An Edible History of Humanity (9 page)

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is sometimes portrayed as the event that ultimately triggered the European age of exploration,
but it was merely the most prominent in a series of events that finally choked off the land route to the East altogether.
The Ottoman Turks had already conquered Greece and most of western Turkey by 1451, and they regarded Constantinople, by now
the last significant holdout of the old Byzantine Empire, as “a bone in the throat of Allah.” Once it had fallen they imposed
huge tolls on ships entering and leaving the Black Sea, and then went on to take the Genoese ports around its coast, including
Caffa, which fell in 1475. Meanwhile the Ottomans’ Muslim rivals, the Mamluks, took the opportunity to raise the tariffs on
spices passing through Alexandria, causing prices in Europe to increase steadily during the second half of the fifteenth century.
It was not simply the fall of a single city, in short, but the slow crescendo of concern over the Muslim spice monopoly that
prompted Eu ro pean explorers to seek radical new sea routes to the East.

In June 1474 Paolo Toscanelli, an eminent Italian astronomer and cosmographer, wrote a letter to the Portuguese court in Lisbon
outlining his unusual theory: that the fastest route from Europe to India, “the land of spices,” was to sail west, rather
than trying to sail south and east around the bottom of Africa. “And be not amazed when I say that spices grow in lands to
the west, even though we usually say the east,” he wrote. Toscanelli described the riches of the east, borrowing heavily from
Marco Polo’s account, and helpfully included a nautical chart showing the islands of Cipangu and Antillia in the ocean on
the way to Cathay (China), which he estimated to be 6,500 miles to the west of Europe. “This country is richer than any other
yet discovered, and not only could it provide great profit and many valuable things, but it also possesses gold and silver
and precious stones and all kinds of spices in large quantities,” he declared. The Portuguese court ultimately ignored Toscanelli’s
advice, but Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor living in Lisbon at the time, heard of his letter and obtained a copy of
it, possibly from Toscanelli himself.

Columbus, like Toscanelli, was convinced that sailing west was the fastest route to the Indies, and he spent years amassing
documents that supported his case, performing calculations, and drawing maps. The idea had solid intellectual foundations—the
ancient authorities Ptolemy and Strabo had alluded to it—and Columbus also drew inspiration from Pierre d’Ailly, a fourteenth-century
French scholar whose “Description of the World” declared that the journey from Spain to India, sailing west, would take “a
few days.” But the backing of Toscanelli, one of the most respected cosmographers of his day, gave the theory added weight.

Building on the calculations of Ptolemy, who had overestimated the size of Eurasia and underestimated the circumference of
the Earth, Columbus cherry-picked figures from various authorities to convince himself that the Earth was even smaller and
Eurasia even bigger, thus shrinking the intervening ocean. He used an estimate from al-Farghani, a Muslim geographer, for
the circumference of the Earth; but he failed to appreciate the difference between Muslim and Roman miles and ended up with
a figure that was, conveniently, 25 percent too small. Then he used Marinus of Tyre’s unusually large estimate of the size
of Eurasia, and added on Marco Polo’s reports of Cipangu (Japan), a large island said to be hundreds of miles off the east
coast of China, which further reduced the width of the ocean he would have to cross. In this way Columbus calculated the distance
from the Canary Islands (off Africa’s west coast) to Japan to be slightly over two thousand miles—less than a quarter of the
true figure.

Convincing a patron to back his proposed expedition proved difficult, however. This was not, as is sometimes suggested, because
the panels of experts appointed in the 1480s by the Portuguese and Spanish courts to evaluate Columbus’s proposal disagreed
with his contention that the Earth was spherical; that was generally accepted. The problem was that his calculations looked
fishy, particularly since they relied on evidence from Marco Polo, whose book describing his travels in the East was widely
regarded at the time as a work of fiction. Portugual was, in any case, pursuing its own program of exploration down the west
coast of Africa, and was unwilling to abandon it (which is why Toscanelli’s letter also fell on deaf ears). So both panels
of experts said no. But Columbus’s fortunes changed when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, fresh from their victory
at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, decided to back him after all. Columbus may have swayed them by suggesting
that the proceeds of his expedition could fund a campaign to recon-quer Jerusalem. He certainly presented his voyage as an
unashamedly commercial venture, and the documents defining the terms of the expedition granted him “a tenth of all gold, silver,
pearls, gems, spices and other merchandise produced or obtained by barter and mining within the limits of these domains.”

