Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  Given the limits of the physician’s mental horizons, and his still more limited understanding of illness, it is perhaps no great wonder that these inexplicable arrivals from the East should have been regarded as medicines of extraordinary force. There was a certain consistency in countering the unknowable with the inexplicable. Moreover spices’ reputation was readily converted into social capital, for which reason many of the references to them concern healing gifts accompanying correspondence or sweeteners to lubricate diplomatic dealings. In the works of Jotsaud, companion to St Odilo, fifth abbot of Cluny, there is a scene early in the new millennium at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, where the host honours his distinguished guest with ‘an extremely valuable glass vessel of the Alexandrian type, with ground spices inside’. Glass and spices alike had arrived from Alexandria, presumably, via Italian merchants. The emperor instructed two young monks accompanying the saintly Odilo to take it to him ‘for the sake of his bodily health’. But the incident ended unhappily. In their curiosity the two monks squabbled over who would carry it, and the glass slipped and broke.

  From the emperor’s perspective, to dispense spices was as magnanimous as it was healing. Wealthy prelates could return the favour, as did St Mayeul, Odilo’s immediate predecessor as abbot of Cluny. While travelling in Germany, the abbot’s company received a delegation on behalf of a sick count, asking for a little of the food served to the blessed Mayeul, who responded with some bread with almonds, fragrant spices and prayer. The count immediately started to feel better, ate his spiced bread and within a few days was well enough to come to the saint and thank him in person.

  In tales of such supernatural intercessions there lies a revealing paradox. For with their faith in the miraculous powers of the holy man or woman, the vitae, or lives of saints, are naturally inclined to credit cures to supernatural agency; yet they are for precisely this reason especially suggestive of the esteem in which spices were held. It is a recurrent motif of the vitae to find the miracle-working saint having no need of spices, much to the astonishment and chagrin of the spice-reliant doctors. The plot is repeated time and time again, the holy man or woman healing an illness that has defeated even the spices of the pigmentarius. One such tale in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History tells of a young man afflicted with a hideous, deforming tumour of the eyelid that threatened to rob him of his eyesight. After the doctors had tried but failed to heal it with poultices of spices, finally, when all hope was lost, his eye was saved by the relics of the saintly Father Cuthbert.

  The faith that informed such tales, religious and medicinal alike, is not to be doubted. For if the authors sought to convince and convert others, their ability to do so relied on the readers believing in spices as firmly as they believed in miracles. A little more than a century before Bede’s day, when Gregory of Tours sought a metaphor for divine intercession, he could think of none more apt than theriac,* a legendary mix of herbs and spices reported to have saved the life of Mithridates, a king of Pontus in northern Anatolia who died in 63 BC. A hypochondriac, Mithridates took this secret mix every day, and so effective did it prove that when he tried to poison himself the most potent toxins were utterly nullified, and in the end he had to ask a Gallic mercenary to finish him off. Shortly after being elected to the see of Tours in 572, Gregory was laid low by acute dysentery, with fever and aches spreading from his stomach through his body. The mere thought of food filled him with horror, and he was unable to digest what he was able to force down. He rapidly weakened. He and his doctors abandoned all hope of life, and preparations were made for his funeral.

  One last remedy remained. In Gregory’s words:

  Despairing of my chances, I called the specialist Armentarius, and I said to him: ‘You have employed every trick of your art, already you have tried the strength of all spices, but the things of this life are of no avail to him who is about to die. There remains one thing that I might do: that I proffer you a great theriac. Get some dust from the holy tomb of St Martin, and then make for me a potion. If this does no good, then all hope of recovery must be abandoned.’ Thereupon, a deacon being sent to the tomb of the blessed Leader, he took some of the sanctified dust, and they gave it to me to drink. No sooner had I drained it than thereupon the pain subsided – I received health from the tomb. Which then was of such great benefit to me, that though I drank it at the third hour of the day, at the sixth hour of the same day I went to dinner in full health.

