A fascinating tapestry of how Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam flourished in the exotic spice trade. Too many tidbits of knowledge to list, but much to savor : Morsels : “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… Spices were even used as mouthwash.” “Pepper… made up the overwhelming majority of all European spice imports.” “Medieval regulations specified that cattle had to be slaughtered and sold the same day.” “… Everyone, including the king, was drinking wine that had been stored for many months in barrels of often indifferent quality… Adding spices, sugar and honey must have quite efficiently improved or masked the off flavors.” “In Venice, in the 15th century when pepper hit an all-time high, you could still buy more than 300 pounds of it per pound of gold.” “You will also read that pepper was used to pay soldiers’ wages… A little context: medieval Europe was desperately short of precious metals to pay as currency… Thus, pepper might be used in lieu of small change. But sacks of common salt were used even more routinely…” “… When the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V visited Naples… he was served peaco*cks stuffed with spices.” “… Emperor Henry VI of Rome, for his coronation in 1191, was paraded down streets that had been fumigated by nutmeg and other aromatics…” “… The relics of St. Mark the Apostle, stolen from a church in Alexandria in the 9th century… Legend claims that the merchants sandwiched the remains between slices of pork to keep the Caliph’s customs officials at bay.” “Tacitus informs us for example that after murdering his wife Poppaea in 65 AD, Nero used a year’s supply of Rome’s cinnamon to bury her.” “When rumors about Indian spices arriving in Lisbon had reached Venice in 1501, the reaction of the government was to send a secret agent to Portugal to discover what was up.” “By 1500 Manuel I ... moved his residence… to the riverbank. Just east of the palace, a broad beach… swarmed with… slaves, sugar, spices… The kings who prided themselves on their crusading zeal now lived much like shopkeepers… above their store to keep an eye on the merchandise. King Francois I of France had a point when he dismissed his Portuguese counterpart as le roi épicier, the spice-seller king." “Contrary to what you may have been taught in elementary school, educated people did not think the world was flat in the Renaissance. There was however no consensus on just how big the world was. According to one eminent Florentine geographer at the time, the earth was some 10,000 miles around the equator… using this number, Columbus made the perfectly reasonable calculation that you could get to to the Indies much faster by sailing west…. Two Portuguese maps show Brazil as early as the 1430’s. Other circ*mstantial evidence proves that the Portuguese had at least some idea of the Americas before Columbus’ voyage.” “At the end of the 13th century, Marco Polo had claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Xiaotong, Guangzhou… According to one well-placed 16th century source, China alone was importing three times as much pepper as the Europeans.” “Within months of the Nina’s return, [red chili pepper] was planted in several monastery gardens, the botanical incubators of the time. By 1564, the visiting Flemish botanist Charles de l'Ecluse reports seeing peppers growing all over Spain.” “Wherever the North Indian merchants loaded their junks and dhows with their peppers and cloves, they left behind their religion… The diffusion of Islam throughout Southeast Asia can be directly credited to the spice route; the story of the earlier spread of Hinduism is much the same.” “Food historians who find medieval quantities of spice off-putting must be apoplectic when they find how much sugar was used in the meat and fish dishes of the Renaissance… A fish pie made with some 3 pounds of fish includes more than a cup of sugar as well as cinnamon and rosewater.” “… [Lisbon] holds more pastry shops per capita than any other place on earth. A recent search of Lisbon’s Yellow Pages turns up more than 800 pasterarias… a similar search on the much larger Paris yields only 180.” “The Dutch - almost uniquely in Europe - have plenty to eat… The famine-prone peasants of southern Europe would have stood with gaping mouths in front of the paintings of plump children in Amsterdam orphanages receiving a weekly ration of meat or fish to supplement their everyday diet of bread, beans and beer.” “The earliest Dutch forays to South Asia were a mixed bag of of abysmal failures and some modest successes… the most misguided were several attempts to reach India via the Arctic Ocean.” “The discipline on Dutch ships was perhaps more brutal than on other European merchant ships… The official rulebooks allowed captains to punish any seamen who injured another by pinning him to the mast with a knife through his hand…” “From the 1470s to 1650, a flood of dietary literature rolled off the presses across Europe. As with so many other subjects, Venetians led the way… “ “The wealthy preferred more exotic remedies… all sorts of precious ingredients of which spices were the most digestible. An early Italian nostrum for soothing the heart includes gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, sapphires… along with cinnamon, cloves, aloeswood, saffron, cubebs, cardamom, coriander, camphor and musk.” “In 1403, five sorcerers were allowed to attempt to cure Charles VI of France. Unluckily for them, the king’s idea of a malpractice award was to burn the quacks at the stake.” “… One of Rembrandt’s more famous paintings… The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp … depicts a scene that took place in the old spice weighing tower in Neomarket… The building not only served to regulate the traffic in nutraceuticals like cinnamon and nutmeg, but was also used by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons for their annual public dissection… The famed surgeon Nicolas Tulp looks on… Apparently he was as skilled at wooing an audience as wielding a scalpel. He later held the position of city treasurer 8 times, and of burgomaster (mayor) 4 times.” “Spices, once they had been turned into an ordinary commodity… had only a marginal place in the modern post medieval world. In the 17th century, chocolate… as well as tea and coffee came to be the new darlings of the ‘in’ crowd.” “ 'That certain seasoning boasted of by a certain southern chicken chain? They don’t like us to mention the name,’ Jim [Lynn, McCormick Communications Director] says with a grin. ‘It's a McCormick spice mix. That special sauce at the hamburger chain with the arches? It’s concocted in Baltimore. ” “Between 1961-1994, the volume of spices imported into the United States increased close to 400%, and doubled again in the next decade. The average contemporary American eats more pepper than any medieval aristocrat…” “The Indian Institute of Spices Research… like researchers everywhere… are eager to share their findings, but are not allowed to share their findings at overseas conferences… ‘In a natural undisturbed system in the forest state,’ the irrepressible field botanist breaks in, ‘pepper plants exist that are a hundred years old. But when you disturb the natural system by tilling and adding manure, the life will deteriorate… a productive life of merely 7-15 years.’ ” .
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