Pepper (4 page)

By the time Alaric the Goth arrived, Romans had been using pepper in their food and medicines for centuries. It enlivened a wide variety of food, and was especially prized as an antidote to poison. Pepper's worth had not escaped the Goth. His army finally left Rome, laden with thousands of pounds of gold and silver, thousands of silk tunics and scarlet-dyed skins, and three thousand pounds of pepper. The ransom mollified the Goth only briefly. Two years later, his army surrounded the city once again, and this time the city was sacked.

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Although the Greeks in the fourth and fifth centuries
B.C.
were familiar with pepper—Hippocrates recommended mixing pepper with various herbs and other ingredients as a treatment for fever—we know that the Romans really got the pepper trade started in the West because they used the spice widely as an ingredient in food. Pepper was generously sprinkled throughout the more than 470 recipes of the famous gourmet Apicius, known for his enormous greed, elaborate banquets, and obsession with food (he was alleged to have hired a ship to look for oversize prawns off the African coast) as much as for his skill as an epicure. In his multivolume cookbook, “Apicius showed it [pepper] employed, ground or whole, black or white, in almost every recipe,” writes historian J. Innes Miller. “It was used in the kitchen and also at the table,” notes Miller, “where it was served in a pepper-pot,
piperatoria,
not infrequently made of silver.”

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As early as the first century
A.D.
, the Romans traded at pepper ports along the west coast of India, and their ships could sail from the Red Sea across the Indian Ocean to India in as little as forty days. This busy trade was extinguished when Rome fell to the barbarians in the fifth century, but gold Roman coins, which were used to buy pepper, along with Mediterranean amphoras used to store wine and other items from that trade, are still unearthed in India today.

It was during the Crusades that medieval Europeans glimpsed the tantalizing riches of Arabia, opening their eyes to the pungency of pepper, the fine caress of silk and velvet, and the sweetness of sugar. All of these soon became luxury items in Europe, which was enthralled with the riches of Arabic civilization.

The ruling classes didn't consider a meal worth eating unless it was generously spiced with pepper, cloves, and cinnamon. Use an ounce of pepper, an ounce of cinnamon, an ounce of ginger, half a quarter of cloves, and a quarter of saffron, a medieval Italian cookbook advised. This combination, it said, will go well with “all food.” The medieval palate obviously craved a peppery sweetness, and taste is heavily influenced by contemporary culture. Think of Vegemite, the jelly concoction today beloved by Australians, but reviled by almost anyone who didn't grow up on the stuff. In medieval England, it was considered a privilege to “sauce” the food of kings. For the Feast of St. Edward in 1264, Master William, a saucier, prepared a sauce that incorporated fifteen pounds of cinnamon, twelve and a half pounds of cumin, and twenty pounds (320 ounces) of pepper. Imagine dumping hundreds of modern-day pepper tins, which usually contain about 1.5 ounces of pepper, into a sauce. Two hundred years later, Duke Karl of Bourgogne, considered one of the wealthiest men in Europe, ordered
380 pounds
of pepper for his wedding dinner in 1468. Subtle flavoring wasn't fashionable in medieval times.

It is popularly believed that pepper was used in the Middle Ages to disguise the taste of rotting meat or as a preservative for meat, but that wasn't so. Wealthy families used the most spices, and they had access to an adequate supply of fresh meat all year long. They were big carnivores, and especially liked to eat birds because they believed that the animals were closer to God in heaven, while lowly vegetables in the soil were that much farther away from holiness. So they ate an incredible assortment of birds, and mammals, too—pigeons, rails, doves, peacocks, partridges, plovers, herons, cranes, swans, geese, rabbits, pigs, deer, sheep, and oxen, among others. They weren't particularly choosey. It didn't matter whether the animal flew, hopped, loped, walked, or pranced. At a feast in Canterbury during 1309 to celebrate the installation of an abbot, for example, some 1,000 geese, 24 swans, 200 suckling pigs, 200 sheep, and 30 oxen were consumed. Spices accounted for a sizeable amount, about 13 percent, of the total expense of that orgy of meat and fowl. Many meats were cooked in highly spiced sauces or ground and combined with spicy sauces, which we might find unpalatable today. In medieval times, sugar wasn't widely available in Europe. To create a fiery sweetness in their food, wealthy Europeans used a lot of pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Pepper enhanced the taste of fresh meat, and it also served as a kind of after-dinner drink. Among the wealthy, it wasn't uncommon for a spice plate to be passed around for tasting after a big feast.

