I ANTICHI
What I remember best from that dinner on Campo San Maurizio are the canoce, a tangle of milky pink sea creatures spilling across a great silver platter. And Luca, looming in the low kitchen doorway, in an outfit of leather pants, royal blue velvet blouse, and Day-Glo orange boots, a huge grin splitting his satyr’s face as he paused dramatically to hold up the dish so that we might admire his succulent prize. Canoce are about the size of a fat man’s index finger and belong to the same family of tasty exoskeletal sea life as shrimp and saltwater crayfish; however, they are distinctly more buglike in appearance, lacking the bright color and exuberant claws of other crustaceans. In flavor, though, they are far more delicate, infused with sweetness and brininess in exquisite balance. When they arrive at the table, I give up on my knife and fork so that I can methodically rip each luscious beast apart to extract its sweet belly and slurp on my fingers to secure each salty drip. I try to remember the instructions from a pamphlet on etiquette published in 1483, when everyone ate with their hands: “Eat with the three fingers, do not take morsels of excessive size and do not stuff your mouth with both hands.” Success is elusive.
Like most Italian cooking today, the canoce recipe is simple: the crustaceans are bathed in a little olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. It is Venetian food at its most elemental, a dish that comes from the bounty of the lagoon that fed local fishermen long before Venice became Europe’s pepper dealer and continued to do so long after the city was washed up in the spice trade. The pepper is still there, but there’s not even a trace of the other seasonings—the ginger, the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the cloves—that once filled the city’s great galleys and suffused her suppers with Oriental scents. It’s as if the ancient town can no longer recall yesterday’s spiced debauch and instead, as the old often do, has retreated to the memories of her youth, before the parvenu aristocrats began to dress her up with baubles from abroad. Luca explains that this method of cooking canoce is more popolare, of the people, the way the old ladies make them, the only ones who can still make Venetian food. The recollection of feasts gone by fades the rake’s smile to melancholy.
I had come to Venice to try to pry off her mask, to uncover some of the antique flavors, to sniff out her ancient peppery smells. I figured Luca could make the introductions. After all, he has spent his forty-something years consorting with the old dowager on the lagoon. Along the way, he has reproduced Renaissance feasts complete with trained bears, swordfights, and period trumpet serenades, where the gilded pheasants and cinnamon-scented ravioli were served from ornate platters and golden bowls. Although he is more a jack-of-all-trades than a Renaissance man, he has often dressed the part of the latter. Imagine Paul Bunyan in silk tights topped by an exquisite doublet of pink and gold. In other towns, Luca Colferai might have been a punk rocker in his youth, but here, his rebellion took the form of organizing erotic poetry festivals and resurrecting Casanova. So you can understand that when his grandiloquent dinner invitation arrived, I could hardly refuse.
One of Luca’s many roles is to play a guiding spirit to I Antichi, a confraternity of like-minded families known as a compagnia de calza (literally, “society of the stocking”). “Our compagnia is made up of a small lunatic fringe who just want to have fun during Carnevale” is how Luca describes his companions. In fact, the society’s mandate, to organize celebrations during Carnival, is fully approved and authorized by the Venetian municipal government. Given that this is Venice, the idea goes back to the sixteenth century, when groups of elite young men formed these associations to throw parties during Carnival. This was a time when the city’s commercial prowess, and the spice trade in particular, was under siege. To the sons of privilege, drinking and whoring till dawn seemed much more sensible than risking their lives in the increasingly precarious pepper business.
The original I Antichi was founded by a group of Venetian nobles in 1541 with the motto Divertire divertendosi, which might be roughly translated as “Throw parties so you can party.” The group was reinvented by a Venetian lawyer and antiquarian named Paolo Zancopè in the late 1970s and subsequently passed into Luca’s hands upon the founder’s death. Zancopè’s residence, where our canoce feast was held, has become a kind of clubhouse for I Antichi, presided over by the effervescent presence of his Brazilian widow, Jurubeba.
Emptying yet another bottle of fizzy Prosecco, Luca recounts a golden past of grand regattas and mask-filled balls. The membership of I Antichi ranges from street sweepers to multimillionaires, from butchers to poets. They come together for the many official festivals that mark the Venetian calendar: for the Festa della Salute, which commemorates the end of the plague of 1631, when a third of Venice perished; for the Festa di Redentore, another party in memory of an epidemic; for the Festa della Sensa, when Venice recalls a time when the doge, the elected Venetian leader, would symbolically marry the sea; and, of course, for Carnevale, the pre-Lenten festival that overruns Venice and can seem as execrable as a plague when the narrow alleys swarm with the tourist hordes. The menu for every holiday follows age-old traditions: cured, spiced mutton for the Salute; artichokes for the Sensa; bigoli for the Redentore.
