5 Splinters of Paradise

5

SPLINTERS OF PARADISE

We ceased not to buy and sell at the several islands till we came to the land of Hind, where we bought cloves and ginger and all manner spices; and thence we fared on to the land of Sind, where also we bought and sold. In these Indian seas, I saw wonders without number or count.

—FROM THE

IN The Book of the Thousand Nights and a

TRANSLATED BY SIR RICHARD BURTON (1885–88)

The Curious Appeal of Spices

Flying snakes, giant carnivorous birds, and fierce bat-like creatures were just some of the perils that awaited anyone who tried to gather spices in the exotic lands where they grew, according to the historians of ancient Greece. Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the “father of history,” explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer be protected from the “winged creatures like bats, which screech horribly and are very fierce . . . they have to be kept from attacking the men’s eyes while they are cutting the cassia.”

   Even stranger, Herodotus claimed, was the process of collecting cinnamon. “In what country it grows is quite unknown,” he wrote. “The Arabians say that the dry sticks, which we call kinamomon, are brought to Arabia by large birds, which carry them to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices which no man can climb. The method invented to get the cinnamon sticks is this. People cut up the bodies of dead oxen into very large joints, and leave them on the ground near the nests. They then scatter, and the birds fly down and carry off the meat to their nests, which are too weak to bear the weight and fall to the ground. The men come and pick up the cinnamon. Acquired in this way, it is exported to other countries.”

   Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher of the fourth century had a different story. Cinnamon, he had heard, grew in deep glens, where it was guarded by deadly snakes. The only safe way to collect it was to wear protective gloves and shoes and, having gathered it, to leave one third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst into flames. Yet another tale told of the flying snakes that protected the frankincense-bearing trees. According to Herodotus, the snakes could be driven off by spice harvesters only by smoking them out with burning storax, an aromatic resin, to produce clouds of incense.

   Writing in the first century Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, rolled his eyes at such stories. “Those old tales,” he declared, “were invented by the Arabs to raise the price of their goods.” He might have added that the tall stories told about spices also served to obscure their origins from European buyers. Frankincense came from Arabia, but cinnamon did not: Its origins lay much farther afield, in southern India and Sri Lanka, from where it was shipped across the Indian Ocean, along with pepper and other spices. But the Arab traders who then carried these imported products, together with their own local aromatics, across the desert to the Mediterranean in camel caravans preferred to keep the true origins of their unusual wares shrouded in mystery.

   It worked brilliantly. The Arab traders’ customers around the Mediterranean were prepared to pay extraordinary sums for spices, largely as a result of their exotic connotations and mysterious origins. There is nothing inherently valuable about spices, which are mainly plant extracts derived from dried saps, gums, and resins; barks; roots; seeds; and dried fruits. But they were prized for their unusual scents and tastes, which are in many cases defensive mechanisms to ward off insects or vermin. Moreover, spices are nutritionally superfluous. What they have in common is that they are durable, lightweight, and hard to obtain, and are only found in specific places. These factors made them ideal for long-distance trade—and the farther they were carried, the more sought-after, exotic, and expensive they became.

Why Spices were Special

The English word spice comes from the Latin which is also the root of words such as and so on. The literal meaning of species is “type” or “kind”—the word is still used in this sense in biology—but it came to denote valuable items because it was used to refer to the types or kinds of things on which duty was payable. The Alexandria Tariff, a Roman document from the fifth century is a list of fifty-four such things, under the heading species pertinentes ad which literally means “the kinds (of things) subject to duty.” The list includes cinnamon, cassia, ginger, white pepper, long pepper, cardamom, aloewood, and myrrh, all of which were luxury items that were liable to 25 percent import duty at the Egyptian port of Alexandria, through which spices from the East flowed into the Mediterranean and then on to European customers.

   Today we would recognize these kinds of things, or “species,” as spices. But the Alexandria Tariff also lists a number of exotic items—lions, leopards, panthers, silk, ivory, tortoiseshell, and Indian eunuchs—that were technically spices, too. Since only rare and expensive luxury items that were subject to extra duty qualified as spices, if the supply of a particular item increased and its price fell, it could be taken off the list. This probably explains why black pepper, the Romans’ most heavily used spice, does not appear on the Alexandria Tariff: It had become commonplace by the fifth century as a result of booming imports from India. Today the word spice is used in a narrower, more food-specific way. Black pepper is a spice, even though it does not appear on the Tariff, and tigers are not, even though they do.

