Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  While many illnesses arrived from the sky, no visitation of malign air was more deadly than the bubonic plague, or Black Death. Broadly, there were three main schools of thought about the causes and the remedies of the plague, none of which was necessarily incompatible with the others. Some looked to God’s wrath at the sins of humanity, while others looked to the comets and stars, a baleful alignment of the planets. A third group looked to the malignant vapours and odours borne ‘by a rotten and corrupt ayre by a hidden and secret propetie which it hath’. First documented in Europe in the reign of the emperor Justinian, the plague returned with terrifying unpredictability, most devastatingly in the pandemic of 1348–1350, when it carried off some 30 per cent of Europe’s population, and up to 50 per cent in some cities. Though this was far and away the most deadly outbreak, the plague returned regularly until the eighteenth century. In London there were over a dozen outbreaks in the sixteenth century alone.

  While doctors agreed no more then than now on the best course of action, aromas and spices were conspicuous in the counter-measures. Those lacking the cash for spices fumigated their houses by burning fragrant woods or garden plants such as rosemary, violet, juniper, lavender, marjoram, oregano and sage.* One budget option was the nosegay, generally a bundle of herbs or flowers. (Hence the ‘pocket full of posies’ of the nursery rhyme; ‘Ah-tishoo! Ah-tishoo!/We all fall down’ a reference to the sneezing that accompanied the first onset of the disease, the falling down the sequel.) According to popular belief the smell did not necessarily have to be pleasant to be effective, merely potent enough to ward off miasma. Onions were a perennial favourite of the English – they were buried in the ground of an infected neighbourhood so as to soak up the disease – along with other still more eye-watering substances. Some burned shoes, some hung old socks under their noses; still others dangled over cesspits so as to envelop themselves in a sheltering stench.

  Among the savants, however, and for those with the cash, the preference was for less noxious odours (in Gulliver’s Travels Swift mocks the Yahoos’ penchant for treating their illnesses with shit and urine). The potency and durability of their aromas, their exoticism and cost, all recommended spices, as did the enthusiastic testimony of survivors. John of Eschenden, a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a survivor of the Black Death, claimed that a powder of cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace and cloves saw him through the time when Oxford’s narrow streets were clogged with the bodies of the dead. Over a hundred years later the exact same confection was recommended by Nicolaus de Comitibus of Padua, a ‘marvellous medicine against the corruption to the air in the time of pestilence which John of Oxford gives as tested by all the medical men of England in the great mortality which prevailed throughout the world in the year of grace 1348’.

  Spices also had the merit of aesthetic appeal, being sufficiently strong and penetrating to exclude the odours of the medieval townscape, which was, at the best of times, a malodorous place; at times the crowded and filthy streets of the cramped medieval city must have smelled, to borrow a phrase from Melville, ‘like the left wing of the day of judgement’. London was notoriously mephitic: in 1275 the White Friars who dwelt by the river Fleet complained to the king that the river’s ‘putrid exhalations … overcame even the frankincense used in the services and had caused the death of many brethren’. The public privy of Ludgate was reported to smell so vilely that it ‘rottith the stone wallys’.

  Over and above their purported salubriousness, spices had the supreme attractions of portability, power and long life. According to Boccaccio, when the plague descended on Florence the inhabitants took to ‘carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or diverse sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses’. One of the most esteemed defences was the pomander, from Old French pome d’embre or apple of amber, a lump of amber or ambergris aromatised with a mixture of spices so as ‘to be worne against foule stinkyng aire’, as one authority phrased it. At the time of the great fourteenth-century outbreak of the Black Death, pomanders generally consisted of a soft, resinous substance bound together – wax was the most common – studded or sprinkled with spices and enclosed within a portable metal or china container worn around the neck or attached to a belt or wrist. Simpler variants of the same were made from a hollowed-out piece of fruit. One popular seventeenth-century remedy was ‘A good Sivill Orenge stuck with cloves’, long considered a defence against the pestilence but now downgraded to a folksy form of air-freshener.