The less fortunate couldn't afford to buy many spices, and they did not eat much fresh meat. They bought small amounts of pepper and cumin, which came from Spain, for their meals of bread, porridge, milky cheese, and occasionally fish. Still, no matter how many times historians point out that spices didn't hide the taste of rotting meat in medieval times, this popular myth persists.

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Venice, the “Queen of the Adriatic,” dominated the European spice trade in the Middle Ages. As historian John Keay notes: “No less than Palmyra and Petra, the city [Venice] owed everything to its preeminence in Oriental trade—a term that was virtually synonymous with spices—and was proud to proclaim it.” During Venice's glory days in the fifteenth century, pepper accounted for as much as 80 percent of the value of all spice shipments to the West. However, a complicated route combining overland and sea journeys was required. Along one such route, Arab and Indian ships crossed the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, where pepper and other spices were offloaded at various ports and carried overland through Egypt to the Nile. There, the pepper was loaded onto boats that sailed downstream to Alexandria on the Mediterranean, the gateway to Europe, where Venetian and Genoan ships waited to carry the spice to Italy.

To break Venice's hold on the spice trade, the Portuguese had to find an all-ocean route to India. “History has shown that the hunger for spices was capable of mobilizing forces very much as the present-day need for energy sources has done,” writes historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his enthralling book
Tastes of Paradise
. Spices, he notes with characteristic brio, “played a sort of catalytic role in the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times.” After large quantities were imported into Europe in the seventeenth century by the Dutch and the English, pepper no longer played this sort of catalytic role. It became a commodity, and demand for it diminished as tastes changed and other imports from the East, most notably tea and coffee, became exceedingly popular in the eighteenth century.

Pepper's hold on the medieval imagination stemmed partly from the abject conditions of people's daily lives. Death from disease, especially plague, and from starvation brought on by horrific food shortages caused by famines were the rule of the day. Beginning in the tenth century, famines occurred regularly in Europe. Peasants in the countryside, who came to the cities to seek relief, found little respite. They begged for food and often died in public squares. Even a country as comparatively privileged as France experienced at least eighty-nine general famines from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, an estimate that excludes the hundreds of local famines that occurred over those centuries, according to accounts cited by historian Fernand Braudel in his masterful
Capitalism and Material Life.

Set against this grim environment, pepper offered salvation. In medieval Europe, people fixed their aspirations for a kinder life on the East, which became a sort of paradise in their minds. Europeans became infatuated with the wild notion that the alluring scented breezes of the south China Seas emanated from the Garden of Eden, which had miraculously survived the cataclysmic biblical flood that wiped out everything except Noah and his ark. “Throughout the middle ages, the Garden was believed, somehow, to have survived the flood,” writes historian John Prest, “and in the great age of geographical discoveries in the fifteenth century, navigators and explorers kept hoping to find it. When they didn't, they began to think of bringing the scattered pieces of creation into a Botanic Garden or new Garden of Eden.”

Since antiquity, spices had been considered part of the mythical East, a place where spices flowed like water in the surviving Garden, and wild pepper trees abounded. In the thirteenth century, cinnamon, ginger, and other spices were believed to float down the Nile from Paradise. Fishermen cast their nets into the river to gather this aromatic bounty. The desire to recreate an ideal place on earth, like the original Garden of Eden, with plants gathered from newly “discovered” lands led to the establishment of the great botanic gardens in Padua, Leyden, Oxford, and Paris during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Along with the notion of an earthly paradise, the belief that pepper and other spices existed in superabundance in the East was essential to the age of discovery. In the words of historian Paul Freedman, “fantasies of absurd plentitude” were vitally important “because it was only the expectation of magical abundance, not merely adequate supply, that drew men like da Gama and Columbus and that sufficiently excited their patrons to put up the money for these ventures.”