   So spices were, by definition, expensive imported goods. This was a further component of their appeal. The conspicuous consumption of spices was a way to demonstrate one’s wealth, power, and generosity. Spices were presented as gifts, bequeathed in wills along with other valuable items, and even used as currency in some cases. In Europe the Greeks seem to have pioneered the culinary use of spices, which were originally used in incense and perfume, and (as with so many other things) the Romans borrowed, extended, and popularized this Greek idea. The cookbook of Apicius, a compilation of 478 Roman recipes, called for generous quantities of foreign spices, including pepper, ginger, putchuk (costus), malabathrum, spikenard, and turmeric, in such recipes as spiced ostrich. By the Middle Ages food was being liberally smothered in spices. In medieval cookbooks spices appear in at least half of all recipes, sometimes three quarters. Meat and fish were served with richly spiced sauces including various combinations of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and mace. With their richly spiced food, the wealthy literally had expensive tastes.

   This enthusiasm for spices is sometimes attributed to their use in masking the taste of rotten meat, given the supposed difficulty of preserving meat for long periods. But using spices in this way would have been a very odd thing to do, given their expense. Anyone who could afford spices could certainly have afforded good meat; the spices were the more expensive ingredient by far. And there are many recorded medieval examples of merchants who were punished for selling bad meat, which rather undermines the notion that meat was invariably putrid and rotten, and suggests that spoiled meat was the exception rather than the rule. The origin of the surprisingly persistent myth about spices and bad meat may lie in the use of spices to conceal the saltiness of meat that had been preserved by the widespread practice of salting.

   Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. Ginger and cinnamon were said by some ancient authorities to be hauled from the Nile in nets, having washed down the river from Paradise (or the Garden of Eden, according to later Christian writers), where exotic plants grew in abundance. They provided an otherworldly taste of paradise amid the sordid reality of earthly existence. Hence the religious use of incense, to provide the scent of the heavenly realm, and the practice of offering spices to the gods as burnt offerings. Spices were also used to embalm the dead and prepare them for the afterlife. The mythical phoenix was even said by one Roman writer to make her nest from—what else?—a selection of spices. “She collects the spices and aromas that the Assyrian gathers, and the rich Arab; those that are harvested by Pygmy peoples and by India, and that grow in the soft bosom of the Sabaean land. She collects cinnamon, the perfume of far-wafting amomum, balsams mixed with tejpat leaves; there is also a slip of gentle cassia and gum arabic, and the rich teardrops of frankincense. She adds the tender spikes of downy nard and the power of Panchaea’s myrrh.”

   The appeal of spices, then, arose from a combination of their mysterious and distant origins, their resulting high prices and value as status symbols, and their mystical and religious connotations—in addition, of course, to their smell and taste. The ancient fascination with spices may seem arbitrary and strange today, but its intensity cannot be underestimated. The pursuit of spices is the third way in which food remade the world, both by helping to illuminate its full extent and geography, and by motivating European explorers to seek direct access to the Indies, in the course of which they established rival trading empires. Examining the spice trade from a European perspective might seem strange, given that Europe occupied only a peripheral position and a minor role in the trade in ancient times. But this served to heighten the mystery and the appeal of spices to Europeans in particular, ultimately prompting them to uncover the true origins of these strangely appealing dried roots, shriveled berries, desiccated twigs, slivers of bark, and sticky bits of gum—with momentous consequences for the course of human history.

The Spice Trade’s World-Wide Web

When a ship was found stranded on the shores of the Red Sea, around 120 there appeared at first to be no survivors. Everyone on board had starved to death—except, it turned out, for one man, and he was only barely alive. He was given food and water and taken to the Egyptian court in Alexandria where he was presented to King Ptolemy VIII (known as Physcon, or “potbelly,” because of his girth). But nobody could understand what the foreign sailor was saying, so the king sent him away to learn some Greek, the official language of Egypt at the time. Not long afterward the sailor returned to the court to tell his story. He explained that he was from India and that his ship had gone off course on its way across the ocean, and had ended up drifting in the Red Sea.