  The effect of such anecdotes, and dozens like them, depended almost wholly on the reputation of spices as the most potent of medicines; when even they are of no avail, only divine intervention will work.

  The medical profession, however, could not bank on miracles, or at least did not like to admit as much. With time doctors developed an increasingly elaborate system to explain and justify their heavy reliance on spices. Just as the high Middle Ages were the golden age of the spice trade, so they were also the golden age of spiced medicine. Around the turn of the millennium the traditional leeching and superstition that had for so long set the tone of European medicine came gradually to be supplemented, if not yet quite supplanted, by a new degree of pharmacological sophistication. Europe was home to a great blossoming of medical studies, in some respects preceding but dramatically catalysed by an infusion of Arab science introduced by the violent medium of the crusades.

  The new learning was led and exemplified by the medical school of Salerno, first recorded as a centre of learning in the tenth century. The Salernitan school was in many ways the lightning rod between Europe and the far more advanced science of the Muslim world. Via the Arabs, the scholars, doctors and translators of Salerno restored to Europe a knowledge of the doctors of antiquity and diffused it far and wide across the breadth of Christendom. The quasi-supernatural reputation of spices was now enshrined as impeccably scientific. They are typically conspicuous in the natural history of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), who advised pepper for pleurisy and the splenetic individual, galangal for heartburn and stinking breath, cinnamon for tertian and quartian fever, sore guts and lungs. To the encyclopaedist Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–1264) cinnamon and pepper were panaceas, and much the same was said at one time or another of all the Eastern spices. The Catalan Libre del Coch of one Mestre Robert recommended a distillation of chicken and spices as ‘so healthful a thing that it will transform a man from life to death’. There was scarcely an illness spices were not believed to cure, besides a great many which, we now know, never existed: such nightmarish visions of the medieval physician as hard spleen, the furious and exalting bile or distempered brain.

  Ultimately, this reputation rested on theoretical foundations built long ago in Greece and Rome and which, we have seen, laid down the ground rules of medieval dietetics. It was a starting premise of humoral theory that all things, animate or inanimate, combined the four elemental qualities of heat, cold, dryness and wetness. Applied to the human body the elements manifested themselves in four humours, which in turn found physical expression in the four internal liquids of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The sanguine humour, corresponding to the air, combined warmth and moistness; the phlegmatic was watery, cool and moist; fiery choler, warm and dry; and earthy melancholy mixed coldness and dryness. In antiquity the most celebrated exponent of humoral medicine was the Greco-Roman Galen, doctor to emperors in the second century and throughout the Middle Ages the physician’s gospel truth and lodestar.

  According to the Galenic system it was above all the balance of the humours that determined the body’s condition, the ideal state being a correct balance of all four. An acute disequilibrium of humours expressed itself as illness. The naturally phlegmatic individual, or the individual suffering from phlegmatic illness, was considered cold and moist; to be choleric was to be hot and dry. Too much black bile generated the cold and dry temper. A cold – the name itself is an echo of older beliefs – was caused by the onset of cool and wet humours. Fever was generally interpreted
as a surfeit of hot and dry. Even moods and one’s mental state were determined by humours – for which reason until well into the eighteenth century the word suggested any state of mind, not necessarily the comic.

  Though medically way off-beam, Galenic medicine at least had the merit of a fundamental consistency. As illness was a form of disequilibrium, so a cure called for restoration of the original balance. The system was scientific inasmuch as prescription followed from diagnosis, the doctor’s task being first to determine the nature of the complaint and then to come up with the countervailing treatment. As the great Persian physician Avicenna (980–1037) put it in his Canon, perhaps the single most famous book in the history of medicine:

  Having treated of the conservation of health, I am going to speak of the healing of illness, and that is summarised in a single rule: counter the bad with its opposite.

  The sickness due to heat is treated with cold; it is the reverse if the illness comes from cold.

  If it originates from the wet, it is treated by the dry, and the converse.

