In its mix of half-accurate detail and wild distortion this was a fairly representative example of European visions of the East. But how seriously were such depictions meant to be taken? There is a risk, in considering these and similar visions, that our own modern credulity outstrips the medieval. Evidently, some of the more fabulous tales of the Indies and their spices were never intended to be taken literally; they are a notoriously unreliable guide to informed opinion, and a trap for the unwary. In the fantastic Asia of such illuminations we are, manifestly, in a not-Europe. But while the tone of such depictions is often playful or didactic, what is clear is that they derived their force from their very invertedness. And spices were, for their creators, a means to that end. It is precisely through this fictive inversion that we, however dimly, can sense how extraordinary spices were in fact. Like the dog-headed men and man-devouring amazons with which they were paired, spices were as ordinary in the imagined Indies as they were exceptional in Europe; that they were commonplace in medieval fantasies was because they were extraordinary in reality.
Retrospectively, of course, it is a little easier to extract the fact from the fantasy, but in medieval times the lines were more blurred. It is precisely this sense of a world turned upside-down and inside-out that animates the genre of more-or-less fictional travellers’ tales that appears from roughly the thirteenth century on. Many such were parodies, such as that of Brother Cipolla of The Decameron, with his trip to Liarland (‘where I found a great many friars’) and Parsnip, India, with its amazing flying feathers. Of these the most celebrated, and in every sense the spiciest, was the Itinerarium conventionally attributed to one Sir John Mandeville, a suitably chivalric-sounding pseudonym of an anonymous, probably French, author. First circulated in various versions and translations between 1356 and 1366, along with the other by-now stock features of the marvellous Eastern landscape – Gog and Magog, Prester John, the Great Khan and his Asian Utopia – spices are one of the hallmarks of his fantastic tableaux. Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace grew in Java ‘more plentyfoulisch than in any other contree’, a land that had ‘many tymes overcomen the Grete Cane of Cathaye in bataylle’. Here, perhaps, is a grain of fact, a vague awareness of Javanese traders shuttling spices west from the Moluccas; so much the author might have learned from Marco Polo. But the force, and the point – for Mandeville (or whoever) wrote not to inform, but to amaze – is of the extraordinary become prosaic. Read on and there are ox-worshipping Cynocephales, corpse-eating savages and gems engendered from the tears of Adam and Eve. Such was the world where the spices grew. Along with the dragons and the mountains of gold, they were one of its distinguishing features.
Mandeville’s account must have raised a knowing chuckle among the merchants who, even then, knew better. And there were plenty who did know better. Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar who travelled through India, South-East Asia and China from roughly 1316 to 1330, reported meeting ‘people in plenty’ in Venice who had been in China. At much the same time, the Tunisian traveller Ibn Battuta saw Genoese merchants in India and China. But though the merchants did the legwork it was the Mandevilles who set the tone. (Perhaps this is to underestimate the savvy of the spice-dealers, who, after all, had an interest in making bankable publicity for their exotic wares: ‘Thus men feign, to make things deer and of great price,’ as a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk said of the wilder myths concerning the origins of cinnamon.) Such accurate information about the spices as did make it through was either kept a close secret or else recast in brighter colours.
Or, alternatively, it was discarded as nonsense. Tellingly, Mandeville’s account proved vastly more popular than a far more sober and factual authority on the Indies and their spices, the Travels of Marco Polo. Published a generation or so before Mandeville, Polo’s book met with widespread suspicion. Despite Rustichello’s best efforts (Rustichello being the professional romance-writer with whom Polo shared a prison cell in Genoa, thanks to whose ability to spot a bestseller the Travels exist), the Venetian’s unadorned account of Asia, with its straightforward, real-world qualities, was in some respects harder to credit than the fiction. In his uncomplicated, businessman’s manner Polo claimed to have sailed past lands where spices were commonplace, growing on real trees, harvested by real people, in quantities that Europeans could not fathom. He claimed the city of Kinsay (Hangchow), with its 12,000 stone bridges and hundred-mile circumference, received a hundred times as much pepper as the whole of Christendom, ‘and more too’. In his matter-of-fact tone, this was a little too much to swallow. It was somehow easier to place the Indies and their spices among the dog-heads and the floating islands. So extraordinary were spices that even the truth seemed fabulous.
And so it remained until the sixteenth century, when at last the discoverers chipped away at the great edifices of medieval ignorance and fantasy, dragging the realms of spice and gold into the prosaic light of day; into the unromantic focus of the profiteer and the venture capitalist. The great spice age, the apex of the appetite, was also the age that killed off their mystery.
Ironically, the individual who did more than any other to draw spices out of fantasy into cold fact was himself one of the most avid consumers of medieval legends of spice and gold. This is perhaps Columbus’s most remarkable achievement, for in respect of Eastern fables he bears, as has already been noted, more than a passing resemblance to Don Quixote, who so overcharged his fancy with the wooings, battles and enchantments of Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul that he quite lost his grip on reality. But whereas Quixote’s dreams sprouted from tales of chivalry and romance, Columbus’s schemes were founded – and sold – on sources that presented themselves, however capriciously, as impeccably factual. The surviving remnants of his library in the Biblioteca Colombiana in Seville include several of the books from which he drew his ideas, among them the early-fifteenth-century Imago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) and the Historia Rerum of Pope Pius II (ruled 1458–1464), each alike laced with descriptions of the fabulous, spicy wonders of the East. There too is Columbus’s copy of Polo’s Travels, the margins crammed with the admiral’s comments on each and every mention of gold, silver, precious stones, silk, ginger, pepper, musk, cloves, camphor, aloes, brasilwood, sandalwood and cinnamon. Dipping in and out of these books, taking what he liked and disregarding what did not suit, spicing Polo’s figures and distances with the vivid hues of the others, Columbus constructed the fabulous mental geography that, quite contrary to his expectations, succeeded in revolutionising geography in an altogether different sense. When he sailed west he quite genuinely believed he was sailing to paradise. If he succeeded in reaching the place where the spices grew he had, ipso facto, arrived.
To his dying day he believed that he had been but a hair’s breadth from getting there. He went to his grave not in the poverty often imagined, but unenlightened. Writing on the troubled progress of his third voyage in the autumn of 1498, charged with chronic mismanagement of the infant colony of Hispaniola, whose disgruntled settlers were now in open rebellion against his command, Columbus assured his patrons that he had been no more than a day’s sailing from the earthly paradise. At the time this seemed reasonable enough, at least to Columbus. Not only his reading told him so, but also the evidence of his own eyes. As he sailed around the top of South America, standing on deck off Trinidad, the Pole Star arced in the sky above him, and the world seemed to spin off its usual axis. Columbus had the overwhelming, disconcerting impression that the ship was climbing, sailing up the incline to paradise. (By this time he had concluded that the world was pear-shaped, with the heights of paradise perched on a protuberance shaped like a woman’s nipple.) The Caribbean season was balmy and mild like an eternal spring: yet more evidence. Buckets were lowered over the side and it was found that the ship, though still out of sight of land, was sailing in fresh water – the outflow, surely, of one of the four rivers flowing from the heights of paradise. Columbus knew he had been, at most, only a short sail from the realms of