   Since the only sea route to India known in Egypt at the time involved hugging the coast of the Arabian peninsula—something Alexandrian sailors were forbidden to do by Arab merchants who wanted to keep the profitable trade with India to themselves—the sailor’s reference to a fast, direct route across the open ocean to India was met with disbelief. To prove that he was telling the truth, and no doubt to secure a passage home for himself, the sailor offered to act as the guide for an expedition to India. The king agreed and appointed as its leader one of his trusted advisers, a Greek named Eudoxus who was known for his interest in geography. Eudoxus duly sailed away and returned many months later with a cargo of spices and jewels from India, all of which the king confiscated for himself. Eudoxus later made a second trip to India at the behest of Ptolemy VIII’s wife and successor, Cleopatra III. Inspired by the wreckage of what appeared to be a Spanish ship on the east African coast of Ethiopia, he then became obsessed with the idea that it was possible to sail right around Africa. He sailed along the north coast of Africa and headed into the Atlantic to attempt the circumnavigation, but he was never heard from again.

   That, at least, is the story related by Strabo, a Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise on geography in the early first century A.D. Strabo himself was skeptical of the tale: Why did the Indian sailor survive, when his shipmates did not? How did he learn Greek so quickly? Yet the story is plausible, because direct sea trade between the Red Sea and the west coast of India really did open up during the first century just after the shipwrecked Indian is supposed to have appeared in Alexandria. Until this time only Arab and Indian sailors had known the secret of the seasonal trade winds, which allowed fast, regular passage across the ocean between the Arabian peninsula and the west coast of India. These winds blow from the southwest between June and August to carry ships eastward, and then from the northeast between November and January to carry them westward again. Knowledge of the winds, and Arab control of the overland routes across the Arabian peninsula, gave Indian and Arab merchants a firm grip on the trade between India and the Red Sea. They sold spices and other oriental goods to Alexandrian merchants in markets around the southwestern tip of Arabia. These goods were then shipped up the Red Sea, over land to the Nile, and finally up the Nile to Alexandria itself.

   Following in Eudoxus’s wake, however, Alexandrian sailors learned how to exploit the trade winds—the details are said to have been worked out by a Greek named Hippalos, after whom the southwesterly wind was named—and were then able to bypass the Arabian markets and sail directly across the ocean to India’s west coast, cutting out the Arab and Indian middlemen. The volume of shipping increased as Roman traders gained direct access to the Red Sea following Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 30 B.C. Roman control of trade between the Red Sea and India was cemented under the emperor Augustus, who ordered attacks on the ports of southern Arabia, reducing Aden, the main market city, to “a mere village” according to one observer. By the early first century A.D. as many as 120 Roman ships a year were sailing to India to buy spices, including black pepper, costus, and nard—along with gems, Chinese silk, and exotic animals for slaughter in the Roman world’s many arenas. For the first time Europeans had become direct participants in the thriving trade network of the Indian Ocean, the hub of global commerce at the time.

Knowledge of the sea route to India gave Alexandrian (and later Roman) sailors direct access to the spice markets of India’s west coast, bypassing Arabia altogether.

   The “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” a sailor’s handbook written by an unknown Greek navigator in the first century gives a flavor of the frenetic commercial activity in the markets interconnected by the Indian Ocean. It lists the ports along the west coast of India and their specialties, from Barbarikon in the north (a good place to buy costus, spikenard, bdellium, and lapis lazuli), to Barygaza (good for long pepper, ivory, silk, and a local form of myrrh) and right down to Nelcynda, almost at the southern tip of India. In this region the main trade was in pepper, which was “grown in quantity” inland, according to the Periplus. Also on offer was malabathrum, the leaf of the local cinnamon plant and a particularly valued spice: A pound of small leaves would fetch seventy-five denarii in Rome, or about six times the typical monthly salary. In all these ports Roman traders offered wine, copper, tin, lead, glass, and red coral from the Mediterranean, which was valued in India as a protective charm. But mostly the Roman traders had to pay for spices with gold and silver, since most of their goods had little appeal to Indian merchants. Tamil poems of the first century A.D. refer to the “yavanas,” a generic term for people from the west, with their great ships and wealth that “never wane[d],” a reference to the vast quantities of gold and silver that were handed over in return for spices.