  Via the physicians of medieval Islam, Europe inherited the identical framework, and in the medical schools of Salerno, then Bologna, Montpellier, Paris and Padua, the best medical minds of the day subjected these basic rules to centuries of scholastic, syllogistic and disputatious embellishments and reworkings. (Avicenna’s Canon was taught in Europe’s medical schools until the seventeenth century.) As Chaucer says of his ‘Doctour of Phisik’:

  He knew the course of every malady,

  Whether it was hot, cold, moist or dry,

  And where they were engendered, and by which humour.

  He was a very perfect practitioner …

  It was in the capacity of safeguarding a healthy equilibrium or restoring a disrupted balance that spices entered the picture. Considered as powerfully heating and drying (for the most part), they were the drugs of choice for all illnesses classed as cool, wet or both.* Like illnesses, drugs were classified according to degrees of heat, cold, wetness or dryness, on a scale of zero to four, and most spices appeared at the hot and dry end of the spectrum. For this reason Avicenna includes spices among the healthfully heating defences against melancholy (others were sugar, egg yolks, coral, pearls, wine, gold and silk).† Cinnamon was typically classed as hot in the fourth degree, dry in the second. Nutmeg was hot and dry in the second; and so on. These gradations were essentially a matter of tradition and intuition; medical writers waged arcane debates on precise qualification. Nor was there any single or unifying dietetic theory from one place to another. But while practitioners might disagree on the details, the broader grouping of spices as heating and drying holds good across the entirety of the medieval period.

  So potent were spices that the authorities never fail to advise due caution. The Regimen sanitatis salernitanum or Salernitan Guide to Health, a book of health tips written in verse form and translated into all major European languages, held that one nutmeg is good, two bad and three deadly. One of the areas for which they are most commonly cited is the stomach, believed to be particularly prone to cold and wet afflictions – a belief that goes a long way to accounting for the medieval taste for spiced sauces. The stomach was conceptualised as a form of cauldron, heated by the liver, digestion being understood as the final phase of the cooking process. It was simple logic that if the cauldron was to stay hot and functioning, cold substances were inimical, and heating were good. A typical and authoritative instance of this thinking is provided by Galen in an account of his diagnosis of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180). The emperor had overdone it at a banquet, and paid for it afterwards as the excess of food was converted into phlegm. As the cold and moist phlegm reduced his body temperature, a fever ensued and he was unable to digest his foods, his stomach being too moist and wet. A cool, wet affliction called for a heating and drying remedy, so Galen prescribed the emperor a thin, dry and acidulous Sabine wine, with some heating and drying pepper.

  And so into the Middle Ages. The eleventh-century Byzantine Emperor Michael VII used nutmeg to comfort his stomach from surfeit of wetness. Writing around 1450, John of Burgundy likewise recommended nutmeg for gastric chills, advising his readers to ‘Eat a nutmeg in the morning, for the voiding of wind from the stomach, the liver and the guts: it is good for people recovering from an illness.’ Water, classed as cold and wet, was considered a particular risk. In the sixteenth century the father of the botanist Gaspard Bauhin (1560–1624) claimed he was brought to the brink of death by water, saved only by a timely reheating of his stomach. Gravely ill while harvesting herbs in the Apennines – too much drinking from an icy mountain stream – he effected a last-minute and semi-miraculous cure with four nutmegs.

  Other afflictions admitted of no remedy, but could at least be mitigated. Old people were considered particularly susceptible to illnesses of a cool nature, the ageing process being seen as a progressive diminution of ‘inner heat’, a gradual cooling down and drying out, fading completely with death. Old age, it followed, could be delayed or at least offset by some warming spices. The Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon (C.1220–C.1292) recommended a mixture of viper’s flesh, cloves, nutmeg and mace to delay the onset of old age. In his ambitiously titled On the Preservation of Youth and Slowing of Old Age, Arnald of Vilanova (?—1311) advised an ‘Electuary of Life’, composed of liquorice root, nutmeg and galangal. The medical texts of the Middle Ages are replete with dozens of similar illusory cures.