Jurubeba interrupts Luca’s reminiscences to consult on the state of our bigoli. (The canoce were only one course among many.) He breaks off midsentence to attend to the important matter at hand. Bigoli are a kind of thick whole wheat spaghetti that are typically served entangled in a sauce of caramelized onions and anchovies, the saltiness of the fish and sweetness of the onion providing the perfect, if unsubtle, condiment for the rough pasta. They are very traditional, especially to the Jews of the Ghetto Nuovo, the original “ghetto.” (The Jewish variant uses garlic instead of onions.) But today, it seems, all that’s left of the Ghetto’s ancient community are Hassidic Jews from Brooklyn—and they know about as much about bigoli as they do about prosciutto. These days, there is little traditional food to be found in Venice. When I invite Luca to a restaurant, he grimaces, insisting that there are no more “honest” restaurants left, that they’re all for the tourists now.
All the same, Venetian food hasn’t entirely disappeared (yet), and if you dig hard enough, you can still unearth hints and clues of what food might have tasted like two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. Many restaurants still serve sarde in saor, a dish of fried sardines mounded with onions and raisins, seasoned with vinegar, sugar, and occasionally even cinnamon. Its combination of sweet and sour is typical of the Middle Ages; there’s even a fourteenth-century recipe for much the same dish. You can also taste the past in the confections called pevarini,sold in every Venetian pasticceria. They are barely sweet with molasses but distinctly seasoned with pepper, the pungency a faint echo of the city’s past renown as spice supplier to the Western world.
Still, most of the food that Venetians call their own, the cooking of their grandmothers, is of much more recent vintage. In Marco Polo’s day, our canoce would have been showered with a medieval blend of spices on top of today’s salt and pepper; even as late as the seventeen hundreds, Casanova sprinkled his pasta with sugar and cinnamon. Indeed, the very idea of Venetian food as a regional Italian cuisine is largely an invention of the nineteenth century, much like the Italian state itself. It was only when Venice lost her overseas empire that her cuisine became dependent on local “Italian” ingredients. The occasional spiced dishes of the Renaissance held on, but only as obscure local specialties. Pelegrino Artusi, who wrote the nineteenth-century bible of Italian bourgeois cooking, is bemused and a little horrified when he writes of the way spices were used in the past.
While there’s no way to know just how the food of the past tasted (the meat, the wine, even the onions, were different from what we have today), the spiced mutton served at the festival of the Madonna della Salute probably comes the closest in flavor to the food eaten by Shakespeare’s merchants of Venice. Preparations for the November holiday begin in the spring, when the meat is prepared by curing a castrated ram with salt, pepper, and cloves before it is smoked and then air-dried for several months. It is still exported from Dalmatia (better known today as the countries of Albania and Croatia), as it would have been when the ancient republic used the preserved meat to feed her sailors. The flavor is strong and complex—and anachronistic. It is entirely alien to Luca’s four-hour feast of simply seasoned bigoli, canoce, roast triglie (red mullets), shrimp, and grilled radicchio and a world apart from the simple dessert of mascarpone and biscotti that arrived to finish our memorable evening.
I can’t help but see a parallel between today’s cooking, with its absence of spice, and the general amnesia you find in Venice about the importance of the spice trade. It didn’t used to be like that. When Venetians found out that the Portuguese had arrived in India, at the very source of the pepper that made the city’s economy hum, many panicked. The loss of the spice trade “would be like the loss of milk and nourishment to an infant,” wrote the spice dealer Girolamo Priuli in his journal in July 1501. And in many ways, it was, though it wouldn’t be until a hundred years later that the Dutch finally choked off the teat of prosperity.
Bemoaning the city’s fate has been a favorite pastime ever since. But there may be more to it now. The city’s population has shrunk by a third in the last twenty years. Foreigners do arrive to settle in the city, just as they have always done, but they are a trickle compared to the exodus. Jurubeba, in her mellifluous Brazilian accent, murmurs how, yes, Venice is shrinking but how the community is più profondo, “deeper.” I don’t ask if becoming deeper in a city that is sinking is necessarily the best thing. Luca shakes his head as he finishes his Prosecco: “The shrinking of the population is a shock to the system. All the food stores are closing so that they can sell masks, but not only masks. Lately, for some reason, everyone is opening lingerie stores. A great explosion of intimate apparel!” Luca bursts into laughter—he doesn’t find this entirely displeasing.