   The Periplus goes on to tell of the ports on India’s east coast and of the small vessels that traded between the east and west coasts. It also mentions the much larger ships that plied the Bay of Bengal between India and southeast Asia, which were probably Malay or Indonesian vessels. Given the size of Roman vessels, the fact that the size of these ships is remarked upon suggests that they were very large indeed. They would have carried goods from farther east, including nutmeg, mace, and cloves from the spice islands of Indonesia (the Moluccas) and silk from China.

   Beyond this point the Periplus becomes rather vague. But it provides at least a glimpse, from the European perspective, of a vast trade network, the first connections of which had been established thousands of years earlier. Cardamom from southern India had been available in Mesopotamia in the third millennium Egyptian ships were bringing frankincense and other aromatics from the land of Punt (probably Ethiopia) in the second millennium and Pharaoh Ramses II was buried in 1224 B.C. with a peppercorn from India inserted in each of his nostrils. In a wave of expansion between 500 B.C. and 200 however, the spice-trade network came to encompass the entire Old World, with cinnamon and pepper from India being carried as far west as Britain and frankincense from Arabia traveling as far east as China. But the full extent of this network was generally unknown to its participants, since they were not always aware of the origins of the goods they traded. Just as the Greeks thought that the Indian spices that reached them via Arab traders actually originated in Arabia, so too the Chinese seem to have assumed that nutmeg and cloves came from Malaya, Sumatra, or Java, though these were in reality just ports of call on the way along the maritime trade routes from their true source farther east, in the Moluccas.

   Spices also crossed the world by land. From the second century B.C. overland routes connected China with the eastern Mediterranean, linking the Roman world in the west and Han China in the east. (These routes were dubbed the Silk Road in the nineteenth century, even though they carried far more than silk and there was in fact a network of east-west routes, not a single road.) Musk, rhubarb, and licorice were among the spices traded along this route. Spices also traveled by land between the north and south of India, between India and China, and between southeast Asia and inland China. Nutmeg, mace, and cloves were available in India and China in Roman times but did not regularly reach Europe until the dying days of Roman rule.

   The extent of this trade, and the amount spent importing exotic foreign goods, provoked some opposition in Rome. For one thing it was extravagant, which was not in keeping with the supposedly traditional Roman values of modesty and frugality. It also meant that large amounts of silver and gold were flowing east. Compensating for this outflow required that the Romans find new sources of treasure, either through conquest or by opening up new mines. And all of this was for products that were, strictly speaking, unnecessary and were sold at heavily marked-up prices.

   As Pliny the Elder put it: “In no year does India absorb less than 55 million sesterces of our wealth, sending back merchandise to be sold to us at one hundred times its prime cost.” In total, he reported, Rome’s annual trade deficit with the east amounted to one hundred million sesterces, or about ten tons of gold, once Chinese silk and other fine goods were taken into account along with the spices. “Such is the sum that our luxuries and our women cost us,” he lamented. Pliny professed to be baffled by the popularity of pepper. “It is remarkable that its use has come into such favor, for with some foods it is their sweetness that is appealing, others have an inviting appearance, but neither the berry nor the fruit of pepper has anything to recommend it,” he wrote. “The sole pleasing quality is its pungency—and for the sake of this we go to India!”

   Similarly, Pliny’s contemporary Tacitus worried about Roman dependence on “spendthrift table luxuries.” When he wrote these words around the end of the first century however, the Roman spice trade was already past its peak. As the Roman Empire declined and its wealth and sphere of influence shrank in the centuries that followed, the direct spice trade with India withered in turn, and Arab, Indian, and Persian traders reasserted themselves as the main suppliers to the Mediterranean. But the spices continued to flow. A Roman cookbook from the fifth century “The Excerpts of Vinidarius,” lists more than fifty herbs, spices, and plant extracts under the heading “Summary of spices which should be in the house in order that nothing is lacking in seasoning,” including pepper, ginger, costus, spikenard, cinnamon leaf, and cloves. And when Alaric, king of the Goths, besieged Rome in 408 he demanded a ransom of 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pieces of silver, 4,000 robes of silk, 3,000 pieces of cloth, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. Evidently the supply of Chinese silk and Indian pepper continued even as the Roman Empire crumbled and fragmented.