Medieval Europeans would have been shocked by the reality of life in the land where they thought pepper trees grew. Famines wracked Asia, too, especially during the time when Europeans were first becoming acquainted with the East. The population in China, which had been growing for two hundred years, suddenly declined in the years 1620 to 1640 because of droughts and floods. India was hit by a terrible famine in 1630, and the droughts in southwest India during this period destroyed the pepper plants in what is now Kerala.

In 1631 a Dutch factor, or merchant, arrived in Surat, India, and described the devastation in a letter dated December 21, 1631. “After our departure from Batavia [modern-day Jakarta] wee arrived att Suratt the 23th October last. And going ashore to the villadg called Swalley, wee sawe there manie people that perished of hunger; and whereas heretofore where were in that towne 260 familllyes, ther was not remaininge alive above 10 or 11 famillyes. And as wee traveled from thence to the cytty of Suratt, manie dead bodyes laye upon the hyeway; and where they dyed they must consume of themselves, beinge nobody that would buirey them. And when wee came into the cytty of Suratt, wee hardly could see anie livinge persons, where heretofore was thousands; and ther is so great a stanch of dead persons that the sound people that came into the towne were with the smell infected, and att the corners of the streets the dead laye 20 togeather…”

People in Europe knew little about life in India and Asia. Some of their impressions were based on Richard Hakluyt's monumental book
The Principal Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
. The first edition appeared in 1589, and it was revised and greatly expanded in 1598. The book included the exploits of Sir Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the world in 1580 and was one of the greatest seamen of the Elizabethan era. Although Hakluyt never traveled to the East, his knowledge was considerable, to judge by the journals, logbooks, and other reports of voyages that he gathered and published, and he provided essential advice to convince Queen Elizabeth to allow the establishment of the English East India Company. He knew where the Portuguese traded pepper in India and where they and the Spanish did not have any exclusive claims to pepper, such as Sumatra, a piece of information that helped allay the Queen's fears that an English trading company would anger the Spanish. Hakluyt wanted to drum up interest in the East—he was one of the founders of the English East India Company—and his
Voyages
described grand seafaring epics. He was enthusiastic about expanding England's domain, but the English wouldn't be ready for empire for another one hundred and fifty years. He once wrote that it was a blessing to live in England “in an age wherein God hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth.” It took propagandizing to persuade men to give at least eighteen months of their lives to the round-trip journey to the East. The fantasy of the Garden of Eden and Hakluyt's adventure-filled stories helped to recruit crews for the English ships, or Indiamen, which bore names such as
Hope
and
Peppercorn
.

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Pepper's link to the beginning of modern global trade is reflected in the organization required for setting the price of pepper and for tabulating its profits, which contributed to the rise of capitalism in northern Europe. Historians trace the origins of the English East India Company, the first company in the world based on stock ownership, to medieval spicers, or pepperers, who imported and distributed spices, particularly pepper. These prosperous men eventually formed guilds to protect their interests. The most important was the Pepperers' Guild of London, which held considerable political clout in the city. Some of its members served as mayor.

The pepperers established their businesses on Sopers' Lane, where apprentices dressed in blue uniforms announced to passersby the wares within. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Pepperers' Guild had been replaced by The Grocers' Company, derived from the “Great Beam” used to weigh quantities of more than twenty-five pounds. The word grocer referred to the
peso grosso
or hundredweight of 112 pounds. Cheating the scale by adding stones, sand, or other materials—or by mixing old spice with the newly acquired—was a serious crime. A man convicted of adulteration forfeited his goods to the king. In 1428, The Grocers' received a royal charter of incorporation from Henry VI. Among other items, the charter allowed it to acquire and hold land, and conveyed the privilege of overseeing the use of the beam and weights. In 1447, The Grocers' became the official “garblers” of the land. Garblers inspected spices to ensure that they were pure, and the inspections also gave them a way to control the spice trade, which made the company even more powerful. Each year, The Grocers' Company had to submit an account of all seized goods to the royal exchequer, and in exchange, it received half of all forfeited goods. It retained the garbling privilege until 1689.