His three ships headed west from the Canary Islands on September 6, 1492, and encountered land, after an increasingly anxious
voyage, on October 12. Columbus was certain that riches were in his grasp as soon as land was sighted. His log refers repeatedly
to “gold and spices” and details his attempts to get the local people to tell him where to find them. “I was attentive and
took trouble to ascertain if there was gold,” he wrote in his log on October 13, after meeting a group of natives. Two weeks
after arriving, having visited several among what he took to be the 7,459 islands that Marco Polo claimed lay off the eastern
coast of China, he wrote in his log: “I desired to set out today for the island of Cuba . . . my belief being that it will
be rich in spices.” Columbus failed to find spices on Cuba, but he was told that cinnamon and gold could be found to the southeast.
By mid-November he was still maintaining in his log that “without doubt there is in these lands a very great quantity of gold
. . . stones, precious pearls and infinite spicery.” In December, lying off the island he had named Hispaniola, he recorded
that he could see on the shore “a field of trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit . . . believed to be spices and
nutmegs.”

Given that Columbus communicated with the local people using sign language, he could interpret their signs in almost any way
he chose. Just as conveniently, there were several plausible explanations for his failure to find any spices. Perhaps it was
the wrong season; his men did not know the correct harvesting and processing techniques; and of course Europeans did not know
what spices looked like in the wild anyway. “That I have no knowledge of the products causes me the greatest sorrow in the
world, for I see a thousand kinds of trees, each one with its own special trait, as well as a thousand kinds of herbs with
their flowers; yet I know none of them,” wrote Columbus. He also suffered from bad luck, it seemed: One crew member said he
had found mastic trees, but unfortunately he had dropped the sample; another said he had discovered rhubarb but could not
harvest it without a shovel.

Columbus departed for Spain on January 4, 1493, having amassed a small amount of gold through trading with the local people.
He also carried back samples of what he took to be spices. After a difficult voyage he arrived back in Spain in March 1493,
and his official letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, reporting his discoveries, became a bestseller across Europe, with eleven
editions published by the end of that year. He described exotic islands with lofty mountains, strange birds, and new kinds
of fruit. On the island of Hispaniola, he wrote, “there are many spiceries, and great mines of gold and other metals.” He
explained that delivery of the riches of these new lands could start right away: “I shall give their highnesses spices and
cotton at once, as much as they shall order to be shipped, and as much as they shall order to be shipped of mastic . . . and
aloes as much as they shall order to be shipped; and slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped, and these shall be
from idolatrous peoples. And I believe I have found rhubarb and cinnamon.”

Judging by the triumphant tone of his letter, it seemed that Columbus had achieved his objective of finding a new route to
the riches of the east. Although the islands he visited did not match the descriptions of China and Cipangu from Marco Polo’s
account, he was confident the mainland was nearby. What better proof than the presence of cinnamon and rhubarb, which were
known to originate in the Indies? But opinion in the Spanish court was divided. The twigs that Columbus claimed were cinnamon
did not smell right and seemed to have gone bad in the course of the return voyage. His other samples of spices were similarly
unimpressive, and he had only found a small quantity of gold. Skeptics concluded that he had found nothing more important
than a few new Atlantic islands. But Columbus claimed to be closing in on the source of the gold, so a second, much larger
expedition was dispatched.