   But during the period when direct trade with the east had thrived, it briefly brought the people of Europe into the vibrant Indian Ocean trade system. In the first century this trading network spanned the Old World, linking the mightiest empires in Eurasia at the time: the Roman Empire in Europe, the Parthian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Kushan Empire in northern India, and the Han dynasty in China. (Rome and China even established diplomatic contacts with each other.) Spices were just one of the things that traveled around this global network by land and sea. But since they had a high ratio of value to weight, could only be found in certain parts of the world in many cases, were easily stored, and were highly sought after, spices were exceptional in being traded from one end of the network to the other, as shown for example by the references in Roman sources to cloves, which grew only in the Molucca Islands on the other side of the globe. Spices brought a flavor of southeast Asia to Roman tables and the scent of Arabia to Chinese temples. And as spices were traded around the world, they carried other things along with them.

Old World trade networks of the first century A.D. linked the Mediterranean in the west with China and the spice islands in the east.

Freighted with Meaning

Goods are not the only things that flow along trade routes. New inventions, languages, artistic styles, social customs, and religious beliefs, as well as physical goods, are also carried around the world by traders. So it was that knowledge of wine and wine-making traveled from the Near East to China in the first century and knowledge of noodles traveled back in the other direction. Other ideas soon followed, including paper, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder. Arabic numerals actually originated in India, but they were transmitted to Europe by Arab traders, which explains their name. Hellenistic influences are clearly visible in the art and architecture of the Kushan culture of northern India; Venetian buildings were decorated with Arab flourishes. But in two fields in particular—geography and religion—the interplay between trade and the transmission of knowledge was mutually reinforcing.

   One of the things that makes spices seem so exotic is their association with mysterious, far-off lands. For early geographers in the ancient world, attempting to put together the first maps and descriptions of the world, spices often marked the boundaries of their knowledge. Strabo, for example, referred to “the Indian cinnamon-producing country” which lay “on the edge of the habitable world,” beyond which the earth was, he said, too hot to allow humans to live. Even the more worldly author of the Periplus had little idea what happened east of the mouth of the Ganges: there was a large island, “the last place of the habitable world” (possibly Sumatra), after which “the sea comes to an end somewhere.” To the north was the mysterious land of “Thina” (China), the source of silk and malabathrum (cinnamon) leaves.

   Traders and geographers depended on each other: Traders needed maps, and mapmakers needed information. Traders would visit geographers before setting out, and might then share information on their return. Knowing how many days it took to travel from one point to another, or typical itineraries of particular routes, made estimates of distance possible, and hence the construction of maps. In this way geographers learned about the layout of the world as an indirect result of the trade in spices and other goods. This is also why so much information about spices comes from the early geographers. Neither they nor the traders wanted to reveal all their secrets, but some give and take made sense for both parties. Merchants worked hand in hand with mapmakers, culminating in the map compiled in the second century A.D. by Ptolemy, a Roman mathematician, astronomer, and geographer. It was surprisingly accurate by modern standards and formed the basis of Western geography for more than a thousand years.

   The interdependence between geography and trade was pointed out by Ptolemy himself, who noted that it was only due to commerce that the location of the Stone Tower, a key trading post on the Silk Road to China, was known. He was well aware that the Earth was spherical, something that had been demonstrated by Greek philosophers hundreds of years earlier, and he agonized about how best to represent it on a flat surface. But Ptolemy’s estimate of the circumference of the Earth was wrong. Although Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician, had calculated the circumference of the Earth four hundred years earlier and arrived at almost exactly the right answer, Ptolemy’s figure was one-sixth smaller—so he thought the Eurasian landmass extended farther around the world than it actually did. This overestimate of the extent to which Asia extended to the east was one of the factors that later emboldened Christopher Columbus to sail west to find it.

