faith than of proof, and spices are no exception. The uses to which they were put were seemingly limited only by the ingenuity of the doctors.
For an age commonly supposed to be shut within its own narrow horizons, when evidence of European involvement in the spice trade is practically nil, and European knowledge of Asia was not much better, the frequency with which spices crop up in the medical texts of the early Middle Ages is nothing less than astonishing. St Benedict Crispus, the early-eighth-century bishop of Milan, wrote several medical poems featuring Eastern spices. For an arthritic hip he advised cloves, pepper and cinnamon, ‘which long serves against the plague’. For angina he suggested pepper. A generation later St Egbert, archbishop of York, prescribed the spice
to cure sores of the mouth. Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury from 669 to 690, claimed that pepper mixed with the gall bladder of a hare could mitigate the pain of dysentery. The Northumbrian scholar Alcuin (c.735–804) claimed spices were as effective a defence against pestilence as the writings of the Fathers were a bulwark against heresy, and his compatriot the Venerable Bede said of cassia and cinnamon that they were ‘very effective in curing disorders of the guts’. It seems a safe assumption that the medical use of spices was the single most important reason for the survival of the long-distance luxury trade through the dark years of the early Middle Ages. Which is to say that the survival of Europe’s contacts with the wider world owed much to its demand for spicy drugs.
The potency of their reputation emerges most clearly from the institutions which kept the best records through this age of fragmentation and collapse, the monasteries. Before the turn of the millennium most references occur in a medical context. In the ninth century a priest called Grimlaic writes matter-of-factly of doctors who were accustomed to compose their medicines from various spices. Around the same time a plan of the Swiss Benedictine monastery of St Gall features a cupboard for storing spices (armarium pigmentorum) attached to the doctor’s quarters, its role to complement the locally grown herbs supplied by the garden. A history of the same monastery written not long after mentions a doctor called Notker, ‘singularly learned in spices and antidotes’. In a contemporary book of medicines from the monastery, pepper is the single most frequently recommended medicine.
Among the monasteries the spicy flavour of St Gall’s medicine cabinet was now the rule. To the west in Burgundy, a monk of the great monastery of Cluny boasted of its infirmary that ‘rarely or never will there be lacking pepper, cinnamon, ginger, and other roots that are health-giving, so there will always be at the ready what is needed for the patient, whether he is seized sometime by a sudden fever or, if it suits, so a spiced wine can be prepared for him’.
