To explain why this is so, how spices came to acquire this freight, is the purpose of this book. Contrary to the certainties of my faraway classroom, this was not an appetite amenable to a simple explanation: there was a good deal more to the attraction of spices than culinary expediency, nor, for that matter, was the food of the Middle Ages quite so bad as moderns have generally been willing to believe. This is a diverse and sprawling history spanning several millennia, beginning with a handful of cloves found in a charred ceramic vessel beneath the Syrian desert where, in a small town on the banks of the Euphrates, an individual by the name of Puzurum lost his house to a devastating fire. In cosmic terms, this was a minor event: a new house was built over the ruins of the old, and then another, and many others after that; life went on, and on, and on. In due course a team of archaeologists came to the dusty village that now stands atop the ruins where, from the packed and burned earth that had once been Puzurum’s home, they extracted an archive of inscribed clay tablets. By a happy accident (for the archaeologists, if not for Puzurum), the blaze that destroyed the house had fired the friable clay tablets as hard as though they had been baked in a kiln, thereby ensuring their survival over thousands of years. A second fluke was a reference on one of the tablets to a local ruler known from other sources, one King Yadihk-Abu. His name dates the blaze, and the cloves, to within a few years of 1721 BC.
As startling as the mere fact of the cloves’ survival might seem, what makes the find truly astonishing is a botanical oddity. Prior to modern times, the clove grew on five tiny volcanic islands in the far east of what is today the Indonesian archipelago, the largest of which measures barely ten miles across. Because cloves grew nowhere else but on Temate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan, these five islands, collectively the Moluccas, were household names of the sixteenth century, spoils contested by rival empires over half a world away. Cervantes found in the rivalry between Ternate and Tidore a suitably exotic setting for his novel The History of Ruis Dias, and Quixaire, Princess of the Moluccas. And yet as colourful as the Moluccas seemed to a sixteenth-century readership, in Puzurum’s day they were surely beyond even the reach of fantasy. For this was an age when Mesopotamian scribes etched their cuneiform narrations of the hero Gilgamesh, when the wild man Humbaba stalked the cedar forests of Lebanon, when genii and lion-men roamed the lands over the horizon. Many centuries before compasses, maps and iron, when the world was an inconceivably more vast and mysterious place than it has since become, cloves came from the smoking, tropical cones of the Moluccas to the parched desert of Syria. How this occurred, who brought them, is anyone’s guess.
Since the incineration of Puzurum’s cloves there have been many more famous spice-seekers sprinkled through history. There are the names we learned at school: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, gambling with scurvy, shipwreck, sheer distance and ignorance to find the ‘places where the spices grow’ – with spectacularly mixed results. There were, besides, the colossal, heroic failures: Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson hunted in vain for nutmeg in the snowy wastes of Canada; the Pilgrim Fathers scoured the cold Plymouth thicket; others froze among the bergs of Novaya Zemlya or left their bones bleaching on some forgotten shore, an entire hemisphere short of their objective.
The story of their spice odysseys have filled plenty of books already. The pages that follow do not pursue the twists and turns of the spice routes, nor the (generally sorry) fates of the traders who travelled them. This book is not a history of the spice trade, at least not in a conventional, narrative sense. I have not sought to retrace the winding pathways that brought cloves to Puzurum or nutmeg to the king of Spain, least of all to show how spices ‘changed the world’. (All writers and publishers who embrace this view too avidly would be well advised to read Carlo Cipolla’s hilarious, acid parody, Le poivre, moteur de l’histoire [Pepper, Motor of History].) In fact I am less concerned with the thorny questions of causation, how spices shaped history, than with how the world has changed around them: why spices were so appealing; how that appeal emerged, evolved and faded. In focusing on the appetite that the spice trade fed, this is not so much a study of the trade as a look at the reasons why it existed.
These reasons were more diverse than we might at first suppose. Taste was only one of the many attractions of spices; they bore many exotic flavours, not all of them to be enjoyed at the table – or even, for that matter, enjoyed. Intertwined in their long culinary history there is another older still, one that until recent times was seldom far from the minds of their consumers. Besides adding flavour to a dry and salty piece of beef or relieving the fishy tedium of Lent, spices were put to such diverse purposes as summoning gods and dispelling demons, driving off illness or guarding against pestilence, rekindling waning desire or, in the words of one authority, making a small penis splendid – a claim that would gratify the creative talents behind the Spice channel. They were medicines of unrivalled reputation, metaphors for the faithful and the seeds of purportedly volcanic erotic enhancement.
But if they were much loved, they were also viewed with mistrust. There was a time not so long ago when the more strait-laced residents of the Maine coast were liable to hear themselves dismissed as ‘too pious to eat black pepper’ – a recollection, perhaps subliminal, of a time when spices were forbidden foods. More than exceptions to a rule, these dissenters help explain an appetite that was ripe with ambiguity and paradox. For when the critics – and they were many – explained what was so objectionable about spices, they tended to single out the reasons that their admirers found for liking them: the merits of flavour, display, health and sexual enhancement transmuted into the deadly sins of pride, luxury, gluttony and lust. These were anything but innocent tastes, and therein lay much of their attraction. It is only by viewing spices in terms of this complex overlap of desires and distaste that the intensity of the appetite can be adequately accounted for – why, in other words, the discoverers we learned about in Aldgate Primary School found themselves on foreign shores, demanding cinnamon and pepper with the cannons and galleons of Christendom at their backs.
All authorities are inclined to inflate the importance of their chosen topic, yet it is my hope that this anatomy of an appetite is not mere antiquarianism. As writers as diverse as Jared Diamond and Günter Grass have observed, food has played a huge role (and a curiously neglected one) in shaping the destinies of humanity – a fact that seems unlikely to change in an age of environmental degradation. Within this field spices occupy a special place. Notwithstanding that they are, in nutritional terms, superfluous, the trade that carried them has been of fundamental importance to two of the greatest problems of global history: the origins of contact between Europe and the wider world, and the eventual rise to dominance of the former – hence, in a nutshell, the academy’s interest. However, in the pages that follow I avoid the larger questions of causation in favour of a more intimate, human focus. This book is written with a sense that history comes too often deodorised, and spices are a case in point. The astonishing, bewitching richness of their past has suffered from being too often corralled into economic or culinary divisions, the essential force of their attraction buried in a materialist morass of economic and political history. Narratives of galleons, pirates and pioneers are more readable but, ultimately, no more explanatory of why that trade existed.
Inasmuch as I have a thesis, it is that spices played a more important part in people’s lives, and a more conspicuous and varied one, than we might be inclined to assume. As whimsical as the claim may seem, there is a deeper historical point.