   Ptolemy also believed that the Indian Ocean was landlocked, despite reports that it could be reached from the Atlantic by going around the southern tip of Africa. (Herodotus, for example, told of Phoenicians who had circumnavigated Africa around 600 taking around three years to do so and finding the seasons strangely reversed as they headed south.) Arab geographers realized that the idea of a landlocked Indian Ocean was wrong during the tenth century. One of them, al-Biruni, wrote of “a gap in the mountains along the south coast [of Africa]. One has certain proofs of this communication although no one has been able to confirm it by sight.” Al-Biruni’s informants were undoubtedly merchants.

   Religious beliefs were another kind of information that spread naturally along trade routes, as missionaries followed routes opened up by traders, and traders themselves took their beliefs to new lands. Mahayana Buddhism spread along trade routes from India to China and Japan, and Hinayana Buddhism spread from Sri Lanka to Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. Tradition has it that Thomas the Apostle took Christianity to India’s Malabar coast in the first century arriving on a spice-trader’s ship in Cranganore (modern Kodungallur) in 52 A.D. But trade’s most striking religious symbiosis was with Islam. The initial expansion of Islam from its birthplace on the Arabian peninsula was military in nature. Within a century of the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 his followers had conquered all of Persia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria, Egypt, the rest of the northern African coast, and most of Spain. But the spread of Islam after 750 A.D. was closely bound up with trade: As Muslim traders traveled outward from the Arab peninsula they took their religion with them.

   Arab trading quarters in foreign ports quickly converted to Islam. The African empires that traded with the Muslim world across the Sahara (such as the kingdom of Ghana, and the Mali Empire that replaced it) converted between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Islam also spread along trade routes into the cities of Africa’s east coast. And, of course, it was carried along the spice routes of the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India and beyond. By the eighth century Arab traders were sailing all the way to China to trade in Canton—a direct trade facilitated by political unification brought about by the rise of Islam in the west and the emergence of China’s Tang dynasty in the east. But the voyage was a particularly hazardous one. Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, a Persian writer, tells of a captain, Abharah, a legendary navigator who made the voyage to China seven times and lived to tell the tale, but only just: He was shipwrecked on one of his voyages and escaped as the only survivor from his ship.

   This is the swashbuckling period depicted in the tales of Sinbad (or Sindbad) the Sailor, of great oceanic voyages, returning home a rich man, spending the spoils, and then becoming restless for adventure and setting out again. Sinbad’s tales draw upon the real experiences of Arab traders who plied the Indian Ocean. The direct trade with China ended in 878 however, when rebels opposed to the Tang regime sacked Canton and killed thousands of foreigners; thereafter merchants from Arabia only went as far as India or southeast Asia, where they traded with Chinese merchants. But Islam continued to spread along the trade routes and eventually took root right around the Indian Ocean, reaching Sumatra in the thirteenth century and the spice islands of the Moluccas in the fifteenth century.

   Trade and Islam proved to be highly compatible. Being a merchant was regarded as an honorable profession, not least because Muhammad himself had been one, making several trips to Syria along the overland routes that carried spices from the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean. As Islam spread, the common language, culture, laws, and customs within the Muslim world provided a fertile environment in which trade could prosper. Visiting Muslim traders were more inclined to do business with coreligionists in trading centers; and once a major trading city in a particular region converted to Islam, it made sense for other towns nearby to follow suit, adopting Muslim laws and the Arabic language. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in the late thirteenth century, noted that the island’s northeast tip was “so much frequented by Saracen [Arab] merchants that they [had] converted the natives to the Law of Mahomet.” Even if some merchants initially converted for reasons of commercial expediency, Islam’s rapid spread suggests that they, or at least their descendants, soon became entirely sincere in their embrace of the new religion. Trade spread Islam, and Islam promoted trade. It is worth noting that at the end of the twentieth century, the two countries with the largest Muslim populations were Indonesia and China—both far beyond the realm of Islam’s military conquests.