The second expedition only perpetuated the confusion over the presence of spices. Writing home to Seville from Hispaniola
in 1494, Diego Álvarez Chanca, who acted as Columbus’s doctor on the voyage, explained the situation. “There are some trees
which ‘I think’ bear nutmegs but are not in fruit at present. I say ‘I think’ because the smell and taste of the bark resembles
nutmegs,” he wrote. “I saw a root of ginger, which an Indian had tied round his neck. There are also aloes: it is not of a
kind which has hitherto been seen in our country, but I am in no doubt that it has medicinal value. There is also very good
mastic.” Not one of these things was really there; but the Spanish really wanted them to be. “There is also found a kind of
cinnamon; it is true that it is not so fine as that which is known at home,” wrote Chanca. “We do not know whether by chance
this is due to lack of knowledge of when it should be gathered, or whether by chance the land does not produce better.”

Columbus threw himself into exploration, hoping to show that he had found the Asian mainland. He claimed to have found the
footprints of griffins and thought he detected similarities between local place names and those mentioned by Marco Polo. At
one point he got every sailor in his fleet to swear an oath that Cuba was bigger than any known island, and that they were
very close to China. Any sailor who refuted these claims was threatened with a large fine and the loss of his tongue. But
doubts grew as Columbus returned from each of his voyages with a few lumps of gold and more of his dubious spices. He fell
back on religious justifications for his activities—the natives could be converted to Christianity—though he also suggested
that they might make good slaves. His settlers became increasingly rebellious. Columbus was accused of mismanagement of his
colonies, and of having painted a misleading picture of their potential. At the end of the third voyage he was sent back to
Spain in chains and was stripped of his title as governor. After a fourth and final voyage, he died in 1506, convinced to
the end that he had indeed reached Asia.

Of course, the Americas offered the rest of the world all kinds of new foodstuffs, including maize, potatoes, squash, chocolate,
tomatoes, pineapples, and new flavorings, including vanilla and allspice. And though Columbus failed to find the spices he
sought in the New World, he found something that was, in some respects, even better. “There is plenty of aji,” he wrote in
his log, “which is their pepper, which is more valuable than black pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very
wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it.” This was the chile, and although it was not pepper, it could
be used in a similar way. An Italian observer at the Spanish court noted that five grains were hotter and had more flavor
than twenty grains of ordinary pepper from Malabar. Better still, the chile could be grown easily outside its region of origin,
unlike most spices, so it quickly spread around the world and had been assimilated into Asian cooking within a few decades.

But despite the chile’s culinary virtues, it was not what Columbus wanted. The ease with which it could be transplanted from
one region to another meant it did not have the financial value of traditional spices, which was due in large part to the
geographical limitations of their supply and the need for long-distance transport. More importantly, however, Columbus wanted
to find the Old World spices not simply for their taste or value, but because he wanted to prove that he really had arrived
in Asia. That was why he sowed confusion for centuries to come by calling chiles “peppers” and the people he found in the
Bahamas “Indians,” in each case naming them after what he had set out to find. For to find the source of spices was to have
arrived in the Indies, the exotic and aromatic lands described by Marco Polo and others whose tales had bewitched Europeans
for so many centuries.

Spices were not one of the original goals of the Portuguese program to explore the west coast of Africa, which was launched
in the 1420s by Infante Henrique of Portugal (known in English as Prince Henry the Navigator, yet another nineteenth-century
coinage). Henry’s aims were to learn more of the geography of the coast and nearby islands, establish trade links, and perhaps
make contact with Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler of a kingdom thought to be somewhere in Africa or the Indies,
who would be a valuable ally against the Muslims. As Henry’s ships worked their way down the African coast, each going a little
farther than the last, they disproved the ancient Greek notion that the earth eventually became too hot for human habitation.
They brought back gold, slaves, and “grains of paradise,” an inferior pepper-like spice that was vaguely known in Europe since
it was sometimes traded across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. They looked for an outlet of the Nile, in the hope of following
it upstream to find Prester John. But as the fifteenth century progressed, the European need to find an alternative route
to the Indies became steadily more urgent. The Portuguese ships pushed south and eventually, in 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded
Africa’s southern cape by accident after being swept out into the Atlantic by a storm and then heading east. He returned to
Lisbon with the news that contrary to the opinion of some of the ancients, the Indian Ocean was not landlocked and could be
reached from the Atlantic—and so, by extension, could India.