The control over gold, silver, precious metals, and most importantly oil has been a source of conflict and a driver of economic globalization. However, other products have also inspired exploration, war, conquest and ultimately the emergence of a closely integrated world trading system. One such product lies in small bottles on the shelves of supermarkets and corner grocery stores: spice.

The quest for spice was, in fact, one of the earliest drivers of globalization. Long before the great voyages of European explorers, spices were globally traded products. As spices once created a global economic network in the Middle Ages, other commodities have followed a similar path. And like spice, many of these products have also faded in popularity. Consider some of the first industries listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average - leather or rubber for instance - that have since lost their privileged place and have now been replaced by products like Coca-Cola or oil. Although spices are no longer the prized items they were in the Middle Ages, the story of the quest for spice is an early model of globalization, which other traded goods have since mirrored.

Spices were the first globally traded product. Their high price, limited supply and mysterious origin fueled a growing effort to discover their source of cultivation. Thus they were a global commodity centuries before the voyages of discovery. And the desire for this commodity fueled the European colonial empires to create global political, military and commercial networks under a single power; where before there had only been a complex chain of relations in which the end consumer had no knowledge of the producer and vice versa.

Historians know a fair amount about the supply of spices in Europe during the medieval period - where they originated, how they were transported, what their prices were - but less about demand. Why go to such extraordinary efforts to procure very expensive products from barely-known places such as India or the Moluccan Islands, or even imagined places such as the Earthly Paradise? Still, the demand was great enough to inspire the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco Da Gama, which launched the first fateful wave of European colonialism. Thus the desire for aromatic substances has had immense historical repercussions whose effects have been felt long after the vogue of spices has diminished.

In a handbook of practical wisdom written by the Florentine merchant Francesco Pegolotti in the early fourteenth century some 288 spices are listed. Included are items we would not count under this rubric, such as fine textiles or industrial products such as alum (used as a dye fixative). Even so, the variety of imported aromatic substances is astounding and suggests a high demand for spices, including many unfamiliar to us today such as "long pepper," "grains of Paradise" (both of these are peppery in taste but unrelated to black pepper), and "dragon's blood" (a dye and also a drug ingredient). So, why were spices so highly prized in Europe in the centuries from about 1000 to 1500?

We can dismiss the most widely disseminated explanation for the medieval demand for spices: that they covered the taste of spoiled meat or they were used to preserve meat. Not only is there no evidence for this, it cannot be squared with common sense. Spices were much more expensive than meat. Besides, fresh meat was readily available, which is proved by the many extant records of municipal ordinances prohibiting butchers from throwing unwanted animal parts and blood in the streets. Butchers received meat on the hoof and were responsible for all the processing now done off-site. Medieval purchasers consumed meat much fresher than what the average city-dweller in the developed world of today has at hand. Moreover, spices are not in fact effective preservatives, especially compared to salting, smoking or drying meat.

Although we have dispelled a few myths about the intended use of spices, we still must answer why spices were so popular. One reason is the particular culinary preferences of the Middle Ages. Over 100 medieval cookbooks survive today. If we take one example, in the Libre del Coch of Master Robert, written for the king of Naples, we find about 200 recipes, 154 of which call for sugar, 125 require cinnamon, 76 ginger, and 54 saffron. Spices ordered for the wedding of George "the Rich", Duke of Bavaria and Jadwiga of Poland in 1475 included 386 lbs. of pepper, 286 lbs. of ginger, 257 lbs. of saffron, 205 lbs. of cinnamon, 105 lbs. of cloves, and 85 lbs. of nutmeg. Clearly, recipes from this era call for not only large quantities of spices, but also a great variety. Spices such as cinnamon or nutmeg that we associate with desserts are found in meat and fish; sugar (which functioned as a spice during this era) is among the ubiquitous ingredients, giving one the impression of how the taste for sweet and sour combinations has diminished.

Given our own change in taste towards a more spicy style of cooking, we are in a position better to appreciate the medieval culinary aesthetic which involved such considerations as color, ingenuity, and a high degree of processing and artifice. Far from the idea of simply grilling meat, medieval food involved a lot of chopping, molding, simmering, and various effects such as dishes with several sauces or served in aspic. What remains alien to us is the presence of a large variety of spices (more like the combinations found in Arabo-Persian or Indian food), and the large number of recipes calling for spices unfamiliar to us.

