An Edible History of Humanity (8 page)

Religious beliefs were another kind of information that spread naturally along trade routes, as missionaries followed routes
opened up by traders, and traders themselves took their beliefs to new lands. Mahayana Buddhism spread along trade routes
from India to China and Japan, and Hinayana Buddhism spread from Sri Lanka to Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. Tradition has
it that Thomas the Apostle took Christianity to India’s Malabar coast in the first century A.D., arriving on a spice-trader’s
ship in Cranganore (modern Kodun-gallur) in 52 A.D. But trade’s most striking religious symbiosis was with Islam. The initial
expansion of Islam from its birthplace on the Arabian peninsula was military in nature. Within a century of the death of the
prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., his followers had conquered all of Persia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria, Egypt, the rest
of the northern African coast, and most of Spain. But the spread of Islam after 750 A.D. was closely bound up with trade:
As Muslim traders traveled outward from the Arab peninsula they took their religion with them.

Arab trading quarters in foreign ports quickly converted to Islam. The African empires that traded with the Muslim world across
the Sahara (such as the kingdom of Ghana, and the Mali Empire that replaced it) converted between the tenth and twelfth centuries.
Islam also spread along trade routes into the cities of Africa’s east coast. And, of course, it was carried along the spice
routes of the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India and beyond. By the eighth century Arab traders were sailing all the
way to China to trade in Canton—a direct trade facilitated by political unification brought about by the rise of Islam in
the west and the emergence of China’s Tang dynasty in the east. But the voyage was a particularly hazardous one. Buzurg ibn
Shahriyar, a Persian writer, tells of a captain, Abharah, a legendary navigator who made the voyage to China seven times and
lived to tell the tale, but only just: He was shipwrecked on one of his voyages and escaped as the only survivor from his
ship.

This is the swashbuckling period depicted in the tales of Sinbad (or Sindbad) the Sailor, of great oceanic voyages, returning
home a rich man, spending the spoils, and then becoming restless for adventure and setting out again. Sinbad’s tales draw
upon the real experiences of Arab traders who plied the Indian Ocean. The direct trade with China ended in 878 A.D., however,
when rebels opposed to the Tang regime sacked Canton and killed thousands of foreigners; thereafter merchants from Arabia
only went as far as India or southeast Asia, where they traded with Chinese merchants. But Islam continued to spread along
the trade routes and eventually took root right around the Indian Ocean, reaching Sumatra in the thirteenth century and the
spice islands of the Moluccas in the fifteenth century.

Trade and Islam proved to be highly compatible. Being a merchant was regarded as an honorable profession, not least because
Muhammad himself had been one, making several trips to Syria along the overland routes that carried spices from the Indian
Ocean into the Mediterranean. As Islam spread, the common language, culture, laws, and customs within the Muslim world provided
a fertile environment in which trade could prosper. Visiting Muslim traders were more inclined to do business with coreligionists
in trading centers; and once a major trading city in a particular region converted to Islam, it made sense for other towns
nearby to follow suit, adopting Muslim laws and the Arabic language. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in
the late thirteenth century, noted that the island’s northeast tip was “so much frequented by Saracen [Arab] merchants that
they [had] converted the natives to the Law of Mahomet.” Even if some merchants initially converted for reasons of commercial
expediency, Islam’s rapid spread suggests that they, or at least their descendants, soon became entirely sincere in their
embrace of the new religion. Trade spread Islam, and Islam promoted trade. It is worth noting that at the end of the twentieth
century, the two countries with the largest Muslim populations were Indonesia and China—both far beyond the realm of Islam’s
military conquests.

The second figure is Zheng He, the admiral of China’s extraordinary armada of treasure ships. Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded
seven official voyages, each lasting two years, that traveled far into the Indian Ocean. His fleet of 300 ships, manned by
27,000 sailors, was the largest ever assembled, and it was to remain unsurpassed in size for another five hundred years. Zheng
He’s instructions were to demonstrate China’s wealth, might, and sophistication to other nations, establish diplomatic links,
and encourage trade. Accordingly, he sailed via the spice islands of southeast Asia to the coast of India, up the Persian
Gulf, and as far west as Africa’s east coast. Along the way his ships gathered curiosities, traded with local rulers, and
collected ambassadors to take back to China. Zheng He was China’s ambassador to the outside world; perhaps surprisingly, he
was also a Muslim. But that made him ideally qualified to navigate the ports, markets, and palaces of the kingdoms around
the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, however, his efforts came to nothing. Although he established China as a powerful presence in
the Indian Ocean, internal rivalries within the Chinese court led to the disbanding of the navy, in part to settle political
scores, but also so that resources could be diverted instead to protecting the empire from land-based attackers from the north.

If the world’s spice-trading networks were the communications networks of their day, linking up far-flung lands, then Islam
was the common protocol on which they operated. But although trade flourished in the Muslim world, the rise of Islam had the
effect of cutting Europe off from the Indian Ocean trade system. Once Alexandria fell to Muslim troops in 641 A.D., spices
could no longer reach the Mediterranean directly: Europeans were relegated to a commercial backwater by a “Muslim curtain”
that blocked their access to the east.