  Beneath these prescriptions lurked memories of class and money. Only long after the end of the Middle Ages did spices – or for that matter, oranges – become relatively accessible to all who wanted them. Before then cost was a large part of their cachet. Gerard Bergens, author of De Pestis Praeservatione, published in Antwerp in 1587, suggests for the ‘altogether rich’ a pomander of nutmeg, cloves or aloes, to be carried on the person at all times. The wealthier one was, the greater the opportunities to indulge and elaborate on one’s hypochondria. Whenever she was exposed to public spaces, even in times free of disease, Elizabeth I wore gloves of Spanish leather perfumed with rosewater, sugar and spices plus, for good measure, a pomander filled with the most expensive spices. Over time, pomanders were fashioned with ever-increasing cost and ingenuity, to the point that by the twentieth century they had become purely ornamental, the vehicle for Fabergé’s fancies.

  But when bad air was thought to be a matter of life or death such aesthetic considerations yielded second place to function. Coming as he did into regular contact with the sick, the medieval or early-modern doctor relied particularly heavily on the pomander and its spiced variants. In times of pestilence, some doctors resorted to a medieval forerunner of the gas mask, in the form of a hood with a large ‘beak’ filled with fragrant herbs and spices. Alternatively, spices could be used as a sort of internal fumigation. One authority advises anyone visiting a plague victim: ‘Let him hold in his mouth a peece of Mastic, Cinamon, Zedoarie, or Citron pill, or a Clove. Let him desire his sicke friend to speake with his face turned from him.’

  The irony, of course, is that the medical utility of such measures was nil. The array of aromatic defences that Europeans erected against the plague were a medicinal Maginot line: a huge effort on which vast resources, intellectual as much as economic, were lavished, but one that the rats, fleas and bacilli simply sidestepped. If spices were of some marginal benefit, it was not against the plague but in disinfecting food, or, at a stretch, in supplying micronutrients to deficient diets.* It is however just as likely that spices were counterproductive, in that the generally unquestioning belief in their effectiveness diverted attention from the real causes of the disease. For while thinkers lavished their intellectual energies on building an airborne defence they neglected such basics as sanitation, thereby rendering the lives of fleas, rats, microbes and lice all the easier. One widely held belief was that washing opened the pores, supposedly rendering the body more prone to infection. Even such a rich person as Elizabeth I of England took a bath but once a month, ‘whether she need it or no’.

  It may be that spices had a still more directly detrimental impact. In an age of limited horizons, the most likely culprit for introducing to Europe the pandemic of 1348 was none other than the same long-distance trade that brought spice from the East. First documented in China in the 1320s, bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium transmitted by the bite of a flea that has drunk the blood of an infected black rat, Rattus rattus. Originally a native of South-East Asia, the Asian rat was probably first introduced to Europe by the Romans’ seaborne commerce with India: a Roman rat was found at a site in London’s Fenchurch Street dating from the fourth century. (The brown or Norwegian rat, which does not carry the fleas that transmit the plague bacillus, was not introduced into the greater part of western Europe before the eighteenth century. Its gradual supplanting of the black rat may explain the disappearance of the plague from Europe at much the same time.) Rattus rattus could not cross the desert
s but he could hitch a ride on the transoceanic pepper trade.

  In the absence of other explanations the theory is a tempting one. Certainly it fits with the narrative of the Byzantine historian Procopius, a witness to the plague in the time of Justinian (483–565). He tells a tale of creeping doom, charting the inexorable spread of the disease from lower Egypt to Alexandria in 540, then north from Alexandria to Byzantium. With trading networks reaching out in all directions as far as India and ultimately China, these two cities were especially vulnerable to the importation of infection via ship and caravan. ‘This disease always started at the coast, and from there went up into the interior,’ wrote Procopius. With no understanding of how the disease was transmitted, let alone any quarantine, every freighter and galley shuttling from India to Egypt and from Alexandria to the capital was, potentially, a death ship.