DOGES AND FISHERMEN
Luca is right about the lingerie stores: I counted four as I made my way—a little unsteadily—to the Museo Correr the next morning. The musty civic history museum is tucked into one of the homely, neoclassical palaces that hem in the much-photographed Piazza San Marco. Like Venice itself, the Correr is all hype and illusion. Every society is a Potemkin village to some degree, built to appear as it would like to be seen, but nowhere is this more true than in the city that sprouted from the lagoon, where marble façades mask simple brick structures teetering on wooden sticks stuck in mud. When Venice’s role on the world stage shrank to insignificance in the sixteenth—but most especially, the seventeenth—century, its inhabitants rewrote her history and rebuilt the backdrop to reflect the new story line. As with the cuisine, the myth of Venice was fossilized into its current form in the nineteenth century, and much to my frustration, the spices are almost as absent from the myth as they are from the cooking.
The Museo Correr is an institution devoted to this willful amnesia, its permanent exhibition a particularly bombastic staging of the nineteenth-century myth. Grand pictures of battles and displays of guns and armor tell a magnificent epic of a mighty imperial power ruled by great doges resplendent as any European prince. In the Correr’s version of history, the most glorious moment came in 1571, at the Battle of Lepanto, when a Venetian-led navy cleared the Mediterranean of the infidel Turk. What you won’t get from the operatic paintings of dueling triremes plunging through roiling waves is that the famous skirmish is widely seen as Venice’s last gasp of power in the inland sea, that in its aftermath, the Turks systematically annexed Venice’s overseas possessions. As you walk from room to room, staring up at portrait after portrait of majestic doges done up in kingly, gold-stitched robes, you never find out that, before Lepanto, just about every one of them had started out as a businessman dealing in grain, wine, cheese, salt, but above all, in spices. As you admire vitrines filled with shiny gold ducats, zecchini, and scudi d’oro, you may notice the plaque that explains that the coins circulated from Europe to India—though, of course, it doesn’t mention why Indian museums are chockablock with old Venetian coins.
All the same, there is a certain logic to the Correr myth. By 1571, the Republic was on its way out as a commercial superpower, and so it only made sense for Venetians to reinvent themselves. The great trading entrepôt turned itself into the entertainment capital of Europe. Gambling at the casinos took the place of speculating on the spice market, and shopping for local gimcracks replaced dealing in exotic merchandise. The museum’s back rooms are full of roulette wheels and card games, acrobats tumbling out of pictures, and fantastic human pyramids, eight men high. In 1523, even as the old pepper-laden fleet had shrunk to the odd, pathetic boatload of spice, the new doge, Andrea Gritti, started to invite poets, artists, and musicians to a city better known for its merchants and insurance underwriters. Stone bridges and civic monuments were scenically arranged to reflect the city’s splendor in the milky waters of the canals. This is the Venice you see today; it’s what draws the visitors and pays the bills. Under Gritti, Carnevale, long the disorderly flip side to the city’s carefully constructed social order, came under central control. Where now tourists compete for the privilege of being smothered by the Piazza San Marco’s famous pigeons, the doges used to sit on their reviewing stands watching official parades that were part church procession and part Fourth of July parade (bands and all). The razzle-dazzle kept the tourists coming even while overseas Venice was washed up.
So if the Correr is all sham and show, where can you find out about the city’s history? The best place to start may not be a museum at all; it may be a fish market. To get there, follow the signs to the Rialto Bridge, then go down the Ruga Orefici and Ruga Speziali (the goldsmith and spice seller streets) until you see a large neo-Gothic pavilion. This is the Pescaria, the city’s ancient fish market. It’s a place where you can get an almost visceral sense of Venice’s origins and its first real source of wealth. You can see it in the masses of sparkling seafood, in the wriggling live shrimp no bigger than a roach and the giant six-inch shrimp that belie the name, in the translucent canoce and bags of razor clams the color of mother-of-pearl, in the giant tuna whose eyes glisten in the morning light, and in the scorfano whose pink getup seems hardly appropriate to a fish with such a fearsome grimace. Here, you understand how the Queen of the Adriatic was spawned in the wriggling lagoon just like the fishy bounty beneath the canopy of the Pescaria.