In 1345 Jani Beg, the khan of the Golden Horde, laid siege to the port of Caffa on the Crimean peninsula. Genoese traders
had purchased the city from the Golden Horde (the westernmost fragment of the collapsed Mongol Empire) in 1266 and it was
their main trading emporium in the Black Sea. But Jani Beg disapproved of the use of the port for slave trading and tried
repeatedly to take it back. Just as it looked as though he was about to succeed, however, his army was struck by a terrible
plague. According to a contemporary account by Gabriele de Mussi, an Italian notary, Jani Beg’s troops loaded plague-ridden
corpses into catapults and fired them into the city. The defenders threw the bodies over the walls of Caffa and into the sea,
but the plague had taken hold. “Soon, as might be supposed, the air became tainted and the wells of water poisoned, and in
this way the disease spread so rapidly in the city that few of the inhabitants had strength sufficient to fly from it,” de
Mussi recorded. But some of the Genoese did manage to flee—and as they headed westward they took the plague with them in their
ships.

The plague, known today as the Black Death, spread throughout the Mediterranean basin during 1347, reaching France and En
gland in 1348 and Scandinavia by 1349, and killing between one third and one half of the population of Europe by 1353, by
some estimates. “A plague attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people,” noted a Byzantine
chronicler. The exact biological nature of the plague is still hotly debated, though it is generally thought to have been
bubonic plague, carried by fleas on black rats. It was known at the time as the “pestilence”; the term “Black Death” was coined
in the sixteenth century and became popular in the nineteenth. No treatment could save victims once the plague took hold.
There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning
their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the
risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a baffling series of dietary pronouncements.
Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine;
and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. “Olive oil,” they warned, “is fatal.”

Among the long lists of foods to avoid, there were a few examples of foods that were meant to offer protection from the plague—chief
among them spices, with their exotic, quasi-magical associations, pungent aromas, and long history of medical uses. The French
doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted
air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and to carry various concoctions
of pepper, rose petals, and other aromatics when going out. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio described people who “walked
abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their
noses.” This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden,
a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves
had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.

But as a means of preventing infection spices were, in fact, completely useless. Indeed, they were worse than useless; they
were partly to blame for the arrival and spread of the plague in the first place. The Genoese port of Caffa was valuable because
it sat at the western terminus of the Silk Road to China, and because spices and other goods from India, shipped up the Gulf
and then carried overland to Caffa and other Black Sea ports, went around the back of the Muslim curtain. So Caffa allowed
the Genoese to circumvent the Muslim monopoly and obtain eastern goods for sale to European customers. (Their arch-rivals,
the Venetians, had by this time allied themselves with the Muslim sultans who controlled the Red Sea trade, and acted as their
official European distributors.) The plague, which appears to have originated in central Asia, reached Caffa along the overland
trade routes before being spread around Eu rope by Genoese spice ships.

By the time the connection between the spice trade and the plague was noticed, it was too late. “In January of 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,” wrote a Flemish chronicler. “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 to 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.” Later that year a French writer in Avignon wrote of the Genoese ships that “people do not eat,
nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear they may lately have arrived in the aforesaid ships
. . . it has many times been observed that those who have eaten the new spices . . . have suddenly been taken ill.”

The relative importance of the various land and sea routes between Europe and the East varied in accordance with the geopolitical
situation in central Asia. Political unification under the Mongol Empire, for example, which encompassed much of the northern
Eurasian landmass, from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east, made overland trade much safer, and volumes increased accordingly:
In the thirteenth century it was said that a maiden could walk across the Mongol Empire with a pot of gold on her head without
being molested. The establishment of Christian toeholds in the Levant during the Crusades provided other outlets for goods
brought overland along the Silk Road or from the Gulf. Conversely, the breakup of the Mongol Empire in the early fourteenth
century meant that the balance tipped back in favor of the Red Sea route, now controlled by the Muslim dynasty of the Mamluks.

During the fifteenth century there was increasing concern in Europe over the extent of Muslim control over trade with the
east. By 1400 some 80 percent of this trade was in Muslim hands. Their European distributors, the Venetians, were at the height
of their powers. Venice handled around five hundred tons of spices a year, around 60 percent of which was pepper. The cargo
of a single Venetian galley was worth a royal ransom. Various popes tried to ban trade with the Muslim world, but the Venetians
either ignored them or won special dispensations to continue doing business as usual. Genoa, meanwhile, was in decline. Its
Black Sea possessions were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks, a rising Muslim power that was encroaching upon the fast-shrinking
Byzantine Empire. And between 1410 and 1414 there was a sudden spike in the price of spices—in En gland, the price of pepper
increased eightfold—which painfully reminded everyone just how dependent they were on their suppliers. (The cause of this
spike was probably the activities of Zheng He, whose unexpected arrival on the west coast of India disrupted the usual patterns
of supply and demand and drove up prices.) All of this fueled a growing interest in the possibility of finding some new way
around the Muslim curtain and establishing direct trading links with the East.