When Julius Caesar gifted a bagful of spices to Brutus’ mother as a token of his regard and affection of her, neither of them would have even heard of the place it came from …. the Malabar Coast. Very soon, Malabar Coast became a synonym for the produce and history was made as thousands of ships were launched from places across the globe to trace the land of spices. And, as trade followed the flag, the short stretch of land that was then known as the Malabar Coast in the Indian subcontinent became the destination of adventurous seafarers as well as avaricious traders.
It wasn’t the tantalizing flavour alone that made spices rival gold in price and possession in olden times. They had many other uses--- as incense, as an additive in medicinal ointments, as energy booster, as air purifier and as food preservative. In some parts of Europe, spices were used for embalming in early centuries. Arguably, no commodity had energized world trade, even international power politics, as strongly as spices till, perhaps, the arrival of crude oil.
Historically, the early traders of spices were the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Greek sailor crossed the Red Sea and Persian Gulf and moved to the West Coast of India, particularly the Malabar Coast. Consignments of spices from the east used to be taken to the Mediterranean coast from where they used to be transported to the west. Alexandria in Egypt was a major distribution point.
Towards the end of the 3rd century, the Romans emerged as rivals to the Greeks. Emperor Augustus Caesar, after his conquest of Egypt, built new ships and opened up direct services to India. Later, a sailor, Hippalus, by deftly using the monsoon winds, cut the sailing time to the Malabar Coast by half. This inevitably increased supplies of spices which, in turn, brought down prices.
Records show that the Romans used to put out to the sea fleet of 120 large ships, every April, from Port Myos Hormus in the Red Sea to the Malabar Coast. These ships, heavily loaded with spices, returned by March the following year. There are references in the *Sangam era literature about Roman vessels that used to call at Kerala ports in search of pepper and other spices during the **Chera period.
With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, other powers chipped in. The Arabs were the first to do so, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. They took the conventional route and delivered supplies at the Mediterranean ports to traders, mostly from Venice to Genoa. At every point of resale, prices used to be more than double. Reportedly, one hundred weight of pepper that cost three ducats (Venetian money) at Kozhikode used to be sold for 80 ducats by the Venetian merchants.
The arrival of the legendary Portuguese adventurer, Vasco da Gama (1498) to the Malabar coast to be more exact in Kappadu beach near Calicut, seemed to have changed the tone and tenor of spices trade. After an initial period of distrust, the Portuguese did succeed in entering into agreements with the kings of Cochin (1500) and later Calicut (Zamorin) for exclusive rights for trading in pepper and other spices. Seeing the enormous revenue potential in trading with the Portuguese, the then reigning Queen of Kollam, a major pepper producing area south of Cochin, entered into an agreement with them in 1502.
The Dutch, who drove away the Portuguese from the Malabar Coast, pursued with equal passion trading in spices. The Dutch were hard bargainers and saw to it that they paid much less than their competitors, often as less as 25 to 30 per cent. In 1778, for example, nearly one million pounds of pepper from the Malabar Coast was reportedly sold in Holland at 17 strivers (one Dutch striver equalled one sterling pound) while they cost only five strivers per pound in Calicut. But whatever margins the Dutch made were lost in the series of wars they had to wage with their European adversaries over their colonies in Asia.
The British, who virtually ousted the Dutch from the subcontinent, were more shrewd, as much in power politics as in business practices. A meeting of major merchants held in the city of London on September 24, 1599, drew up the contours of British trade in spices.
In its brief to its representative in Bombay, the East Indian Company had let it known that “ we do not want an extent of land if we could but obtain pepper cheap and sufficient”. Unsurprisingly, the company later widened its brief to include land that finally ended up in converting India into a major British colony.