Recent archaeological digs under the murky waters of the canals have revealed that the dependable riches of the local tides drew people here as early as the third century. The proudly separate Venetians like to think that their city was founded by Italians from the mainland escaping marauding barbarians in the fifth and sixth centuries. (Luca still refers to the mainlanders, those from the terra firma, as barbarians.) But more likely, those early marsh dwellers were just looking for a spot to set up camp near the fertile fishing grounds. They eventually settled on one of the few islands that remained dry during high tide. They called it Rivo Alto, meaning “high bank,” later shortened to Rialto.
At first, the city of Venice was no more than a stretch of wetland, scattered with a handful of boggy islands. Streams meandered through the marsh, one of which would eventually become the Grand Canal. It was a highly improbable place to build a town. Those early Venetians had to drain the boggy landscape, shore up banks, transport soil from miles away, and drive wooden stakes into the sludge. The city was built first of mud and wattle; then bricks; and finally, to give the impression of solidity, sheets of marble facing were shipped in to cover the plain brick. Nevertheless, the city kept sinking, even as it does today. Archaeologists calculate that by the eleventh century, when the mosaic floors of the great churches at Torcello and San Marco were laid, the ground level had already been raised by more than six feet at the two sites. For the city to remain above water, neither the people nor the government could ever let up on their efforts to keep the houses from flooding and the canals from silting up. This kind of cooperative spirit would come in handy when Venetians started to go into business overseas.
That lagoon not only brought piscatory plenitude but also provided the first Venetians with a salable commodity in the form of salt. Needless to say, this naturally occurring chemical was critical to every human economy before the advent of refrigeration. While food might be preserved by other methods, salt was essential to keeping meat and fish from one season to the next. This is hard to appreciate when, on our tables, salted foods like ham, anchovies, and capers are no more than incidental accessories. But for most Europeans, until very recently, fresh meat was a rare luxury. Salted meats, prepared much like the holiday specialty of spiced mutton, used to be the norm.*1 Whereas in northern Europe, salt came from deep mines, in the Mediterranean, the supply came from evaporating seawater. Just about anyone with a suitable spot could produce salt, and trying to control production was a virtual impossibility.
Nevertheless, the Venetians gave it a try. The fishermen who had settled on the islands around the Rialto had been working local salt pans since at least the sixth century; however, they could never keep up with the region’s main salt producer, which was the town of Comacchio, some fifty miles down the coast. The Venetians’ solution was as simple as it was brutal. In 932, they rowed their galleys up to Comacchio, burned its citadel, massacred the inhabitants, and carried off the survivors. Once in Venice, the Comacchians were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to the doge before they were freed. While differing in the particulars, these harsh methods developed by the racketeers who ran the Venetian salt business became a template for the violent strategies of later spice traders—and not only Italians in the Mediterranean but also their Portuguese and Dutch successors as they rampaged through Asia.
Venice did eventually give up trying to control salt production, but trade was another matter. Through a combination of business smarts, diplomacy, and murder, the city eventually controlled all the salt that passed through the region. In much the same way as they later set up a government unit to control the spice trade, the Republic’s leaders organized a department to determine how, where, and when salt could be sold.*2
The men who devised these policies came from a loose cluster of prominent families. They were generally old, experienced businessmen, much like the patricians who sit on American boards of directors, and like those corporate board members, they periodically elected a chief executive officer, the doge, to run the day-to-day operations of Venice Inc. This CEO was expected to fill the role for life; though, when it seemed like the boss was pursuing vainglorious adventures that could jeopardize the bottom line, he could be reined in and, at times, even sacked. (In 1355, when Doge Marin Falier got too high and mighty, the ruling Council of Ten’s idea of a golden parachute was to slice off the chief bureaucrat’s head on his own palace stairs.) Even though the Republic of Saint Mark could never be confused with a democracy, it was also nothing like the usual feudal medieval state. Here, the ruling class was made of merchants intent on making a buck rather than armed knights more interested in hunting one. It was a government of businessmen by businessmen for businessmen. Which is not to say they had much use for free trade. Nevertheless, they did keep an eye on the little guy and set ground rules under which even small-time merchants could prosper. In this business-friendly environment, ambitious young men with no capital could set up partnerships with established financiers and wealthy widows. With a dose of savvy and a little luck, both sides could profit from the arrangement. But it wasn’t just the entrepreneurs who benefited from a government organized to maximize commercial profits. Shipbuilders and sailmakers, sailors and stevedores, provisioners and prostitutes, along with the bankers and insurance underwriters, all had a direct stake in the merchant republic.