  The spice trade might conceivably have played a still more direct role in the great outbreak of the Black Death of 1348. From a very early date, the advent of the plague was attributed to galleys returning to Italy from the Black Sea, where they went to acquire Eastern luxuries at the terminus of the trans-Asian caravan routes. In the words of a Flemish chronicler,

  In January of the year 1348 three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods. When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith. Thus, they were scattered from port to port …

  And so the plague was exported from one town to the next. Chroniclers across Europe relate the horrifying moment when a plague-ship pulled into harbour bearing a dead and dying crew and their deadly cargo. In every port of Europe the tale unfolded with the same dreadful regularity. Everywhere the arrivals were driven from the city, but by then it was too late. Thus was the long-distance trade the unwitting, indispensable accomplice of flea, bacillus and rat. In a world of limited horizons there could scarcely have been a more effective way of spreading the disease.

  CARYOPHYLLI AROMATICI.

  The clove, from bud to flower. Pietro Matthioli, Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei (Venice, 1565).

  * Bdellium is a gum-resin that oozes from one of several shrubs of the genus Balsamodendron. The dried product resembles impure myrrh.

  † The Mayans used allspice in embalming.

  * In respect of its fire and aromatics the event was apparently not dissimilar to the perfumed royal cremations practised to this day in Bali.

  * The phoenix was moreover a common motif on early Christian sarcophagi. It is possible that the motif and the spice were commonly paired.

  * Similar treatment was presumably given to the body of the eleventh-century Spanish hero El Cid, which remained on display in an ivory chair in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña for a decade before burial.

  * The origin, incidentally, of the modern ‘treacle’.

  * The odd ones out were ginger and galangal, which being classed as hot and wet were generally prescribed for illnesses of a cold and dry nature.

  † When tobacco was introduced to Europe physicians initially classed it as ‘warming’, for which reason it was prescribed for ‘moist’ lungs.

  * Other treatments were ‘unicorn horn’ and magic knives believed to change colour when used to cut contaminated food.

  * Celandine is a small flowering plant that produces a thick yellow juice, long considered a remedy for poor eyesight.

  * Galen was nearer the mark in attributing the outbreak of summer fevers to poisonous vapours rising from swamps, although it was not the air but the mosquitoes flying through it that were responsible for the illness. One legacy is that malaria derives its name from the Latin for ‘bad air’.

  * The similarities between ancient Indian and Greek medicine have been the cause of much speculation. Was there an early transmission of ideas, or did the faith in aromatic medicines emerge independently in both East and West?

  * In the longer term reeds, herbs and matting were liable to decompose and stink. Describing a typical English residence, Erasmus (who generally admired England and the English) wrote of decomposing rushes covering twenty-year-old vomit, spit and dribble of dogs and men, old fish bones, ‘and other filth not to be named … in my opinion harmful to the human body’. Despite this domestic filth he ascribed the plague to noxious winds and vapours admitted into the house by poorly sealed windows.

  * Studies suggest they have a similar effect on the diet of the extremely poor in modern India.

  5

  The Spice of Love

  I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.

  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves.

  Proverbs 7:17–18

  Whan Tendre Youthe Hath Wedded Stoupyng Age

  Even before he caught his wife in flagrante delicto with his squire up a pear tree, January was anxious about the physical aspects of his marriage. Not that he would have admitted as much: though some forty years the senior of the two, January would boast to his friends of his still-rampant virility, declaring himself ‘nowhere grey but on my head’, more than capable ‘to do all it befits a man to do’. Before his marriage, he even fretted whether his young wife could withstand the sexual tornado that awaited her: ‘God willing you might endure my ardour: it is so sharp and keen – I fear you cannot bear it.’ She would be as putty in his hands.