The English played every trick of the trade, including feigned romance, to expand their interests in spices trade. One such was enacted at Attingal, near Kollam, south of Cochin, which produced one of the finest varieties of pepper. The then Rani of Attingal took a fancy to an Englishman that slowly developed into an obsessive fascination with attendant allurements of favours of all sorts. From his part, all that the Englishman sought was total monopoly in pepper trade within the Rani’s jurisdiction. The romance, however, ended abruptly when the local traders, seeing their trading interests being threatened, immediately took up cudgels against the Englishman and chased him out of the place.
There were local elements who had as strongly spiced up trading in spices as their foreign competitors. The most important among them were the Gujaratis. Legend has it that Vasco da Gama was guided to the Malabar Coast by a Gujarati, Kano Malan, whom he befriended in Africa.
Historians trace the Gujarat connection to the early 18th century when there used to be regular shipping services between Surat in Gujarat and the Malabar Coast. While the majority of the ships flew the Portuguese flag, evidently for reasons of safety, they were reportedly owned by Asians. Spices were the major merchandise. Possibly, the enormous business potential in spices trade had attracted the attention of the business-minded Gujaratis.
Their presence did help the growers get good prices for their produce. While the foreign buyers bargained at gun-point, the Gujaratis were relatively more generous with pricing that helped them get away with better quality and higher volume.
Little wonder that they continue to hold sway in spices trade even as the foreign elements were eased out partly by commercial but largely by political dynamics.
THE NEED FOR SPICE
A great deal of nonsense has been written by highly knowledgeable people about Europeans’ desire for spices. Economic historians of the spice trade who have long mastered the relative value of pepper quintals and ginger kintars (both units of weight] and effortlessly par se the price differential of cloves between Mecca and Malacca will typically begin their weighty tomes by mentioning, almost in passing, the self-evident fact that Europeans needed spices as a preservative or to cover up the taste of rancid food. This is supposed to explain the demand that sent the Europeans off to conquer the world. Of course, the experts then quickly move on to devote the rest of their study to an intricate analysis of the supply side of the equation. But did wealthy Europeans sprinkle their swan and peacock pies with cinnamon and pepper because their meat was rank? The idea is an affront to common sense, to say nothing of the fact that it completely contradicts what’s written in the old cookbooks.
Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration, food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting and preserving in acid. Think prunes, prosciutto and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn’t so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici, or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette, even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. The rough-and-ready Franks were largely ignorant of all but pepper. In Renaissance Italy, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron and cloves adorned not merely the tables of merchants and potentates but also found their way into medical prescriptions and alchemical concoctions. Spices were even used as mouthwash. And then French trendsetters of the waning seventeenth century, after their own six hundred year dalliance with the aromas of the Orient, turned away from most spices to invent a cuisine that we might recognize today. So if spices were used for their preservative qualities, why did they stop using them? The French had not discovered some new way of preserving food. There was a shift in taste, certainly, but it was the same kind of change that happened when salsa replaced ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. There were many underlying reasons for it. Technology wasn’t one of them.
Old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren’t used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices towards the end of the cooking process, where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. The Menagier, for one, instructs his spouse to “put in the spices as late as may be, for the sooner they be put in, the more they lose their savor.” In atleast one Italian cook book that saw many editions after its first printing in 1549, Cristoforo Messisbugo suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage.
Perversely, even though spices weren’t used in this way in Europe, they could have been. Recent research has identified several spices that have powerful antimicrobial properties. Allspice and oregano are particularly effective in combating salmonella, listeria, and their kind. Cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and mustard can also boast some bacteria-slaying prowess. Pepper, however, which made up the overwhelming majority of all European spice imports, is a wimp in this regard. But compared to any of these, salt is still champion. So the question remains, why would Europeans use more expensive and less effective imports to preserve food when the ingredients at hand worked so much better?
AN ANCIENT TRADE
The fantastic profits to be made from the spice trade had attracted businessmen for millennia and not only, or even primarily, in Europe. A thriving spice trade existed among India, China and the islands of Southeast Asia long before the Portuguese and Dutch bullied their way in. The Chinese ruling classes of the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E) were as fond of Indonesian and other spices as any Burgundian lord. Marco Polo claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou). By some estimates, the percentage of spices that reached the European market was never much more than about a quarter of what Asia produced.