In other places, princes and caliphs skimmed as much of the surplus as they could from their own merchants, but not in Venice. Here, money bred money. As a result, the relatively puny republic could take on vastly bigger and more populous powers such as the kingdom of Hungary, which repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) tried to muscle in on Venice’s backyard, and more fatefully, even populous Byzantium. The vast sums that eddied and flowed down the Grand Canal made it possible for a city of fewer than one hundred thousand souls to take on an empire of millions.
When it comes to the Byzantines, once again, La Serenissima suffers from selective memory. In the beginning, Venice had been a part of that Eastern realm—though, admittedly, an inconsequential little town on its western periphery. The city was officially a part of the empire until the early ninth century, when, through a series of treaties, it entered a kind of legalistic limbo, still technically a province of Byzantium but paying tribute to the German emperors. As late as 1082, the emperor would refer to the Venetians as “true and faithful servants,” and at least theoretically, they remained subject to the same laws as Byzantines. In the early years, Venetians took full advantage of this intimate relationship; later, they ruthlessly exploited it and then finally slit the throat of their once-great overlord. Yet you don’t hear much about this in Venice. There is an almost Oedipal reluctance to discuss the city’s indebtedness to Byzantium. Still, much of the history of Venice, and especially her role as the spice merchant of Europe, makes sense only when you remember her origins in that ancient empire.
VENICE AND BYZANTIUM
Right next to the great Basilica of Saint Mark and the eponymous piazza is the long quay called the Molo. This is where everybody stands to take the stereotypical snapshot of the green lagoon with the sparkling white church of San Giorgio Maggiore in the background. If you want to buy a gondolier’s hat for your nephew or a Carnival cap for your niece, a dozen kiosks here will be happy to oblige. This is where you catch the ferry to the beach on the Lido or to visit the glassworks on Murano or make the trip to the airport. Ships have unloaded passengers and cargo here for a thousand years. It was from this wharf that each doge mounted his gilt-encrusted galley for the annual ceremony in which he married the sea. This has always been Venice’s front porch. Yet what is notable, though not immediately obvious, about the pier is its orientation: the Molo faces south and east. It turns its back on the European mainland, the terra firma of the barbarians, to look in the direction of Constantine’s glittering metropolis.
When they originally built Saint Mark’s, it was no more than the doge’s modest private chapel, propped up right next door to his walled fortress. Its claim to fame was that it held the relics of Saint Mark the Apostle, stolen from a church in Alexandria in the ninth century. (Legend claims that the merchants sandwiched the remains between slices of pork to keep the caliph’s customs officials at bay.) Some two hundred years on, though, the city had come of age, and like every medieval city of ambition, it needed a grand church to announce her coming out. For a model, the Venetians turned, as they usually did, to Constantinople. They decided to crib the design from the Church of the Holy Apostles, not least because it had been commissioned by Constantine the Great. The doge could now boast of a church to rival the one built by a legendary Roman emperor, with bragging rights to relics just as good as any Byzantine church.
Much of medieval Venetian culture was in fact stitched together from scraps imported from the East. Venetian law followed the Roman tradition of the Eastern Empire more than it did the legal approach of the mainland.*3 The design of war galleys and the idea of a state-managed arsenal were both largely derived from Byzantium. Taste in clothes, art, and food looked for inspiration to Constantinople. In Venice, Eastern styles of dress—richly brocaded and hanging loose from the shoulders—as well as Greek-inspired icons remained in favor long after the Florentines and Mantuans had turned to tight-fitting, form-revealing outfits and moved on to patronizing the likes of Botticelli and Leonardo.
Venetians not only tried to dress like the Byzantines, they aped their eating habits, too. Not that every Eastern culinary innovation was immediately embraced. The imported fork, for example, was initially demonized as “an instrument of the devil.” When the doge’s son Giovanni Orseolo returned from Constantinople around 1004 with his Byzantine bride, Maria, she immediately elicited gossip not least because of the highly suspect implements in her trousseau. “She did not touch food with her hands,” wrote a scandalized reporter years after the event, “but the food was cut up into small pieces by her servants and she would pick up these tidbits, tasting them using a golden fork with two tines.” And as if her eating habits weren’t peculiar enough, Maria had a proclivity for bathing, in perfumed water no less! Some even blamed her arrival for the plague that devastated the city at the time. (This is not as far-out as it sounds, since the plague was, in fact, as much a Byzantine export as forks and perfume.) Forks were by no means an overnight success, but by the late thirteenth century, the delicate little implements (they were about the size of today’s oyster fork) were appearing in wills and inventories. You can see them in a Botticelli painting from the mid-fifteenth century in which two young women delicately hold these tiny forks, and later Venetian banquet depictions are littered with them. Though the sources don’t mention it, Maria must have brought her cooks, too. Imagine a finely drilled brigade of Parisian chefs arriving in a Wild West frontier town and you might get some sense of the scandal and wonder engendered by the spiced aromas that now wafted from the kitchens of the doge’s palace. Eleventh-century Venice still had a long way to go to keep up with the Byzantines.