  But that the underlying faith was misplaced did not harm spices’ reputation. There was, it is true, the occasional serendipitous success among the myriad – and often harmful – misses. But it would be naïve in the extreme to transpose the empiricist assumptions of modern medicine back to a time where they do not belong. Faith in spices’ efficacy far outstripped any proof. Spices even had a role to play in veterinary medicine. The Spanish Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora (C.1240–C.1320) claimed a rheumy falcon could be cured with a mix of ground amber, ginger and pepper; a mix of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cumin, salt and aloes would cure a goshawk of a headache, though this was presumably a tricky diagnosis to make. In 1353 Pope Innocent VI bought spices to perk up the pining papal parrot. For an Indian bird, an Indian remedy.

  Other illnesses were less natural. The nobility of both the ancient and medieval worlds shared a fixation with poisoning, and the hand of a poisoner was frequently sought where only poor hygiene and bacteria were to blame: the poisoned mushroom alleged to have killed the emperor Claudius may have been simply the wrong mushroom, just as the deadly melons reputed to have done away with Pope Paul II in the middle of the fifteenth century were probably no more substantial than a physician’s best guess. With such terrors and suspicions so firmly rooted in the consciousness, antidotes were a constant presence in the shops of medieval speciarius, and the literature correspondingly hefty. Since poisons were generally believed to kill by cooling the organism to the point of death, from the earliest times spices came recommended as the most potent of antidotes.* Theophrastus refers to pepper as heating and for that reason an antidote to hemlock, which was believed to kill by cooling from the toes up. A fragment of the Attic poet Euboulos refers to pepper in conjunction with Cnidusbay berry, another staple antidote. Pepper was recommended against hemlock by Theodulfus, bishop of Orléans (c.760–821), who served the spice at the court of Charlemagne. In the hugely influential De Materia Medica (C.AD 77) Dioscorides recommends ginger if someone slipped a toxin into dinner.

  But the most important work on the subject, and one that guaranteed spices’ position on the shelf, was Galen’s Concerning Antidotes. In his capacity as physician to Marcus Aurelius, Galen had supplied the hypochondriac philosopher-emperor with a daily dose of cinnamon and other lauded ‘antidotes’ – the more expensive, the better. Galen testifies that during the reign of Severus towards the close of the second century it was hard for the emperor to get a good stash of cinnamon. Imperial stocks of the spice dated back to the time of Trajan – a
sign, perhaps, that even now the Roman trade with India was drying up.

  Yet while these and many other spiced prescriptions were sanctioned by the weight of tradition, not all of the attractions of spice were so intellectually respectable. The proto-scientific framework of Galenic medicine easily shaded into magic; indeed the exact division between the two cannot always be readily distinguished. Even in the most sober medical textbooks many spiced recipes were pure superstition. Late in the thirteenth century Arnald of Vilanova referred to the enchantments of the ‘old wives of Salerno’, who gave three peppercorns to women to suck during childbirth, with the proviso that they should never chew them – presumably a somewhat delicate operation during the pains of labour. Even Galen, who so prided himself on his systems and authorities, was not above using magic numbers and combinations. For colic, he advised dried cicadas with three, five or seven grains of pepper. Sometimes spices were esteemed purely on account of an exotic reputation. Among the Acts of St Francis of Paola (1416–1507) is the account of the illness of Loysius de Paladinis de Lecia, the royal auditor of Calabria, who in 1447 suffered a mysterious illness for thirty-three days, at which point his wife Dona Catharinella sent a servant beseeching the holy man’s intercession. His advice was to bake two loaves of bread, and to sprinkle each with ground pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, then to place one loaf on the patient’s back, and the other on his stomach.

  Uncertain as to whether she should follow Francis’s advice, Catharinella asked for a second, medical opinion, but the doctors disagreed, and so she did nothing. The patient did not improve. Sending another messenger to the saint for more prayers, she was reprimanded, Francis being miraculously aware that his advice had not been followed. Chastened, the fickle noblewoman now did as she had first been told, thereby curing her husband and confirming the miraculous powers of the holy man.