If we can rely on the reporting of the Old Testament, Joseph was sold to a caravan carrying spices into ancient Egypt. Just what kind of spices we aren’t told, but chances are they brought at least a little pepper. A pharaoh who died in 1224 B.C.E. has been found embalmed with peppercorns up his nose. In later years, when the queen of Sheba made a courtesy call on King Solomon, she reportedly brought along camels bearing spices as a house gift. Perhaps a more trustworthy source is an archaeological dig in Syria that has unearthed cloves dating back to about 1700 B.C.E and that in the kitchen of an ordinary household. When the Romans arrived on the scene, they, too, imported spices from Asia, though at nothing like the later European rate. Pepper seemed to have been popular, as was cinnamon and its look-alike, cassia, though some scholars have argued that these last two were actually altogether different spices from the ones we recognize by those names today. In time, the western empire collapsed, and pepper was a rare sight indeed in the former Roman provinces. Elsewhere, though, spice merchants continued to keep the tables of the rich and powerful well supplied. China, India, Persia and the Arab states of the Middle East still used spices just like they always had, as both tonic and seasoning. Even the Eastern Roman Empire – or Byzantium, as it came to be known – kept up its culinary habits more or less as before.
In Europe, things were different. With the collapse of Rome, the orderly territories north of Alps were ravaged. Wheat fields were bludgeoned into wastelands, and vineyards were trampled into dust. Trade was throttled. Great cities shriveled to hamlets. Ordinary folk resorted to scavenging for roots and nuts, while the warrior class tore at great haunches of roasted beasts, swilling beer all the while. Or that, at least, is our image of the Dark Ages. Undoubtedly, there were pockets of polished civilization amid the roughened landscape, especially in the monasteries, where fragments of a Roman lifestyle remained. Italy, in particular, retained active ties to both the current “Roman” empire in Byzantium as well as the memory of the old stamping grounds of the Caesars. All the same, whatever else you might say about the invasions of the Germanic and Slavic tribes that swept across the continent in those years, their arrival was hardly conducive to the culinary arts.
In the meantime, as Europe spiraled down into a recurring cycle of war, hunger, and pestilence, the Middle East flourished under a Pax Arabica. In Baghdad, the imperial capital, Persians, Arabs and Greeks sat down at the same table to argue about medicine, science, the arts and naturally what should be served for dinner. Arab merchants sent their agents to China, India and Indonesia to shop for silks and jewels, but most especially for the spices that were the essential ornament to any sophisticated cuisine. Incidentally, it was those same spice traders who brought Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, in the West, Muslim armies had overwhelmed the Iberian Peninsula and penetrated deep into France. They took Sicily and all but a fragment of the Byzantine Middle East. In Jerusalem, mosques towered over Christian remains. For a time, the cries of muezzins calling the faithful to prayer could be heard from the dusty plains of Castile to Java’s sultry shores.
Quite reasonably, Christian Europe felt under siege, and its response came in a series of assaults on the Middle East between 1096 and 1291 that we call the Crusades. Yet the short-lived military success of the Crusaders in the Holy Land (they held Jerusalem for just eighty-eight years) pales in comparison to the ideological, cultural and economic after shocks that followed those first Catholic Jihads.
Cultures typically gain their identity not only from what unifies them but, more important, from what sets them apart from their neighbors and foes. Today, for example, Europeans are united as much by the way they grouse about Americans as they are by the euro. In much the same way, the early medieval idea of Christendom-given the enormous political and economic differences within Europe- could not have been possible without the outside threat. On a more everyday level, the Crusades also changed tastes and fashions. The Norman knight who returned to his drafty St.Albans manor brought back a craving for the food he had tasted in sunny Palestine, much like the sunburned Manchester native does today when he returns from his Turkish holiday. In the Dark Ages, spices had all but disappeared from everyday cooking. With the Crusaders’ return, Europeans (of a certain class) would enjoy well-spiced food for the next six hundred years.