  His brother on the other hand had his misgivings, suggesting that it wasn’t that easy for even the most sprightly husband: ‘The youngest man among us will have his work cut out to keep his wife to himself.’ Events would prove his pessimism, and not January’s bravado, correct. Before long it came to pass that January unwittingly led May to clamber up a pear tree to her rendezvous with Damian:

  Whereupon this Damian pulled up the smock,

  And in be thrust.

  So runs, in brief, the unhappy tale of January’s misplaced bravado and subsequent cuckolding, the subject of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, ‘Whan tendre youthe hath wedded stoupyng age’. Given the period and the subject matter, it comes as no surprise to find a little spice lurking in the details. For all his braggart’s confidence in his sexual prowess, January was not above seeking a little chemical assistance. And as fretful males had done for hundreds if not thousands of years, he turned to spices for a wedding-night boost. Following traditional formulae to increase his virility, January downed some spiced wines, followed by some sweetened mixes of spices known as ‘electuaries’:

  He drinks hippocras, clarry and vernage*

  Hot spices to kindle his lust,

  And many an clectuary full fine,

  Such as the accursed monk, damned Constantine,

  Has written in his book, De Coitu –

  To eat them all he did not eschew.

  And presto! The spiced aphrodisiacs worked as the ‘cursed monk’ said they would, and though he stood on his grave’s edge, the ancient January laboured hard until the dawn. On the morrow, he sat up in bed and sang for joy, immensely satisfied with his performance, ‘as full of chatter as a spotted magpie’. His wife on the other hand counted his efforts ‘not worth a bean’: for all her husband’s spiced aphrodisiacs and exertions, she was more interested in Damian, his squire. She read his love letters in the privy; Damian sighed with longing. The encounter in the branches followed in due course.

  While some of the features of January’s troubled marriage were a little peculiar, there was nothing unusual about his methods (nor, according to Chaucer, the outcome). Spices were among the premier aphrodisiacs of the day, not least thanks to the author January turned to for his stimulants, ‘damned Constantine’. More conventionally known as Constantine the African (c.1020–1087), Chaucer’s ‘cursed monk’ was i
n fact one of the major intellectual figures of the age, his work occupying a central place in the canon of medical studies in European universities until the end of the fifteenth century. Elsewhere Chaucer mentions him as on a par with Hippocrates and Galen, the two greatest medical authorities of classical antiquity.

  Born in Carthage around 1020, Constantine chafed at the limited intellectual horizons of his hometown, abandoning it for Babylon, the greatest seat of learning of the age. His curiosity led him to India, Egypt and Ethiopia, before he finally returned home after thirty-nine years. His travels might be said to have broadened not only his own mind but that of Europe as a whole, for it was he who initiated the translation of Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Latin, thereby reintroducing to Europe a rigour of method and enquiry forgotten since the fall of Rome. In all he translated some thirty-seven books from Arabic into Latin, including many translations of long-forgotten Greek originals. He was also credited with playing a part in the foundation of the famous medical school at Salerno, the first institution of its kind in Europe since ancient times. He was a profoundly influential figure. He died at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino in 1087.

  He was also, to use an anachronism, the pre-eminent sexologist of the age. His work De coitu (On Sexual Intercourse), the book consulted by January, might be termed the foremost sex handbook of the Middle Ages: three hundred years after Constantine’s death it was still the obvious choice, as Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century audience could evidently be taken to understand. There were plenty of other works January might have turned to, but this was, in its time, the major scientific work on the topic, covering all aspects of sexual health, albeit from a somewhat mechanical and wholly male perspective. (Historically speaking, much the same might be said of the overwhelming bulk of the literature on sex: the search for the perfect aphrodisiac has been, overwhelmingly, a masculine anxiety.) Admittedly, Constantine does not wholly omit what we might regard as more conventional techniques of seduction: a peck on the cheek, holding hands, a look at the face, deep sighs or ‘sucking the tongue’ (this seems to be medieval Latin for ‘French kiss’). But if none of these does the trick, he has a host of prescriptions.