The Medieval Taste for Spices

Historically Speaking September/October 2008 Historically Speaking September/October 2008 VbI. DC No. 7 Contents The Medieval Taste forSpices Paul Freedman Is ThereAnything Leftto Be SaidaboutAbraham Lincoln? Vernon Borlón TheAssassin'sAccomplice: MarySunattandthe Plotto KillLincoln Kate Larson "Abundant History":A Forum Abundant History: MarianApparitions as 12 Alternative Modernity RobertA. Orsi HowAbundantis "AbundantHistory"? 16 Thomas Kselman AbundantHistory: Protestantismand18 Alternative Modernities Jane Shaw Back to the Future:A Response to20 Robert Orsi Brad S. Gregory Troubling Presence22 Constance M. Furey A Response to the Commentaryon25 "AbundantHistory" RobertA. Orsi American "ExceptionaHsm":27 Addenda toAlonzo Hamb/s Essay John Lukacs Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease: A Roundtable Epidemics, Pandemics, andthe29 DoomsdayScenario AndrewCunningham Epidemic Smallpoxin India31 DavidAmok) WhyDidHHappen? ReS0ous34 Explanations ofthe "Spanish"Fht Epidemicin SouthAfrica Homard PhWpS Religion andEpidemic Disease36 OuaneJ.Osheim HistoriesofHistoriography:A ReviewEssay 38 Zachary S. Schrflman The Soilingof(M Glory:41 An Interview with Louis Masur Conducted by DonaldA. Yerxa Discoveringthe Dharma:43 BucWh/s/n/n America Richard Hughes Seagar Sporting Male Weeklies in 19th-century 46 Afetv VooV. An Interview with Patricia Orne Cohen, TimothyJ. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Conducted by Randal J. Stephens Letters50 The Medieval Taste for Spices Paul Freedman The subject of medieval spices is a venerable one, venerable to the point of being a series of clichés. For example, an enduring piece of received knowledge about medieval Europe is that spices were used to cover up the taste of meat that was semi-spoiled. This is in the same category of erroneous modern lore about the Middle Ages as the droit de seigneur, Pope Joan, chastity belts, Marco Polo bringing pasta to Italy from China, or Columbus attempting to prove that the Earth is round. All this notwithstanding , three related historical topics make it worthwhile to explore the allure of spices in the Middle Ages. In the first place, spices are part of the history of culinary and medical ideas. Spices also play a role in the background to the first overseas expansion of Europe in the 16th century. A third reason to examine the cultural history of spices is that they tell us something about how people in the Middle Ages looked at the world. This third topic is what first interested me, because spices appear in all sorts of odd contexts, from discourses about the earthly Paradise to denunciations of luxury; from medical recommendations to ceremonial banquets. Their appeal to medieval observers reveals notions of geography, the sacred, consumer culture, commercial practice, and economic theory. The business-history aspect of medieval spices—trade routes and prices especially—have been dealt with extensively by generations of historians . Trade paths from East Asia to the West, price fluctuations, and the fortunes of entrepôts like Venice and Montpellier—diese concern how spices were obtained, what might be called the "supply side." Less has been done with the "demand side"; why these commodities were so popular to begin with. That is what I propose to discuss here. That the demand really was powerful is evident from medieval recipes, pharmacy manuals, and merchants ' records, and, most dramatically, die circumstances that led to the voyages of discovery and colonial conquest at the close of the Middle Ages. The pepper brought back to Portugal in 1499 by Vasco da Gama had been purchased in India at the equivalent of 3 Venetian ducats per hundredweight, at a time when the going price in Venice was 80 We can discount the popular but erroneous idea that spices were used to preserve meat or cover up its deterioration. Anyone in the Middle Ages who could afford spices could readily have procured fresh meat. ducats. Columbus was less successful in this regard, but equally eager for similar profits. In the log of his first voyage, and in reporting to the king and queen of Spain, Columbus asserted that all sorts of precious metals and spices were to be found just beyond the places he had explored. If spices played such an important role in the cataclysmic European expansion that marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, it is worth asking what the basis for their ascribed value was. As I said at the outset, we...