It wasn’t the tantalizing flavour alone that made spices rival gold in price and possession in olden times. They had many other uses--- as incense, as an additive in medicinal ointments, as energy booster, as air purifier and as food preservative. In some parts of Europe, spices were used for embalming in early centuries. Arguably, no commodity had energized world trade, even international power politics, as strongly as spices till, perhaps, the arrival of crude oil.
Historically, the early traders of spices were the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Greek sailor crossed the Red Sea and Persian Gulf and moved to the West Coast of India, particularly the Malabar Coast. Consignments of spices from the east used to be taken to the Mediterranean coast from where they used to be transported to the west. Alexandria in Egypt was a major distribution point.
Towards the end of the 3rd century, the Romans emerged as rivals to the Greeks. Emperor Augustus Caesar, after his conquest of Egypt, built new ships and opened up direct services to India. Later, a sailor, Hippalus, by deftly using the monsoon winds, cut the sailing time to the Malabar Coast by half. This inevitably increased supplies of spices which, in turn, brought down prices.
Records show that the Romans used to put out to the sea fleet of 120 large ships, every April, from Port Myos Hormus in the Red Sea to the Malabar Coast. These ships, heavily loaded with spices, returned by March the following year. There are references in the *Sangam era literature about Roman vessels that used to call at Kerala ports in search of pepper and other spices during the **Chera period.
With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, other powers chipped in. The Arabs were the first to do so, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. They took the conventional route and delivered supplies at the Mediterranean ports to traders, mostly from Venice to Genoa. At every point of resale, prices used to be more than double. Reportedly, one hundred weight of pepper that cost three ducats (Venetian money) at Kozhikode used to be sold for 80 ducats by the Venetian merchants.
The arrival of the legendary Portuguese adventurer, Vasco da Gama (1498) to the Malabar coast to be more exact in Kappadu beach near Calicut, seemed to have changed the tone and tenor of spices trade. After an initial period of distrust, the Portuguese did succeed in entering into agreements with the kings of Cochin (1500) and later Calicut (Zamorin) for exclusive rights for trading in pepper and other spices. Seeing the enormous revenue potential in trading with the Portuguese, the then reigning Queen of Kollam, a major pepper producing area south of Cochin, entered into an agreement with them in 1502.
The Dutch, who drove away the Portuguese from the Malabar Coast, pursued with equal passion trading in spices. The Dutch were hard bargainers and saw to it that they paid much less than their competitors, often as less as 25 to 30 per cent. In 1778, for example, nearly one million pounds of pepper from the Malabar Coast was reportedly sold in Holland at 17 strivers (one Dutch striver equalled one sterling pound) while they cost only five strivers per pound in Calicut. But whatever margins the Dutch made were lost in the series of wars they had to wage with their European adversaries over their colonies in Asia.
The British, who virtually ousted the Dutch from the subcontinent, were more shrewd, as much in power politics as in business practices. A meeting of major merchants held in the city of London on September 24, 1599, drew up the contours of British trade in spices.
In its brief to its representative in Bombay, the East Indian Company had let it known that “ we do not want an extent of land if we could but obtain pepper cheap and sufficient”. Unsurprisingly, the company later widened its brief to include land that finally ended up in converting India into a major British colony.
The English played every trick of the trade, including feigned romance, to expand their interests in spices trade. One such was enacted at Attingal, near Kollam, south of Cochin, which produced one of the finest varieties of pepper. The then Rani of Attingal took a fancy to an Englishman that slowly developed into an obsessive fascination with attendant allurements of favours of all sorts. From his part, all that the Englishman sought was total monopoly in pepper trade within the Rani’s jurisdiction. The romance, however, ended abruptly when the local traders, seeing their trading interests being threatened, immediately took up cudgels against the Englishman and chased him out of the place.