But there was more to the demand for spices than gastronomic fashion. Most spices used in cooking began as medical ingredients, and throughout the Middle Ages spices were used as both medicines and condiments. Above all, Medieval recipes involve the combination of medical and culinary lore in order to balance the humeral properties (cold, wet, hot, dry) that were thought to inhere in food and whose imbalance produced disease. Most spices were hot and dry and so appropriate in sauces to counteract the moist and wet properties supposedly possessed by most meat and fish. Merchant guilds that supplied spices were variously known as "spicers", "apothecaries", or "pepperers". Inventories and account books of pharmacies show that such culinary stalwarts as pepper, cinnamon and ginger were sold in many varieties and in different medical prescriptions.

The demand for spices may then be said to combine a taste for strongly flavored food, a belief in their medicinal properties, and also the sense of well-being, refinement and health that their fragrance was believed to confer, something similar to the claims made by aromatherapy in recent years. Once these varied properties were recognized or accepted, spices became objects of conspicuous consumption, a mark of elite status as well as markers of exquisite taste in all senses of the word.

Where spices came from was known in a vague sense centuries before the voyages of Columbus. Just how vague may be judged by looking at medieval world maps that attempt to incorporate information about Asia from the Book of Genesis, legends of the conquests of Alexander, Christian prophetic literature (especially regarding the apocalypse), and real and fabricated travel accounts such as those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville.

To the medieval European imagination, the East was alluring, and had a certain "otherness". Medieval maps often placed India close to the Earthly Paradise (the Garden of Eden) and this explains why India was thought to abound in gems and spices which, as the Bible assures us, are attributes of our original home now closed off by Adam and Eve's disobedience.

Geographical knowledge has a lot to do with the perceptions of spices’ relative scarcity and the reasons for their high price. If they were intrinsically rare, their high price would obtain even in their country of origin and the profits to be gained from seeking them out would not compensate for the danger involved. If, on the other hand, they were cheap and easy to gather in Asia, then it was worth tremendous risks for the possibility of staggering profits.

An example of the different notions of scarcity is the conflicting information about how pepper is harvested. As far back as the seventh century Europeans believed that pepper in India grew on trees "guarded" by serpents that would bite and poison anyone who attempted to gather the fruit. The only way to harvest pepper was to burn the trees, which would drive the snakes underground. This bit of lore also explained why pepper, which was known to exist in a white form, was usually sold in shriveled black form, the result (it was believed) of the fire.

Certain writers occasionally questioned how pepper could be collected year after year since, presumably, the fire would not only blacken the peppercorns, but also destroy the entire tree. Only with a report by the merchant Nicolo de' Conti in the early fifteenth century do we have a European eyewitness at a pepper harvest on the Malabar Coast. Nicolo remarks that there are no snakes, no fire, no bizarre harvesting methods, and that even Christians rule some of the territories from which pepper originates. Nicolo's account almost invites merchants to undermine a price differential resulting from artificial barriers, middlemen and ignorance, and encourages exploration and economic opportunity.

Of course, knowledge was not the only thing. The price and availability of spices in Europe were affected by factors with global implications and dimensions: from the weather in India to relations between Christian and Muslim powers. While the papacy and the Kingdom of Cyprus attempted to restart the crusades by prohibiting trade with Egypt, the Venetians and Genoese fought to control that extremely lucrative trade. Traders from the great Italian commercial cities as well as merchants from Barcelona, Marseilles and elsewhere in the northwestern Mediterranean bought spices in Alexandria, Beirut, and sometimes ports on the eastern Mediterranean or the Black Sea.

Spices never had the enduring allure or power of gold and silver or the commercial potential of new products such as tobacco, indigo or sugar (which ceased being a spice to become a basic commodity). But the taste for spices did continue for a while beyond the Middle Ages. As late as the seventeenth century, the English and the Dutch were struggling for control of the Spice Islands: Dutch New Amsterdam (New York) was exchanged by the British for one of the Moluccan islands that grew nutmeg. Spices faded from European cuisine not only because of changing tastes, but also because ancient medical ideas lost currency, more exciting drugs arrived from the New World, and the prevalence of opiates rose. Nonetheless, spices' eclipse in later centuries should not obscure their role as the basis for the first large-scale global economic network and the force behind the first expansion of Europe.

Article by: Paul Freedman, Professor of History at Yale University.

Courtsey: Yale Global Online.