   Two historical figures illustrate Islam’s reach and unifying power. The first is Ibn Battuta, a Muslim from Tangiers who is often referred to as the Arab Marco Polo. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he set out to make the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, where he arrived the following year, having visited Cairo, Damascus, and Medina along the way. But rather than return home directly, he decided to do some more traveling and embarked on what turned into a twenty-nine-year, 73,000-mile journey around much of the known world. He visited Iraq, Persia, the east coast of Africa, Turkey, and Central Asia and traveled across the Indian Ocean to southern China. He then returned to North Africa, from where he visited southern Spain and the central African kingdom of Mali. It was an amazing journey by any standard, but what is particularly remarkable is that for most of his travels, Ibn Battuta remained within the Muslim world, or what Muslims call dar al-Islam (literally, “the abode of Islam”). He served as a judge in Delhi and the Maldives, was sent by an Indian sultan as an ambassador to China, and when he visited Sumatra in 1346, he found that the local sultan’s jurists were members of his own Hanafi school of legal thought.

   The second figure is Zheng He, the admiral of China’s extraordinary armada of treasure ships. Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven official voyages, each lasting two years, that traveled far into the Indian Ocean. His fleet of 300 ships, manned by 27,000 sailors, was the largest ever assembled, and it was to remain unsurpassed in size for another five hundred years. Zheng He’s instructions were to demonstrate China’s wealth, might, and sophistication to other nations, establish diplomatic links, and encourage trade. Accordingly, he sailed via the spice islands of southeast Asia to the coast of India, up the Persian Gulf, and as far west as Africa’s east coast. Along the way his ships gathered curiosities, traded with local rulers, and collected ambassadors to take back to China. Zheng He was China’s ambassador to the outside world; perhaps surprisingly, he was also a Muslim. But that made him ideally qualified to navigate the ports, markets, and palaces of the kingdoms around the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, however, his efforts came to nothing. Although he established China as a powerful presence in the Indian Ocean, internal rivalries within the Chinese court led to the disbanding of the navy, in part to settle political scores, but also so that resources could be diverted instead to protecting the empire from land-based attackers from the north.

   If the world’s spice-trading networks were the communications networks of their day, linking up far-flung lands, then Islam was the common protocol on which they operated. But although trade flourished in the Muslim world, the rise of Islam had the effect of cutting Europe off from the Indian Ocean trade system. Once Alexandria fell to Muslim troops in 641 spices could no longer reach the Mediterranean directly: Europeans were relegated to a commercial backwater by a “Muslim curtain” that blocked their access to the east.

Around the Muslim Curtain

In 1345 Jani Beg, the khan of the Golden Horde, laid siege to the port of Caffa on the Crimean peninsula. Genoese traders had purchased the city from the Golden Horde (the westernmost fragment of the collapsed Mongol Empire) in 1266 and it was their main trading emporium in the Black Sea. But Jani Beg disapproved of the use of the port for slave trading and tried repeatedly to take it back. Just as it looked as though he was about to succeed, however, his army was struck by a terrible plague. According to a contemporary account by Gabriele de Mussi, an Italian notary, Jani Beg’s troops loaded plague-ridden corpses into catapults and fired them into the city. The defenders threw the bodies over the walls of Caffa and into the sea, but the plague had taken hold. “Soon, as might be supposed, the air became tainted and the wells of water poisoned, and in this way the disease spread so rapidly in the city that few of the inhabitants had strength sufficient to fly from it,” de Mussi recorded. But some of the Genoese did manage to flee—and as they headed westward they took the plague with them in their ships.

   The plague, known today as the Black Death, spread throughout the Mediterranean basin during 1347, reaching France and England in 1348 and Scandinavia by 1349, and killing between one third and one half of the population of Europe by 1353, by some estimates. “A plague attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people,” noted a Byzantine chronicler. The exact biological nature of the plague is still hotly debated, though it is generally thought to have been bubonic plague, carried by fleas on black rats. It was known at the time as the “pestilence”; the term “Black Death” was coined in the sixteenth century and became popular in the nineteenth. No treatment could save victims once the plague took hold. There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a baffling series of dietary pronouncements. Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine; and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. “Olive oil,” they warned, “is fatal.”