There were local elements who had as strongly spiced up trading in spices as their foreign competitors. The most important among them were the Gujaratis. Legend has it that Vasco da Gama was guided to the Malabar Coast by a Gujarati, Kano Malan, whom he befriended in Africa.
Historians trace the Gujarat connection to the early 18th century when there used to be regular shipping services between Surat in Gujarat and the Malabar Coast. While the majority of the ships flew the Portuguese flag, evidently for reasons of safety, they were reportedly owned by Asians. Spices were the major merchandise. Possibly, the enormous business potential in spices trade had attracted the attention of the business-minded Gujaratis.
Their presence did help the growers get good prices for their produce. While the foreign buyers bargained at gun-point, the Gujaratis were relatively more generous with pricing that helped them get away with better quality and higher volume.
Little wonder that they continue to hold sway in spices trade even as the foreign elements were eased out partly by commercial but largely by political dynamics.
THE NEED FOR SPICE
A great deal of nonsense has been written by highly knowledgeable people about Europeans’ desire for spices. Economic historians of the spice trade who have long mastered the relative value of pepper quintals and ginger kintars (both units of weight] and effortlessly par se the price differential of cloves between Mecca and Malacca will typically begin their weighty tomes by mentioning, almost in passing, the self-evident fact that Europeans needed spices as a preservative or to cover up the taste of rancid food. This is supposed to explain the demand that sent the Europeans off to conquer the world. Of course, the experts then quickly move on to devote the rest of their study to an intricate analysis of the supply side of the equation. But did wealthy Europeans sprinkle their swan and peacock pies with cinnamon and pepper because their meat was rank? The idea is an affront to common sense, to say nothing of the fact that it completely contradicts what’s written in the old cookbooks.
Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration, food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting and preserving in acid. Think prunes, prosciutto and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn’t so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici, or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette, even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. The rough-and-ready Franks were largely ignorant of all but pepper. In Renaissance Italy, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron and cloves adorned not merely the tables of merchants and potentates but also found their way into medical prescriptions and alchemical concoctions. Spices were even used as mouthwash. And then French trendsetters of the waning seventeenth century, after their own six hundred year dalliance with the aromas of the Orient, turned away from most spices to invent a cuisine that we might recognize today. So if spices were used for their preservative qualities, why did they stop using them? The French had not discovered some new way of preserving food. There was a shift in taste, certainly, but it was the same kind of change that happened when salsa replaced ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. There were many underlying reasons for it. Technology wasn’t one of them.
Old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren’t used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices towards the end of the cooking process, where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. The Menagier, for one, instructs his spouse to “put in the spices as late as may be, for the sooner they be put in, the more they lose their savor.” In atleast one Italian cook book that saw many editions after its first printing in 1549, Cristoforo Messisbugo suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage.
Perversely, even though spices weren’t used in this way in Europe, they could have been. Recent research has identified several spices that have powerful antimicrobial properties. Allspice and oregano are particularly effective in combating salmonella, listeria, and their kind. Cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and mustard can also boast some bacteria-slaying prowess. Pepper, however, which made up the overwhelming majority of all European spice imports, is a wimp in this regard. But compared to any of these, salt is still champion. So the question remains, why would Europeans use more expensive and less effective imports to preserve food when the ingredients at hand worked so much better?
AN ANCIENT TRADE
The fantastic profits to be made from the spice trade had attracted businessmen for millennia and not only, or even primarily, in Europe. A thriving spice trade existed among India, China and the islands of Southeast Asia long before the Portuguese and Dutch bullied their way in. The Chinese ruling classes of the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E) were as fond of Indonesian and other spices as any Burgundian lord. Marco Polo claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou). By some estimates, the percentage of spices that reached the European market was never much more than about a quarter of what Asia produced.
If we can rely on the reporting of the Old Testament, Joseph was sold to a caravan carrying spices into ancient Egypt. Just what kind of spices we aren’t told, but chances are they brought at least a little pepper. A pharaoh who died in 1224 B.C.E. has been found embalmed with peppercorns up his nose. In later years, when the queen of Sheba made a courtesy call on King Solomon, she reportedly brought along camels bearing spices as a house gift. Perhaps a more trustworthy source is an archaeological dig in Syria that has unearthed cloves dating back to about 1700 B.C.E and that in the kitchen of an ordinary household. When the Romans arrived on the scene, they, too, imported spices from Asia, though at nothing like the later European rate. Pepper seemed to have been popular, as was cinnamon and its look-alike, cassia, though some scholars have argued that these last two were actually altogether different spices from the ones we recognize by those names today. In time, the western empire collapsed, and pepper was a rare sight indeed in the former Roman provinces. Elsewhere, though, spice merchants continued to keep the tables of the rich and powerful well supplied. China, India, Persia and the Arab states of the Middle East still used spices just like they always had, as both tonic and seasoning. Even the Eastern Roman Empire – or Byzantium, as it came to be known – kept up its culinary habits more or less as before.
In Europe, things were different. With the collapse of Rome, the orderly territories north of Alps were ravaged. Wheat fields were bludgeoned into wastelands, and vineyards were trampled into dust. Trade was throttled. Great cities shriveled to hamlets. Ordinary folk resorted to scavenging for roots and nuts, while the warrior class tore at great haunches of roasted beasts, swilling beer all the while. Or that, at least, is our image of the Dark Ages. Undoubtedly, there were pockets of polished civilization amid the roughened landscape, especially in the monasteries, where fragments of a Roman lifestyle remained. Italy, in particular, retained active ties to both the current “Roman” empire in Byzantium as well as the memory of the old stamping grounds of the Caesars. All the same, whatever else you might say about the invasions of the Germanic and Slavic tribes that swept across the continent in those years, their arrival was hardly conducive to the culinary arts.
In the meantime, as Europe spiraled down into a recurring cycle of war, hunger, and pestilence, the Middle East flourished under a Pax Arabica. In Baghdad, the imperial capital, Persians, Arabs and Greeks sat down at the same table to argue about medicine, science, the arts and naturally what should be served for dinner. Arab merchants sent their agents to China, India and Indonesia to shop for silks and jewels, but most especially for the spices that were the essential ornament to any sophisticated cuisine. Incidentally, it was those same spice traders who brought Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, in the West, Muslim armies had overwhelmed the Iberian Peninsula and penetrated deep into France. They took Sicily and all but a fragment of the Byzantine Middle East. In Jerusalem, mosques towered over Christian remains. For a time, the cries of muezzins calling the faithful to prayer could be heard from the dusty plains of Castile to Java’s sultry shores.
Quite reasonably, Christian Europe felt under siege, and its response came in a series of assaults on the Middle East between 1096 and 1291 that we call the Crusades. Yet the short-lived military success of the Crusaders in the Holy Land (they held Jerusalem for just eighty-eight years) pales in comparison to the ideological, cultural and economic after shocks that followed those first Catholic Jihads.
Cultures typically gain their identity not only from what unifies them but, more important, from what sets them apart from their neighbors and foes. Today, for example, Europeans are united as much by the way they grouse about Americans as they are by the euro. In much the same way, the early medieval idea of Christendom-given the enormous political and economic differences within Europe- could not have been possible without the outside threat. On a more everyday level, the Crusades also changed tastes and fashions. The Norman knight who returned to his drafty St.Albans manor brought back a craving for the food he had tasted in sunny Palestine, much like the sunburned Manchester native does today when he returns from his Turkish holiday. In the Dark Ages, spices had all but disappeared from everyday cooking. With the Crusaders’ return, Europeans (of a certain class) would enjoy well-spiced food for the next six hundred years.
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