   Among the long lists of foods to avoid, there were a few examples of foods that were meant to offer protection from the plague—chief among them spices, with their exotic, quasi-magical associations, pungent aromas, and long history of medical uses. The French doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and to carry various concoctions of pepper, rose petals, and other aromatics when going out. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio described people who “walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses.” This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden, a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.

   But as a means of preventing infection spices were, in fact, completely useless. Indeed, they were worse than useless; they were partly to blame for the arrival and spread of the plague in the first place. The Genoese port of Caffa was valuable because it sat at the western terminus of the Silk Road to China, and because spices and other goods from India, shipped up the Gulf and then carried overland to Caffa and other Black Sea ports, went around the back of the Muslim curtain. So Caffa allowed the Genoese to circumvent the Muslim monopoly and obtain eastern goods for sale to European customers. (Their arch-rivals, the Venetians, had by this time allied themselves with the Muslim sultans who controlled the Red Sea trade, and acted as their official European distributors.) The plague, which appears to have originated in central Asia, reached Caffa along the overland trade routes before being spread around Europe by Genoese spice ships.

   By the time the connection between the spice trade and the plague was noticed, it was too late. “In January of 1348 three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods,” wrote a Flemish chronicler. “When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared to touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith. Thus they were scattered from port to port.” Later that year a French writer in Avignon wrote of the Genoese ships that “people do not eat, nor even touch spices, which have not been kept a year, since they fear they may lately have arrived in the aforesaid ships . . . it has many times been observed that those who have eaten the new spices . . . have suddenly been taken ill.”

   The relative importance of the various land and sea routes between Europe and the East varied in accordance with the geopolitical situation in central Asia. Political unification under the Mongol Empire, for example, which encompassed much of the northern Eurasian landmass, from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east, made overland trade much safer, and volumes increased accordingly: In the thirteenth century it was said that a maiden could walk across the Mongol Empire with a pot of gold on her head without being molested. The establishment of Christian toeholds in the Levant during the Crusades provided other outlets for goods brought overland along the Silk Road or from the Gulf. Conversely, the breakup of the Mongol Empire in the early fourteenth century meant that the balance tipped back in favor of the Red Sea route, now controlled by the Muslim dynasty of the Mamluks.

   During the fifteenth century there was increasing concern in Europe over the extent of Muslim control over trade with the east. By 1400 some 80 percent of this trade was in Muslim hands. Their European distributors, the Venetians, were at the height of their powers. Venice handled around five hundred tons of spices a year, around 60 percent of which was pepper. The cargo of a single Venetian galley was worth a royal ransom. Various popes tried to ban trade with the Muslim world, but the Venetians either ignored them or won special dispensations to continue doing business as usual. Genoa, meanwhile, was in decline. Its Black Sea possessions were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks, a rising Muslim power that was encroaching upon the fast-shrinking Byzantine Empire. And between 1410 and 1414 there was a sudden spike in the price of spices—in England, the price of pepper increased eightfold—which painfully reminded everyone just how dependent they were on their suppliers. (The cause of this spike was probably the activities of Zheng He, whose unexpected arrival on the west coast of India disrupted the usual patterns of supply and demand and drove up prices.) All of this fueled a growing interest in the possibility of finding some new way around the Muslim curtain and establishing direct trading links with the East.

   The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is sometimes portrayed as the event that ultimately triggered the European age of exploration, but it was merely the most prominent in a series of events that finally choked off the land route to the East altogether. The Ottoman Turks had already conquered Greece and most of western Turkey by 1451, and they regarded Constantinople, by now the last significant holdout of the old Byzantine Empire, as “a bone in the throat of Allah.” Once it had fallen they imposed huge tolls on ships entering and leaving the Black Sea, and then went on to take the Genoese ports around its coast, including Caffa, which fell in 1475. Meanwhile the Ottomans’ Muslim rivals, the Mamluks, took the opportunity to raise the tariffs on spices passing through Alexandria, causing prices in Europe to increase steadily during the second half of the fifteenth century. It was not simply the fall of a single city, in short, but the slow crescendo of concern over the Muslim spice monopoly that prompted European explorers to seek radical new sea routes to the East.