Even as western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Constantinople was the Mediterranean’s greatest and most cosmopolitan city. At its height, in the reign of the Emperor Justinian (527–565), the imperial capital likely exceeded half a million people (some estimates go as high as a million). No city in Europe would reach that figure for more than a thousand years! As late as 1204, when the Venetians were about to ravage their increasingly decrepit former mistress, one of their company was still awed by what he saw:
Those who had never seen Constantinople before were enthralled, unable to believe that such a great city could exist in the world. They gazed at its high walls, the great towers with which it was fortified all around, its great houses, its tall churches more numerous than anyone would believe who did not see them for himself; they contemplated the length and breadth of the city that is sovereign over all others.
The city at the gates of the Bosporus had always been a magnet for people from across eastern Europe and western Asia. A Western Crusader described Constantinople’s melting pot in 1096: “Greeks, Bulgarians…Italians, Venetians, Romanians [the contemporary term for mainland Greece], Dacians [from today’s Romania], English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans, Arabs and people of all nations come together here.” Not surprisingly, the local culture was inflected by all these foreign accents and the city’s cuisine seasoned by flavors from across the empire.
Byzantine kitchens largely depended on the abundant local fish and produce (much as Turkish and Greek cooking does today), but the imperial capital could also count on supplies of grain from far-off Crimea, cheese and wine from the Aegean Islands, and oil from mainland Anatolia. As far as seasoning goes, garum (garos in Greek), the fermented fish sauce so essential to ancient Greek and Latin cuisines, remained in favor here long after western Europe gave it up. The old Roman influence also showed up in a love of herbs, spices, and other exotic seasonings. The taste for spices, it seems, grew more pronounced over the years. Ancient Roman cooks had mostly limited their use of Asian condiments to black and long pepper (Piper nigrum and Piper longum), despite the fact that there was a more or less direct route that delivered spices from South India to Italy. Other aromatics were mainly used medicinally, though priests and embalmers found them handy as well. Tacitus informs us, for example, that after murdering his wife, Poppaea, in 65 C.E., Nero used a year’s supply of Rome’s cinnamon to bury her.
In Byzantium, as the connection to ancient Rome faded, spices began to leach from the apothecary’s cabinet to the stewpot. This was remarked upon by an early Christian killjoy, Asterius of Amasea, around 400 C.E. “Becoming more elaborate as every day passes,” he notes with the usual religious ascetic’s breast-beating, “our luxury now impels us to plaster our food with the aromatics of India. Nowadays the spice merchant seems to be working not for the physician but for the cook!” Asterius was probably overstating the case so he could pep up his sermon. Spices remained important in the physicians’ medical kit, their therapeutic value appreciated perhaps even more than before as people became ever more familiar with the humoral system. If anything, the curative properties of the Asian exotics only enhanced their prominence in Byzantine cooking.
A wide range of spices was used in the kitchens of Constantinople. Apparently, at least one of the emperors, Constantine VIII, was even an amateur cook, “a highly skilled mixer of sauces, seasoning his dishes with colors and flavors so as to arouse the appetite of all types of eaters.” Our source, a contemporary chronicler, adds that the imperial gourmet was addicted to food and sex and, as usual, came to a bad end. The flavors in the emperor’s pantry would be only partially familiar to us. Mastic, produced from the sap of trees on the island of Chios, was a great favorite used in bread and cakes but also as a kind of chewing gum to freshen breath. (Turks and Greeks still add it to chewing gum to similar effect.) Storax and balsam, produced in much the same way in the southern reaches of the Middle East, perfumed soups and wines. Spikenard, an extract of a leafy Himalayan plant, and putchuk, a plant from the highlands of Kashmir, were just two of the many Indian seasonings the debauched ruler mixed into his sauces and soups. He could also turn to black pepper, long pepper, ginger, cassia, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and the equally pricey sugar to arouse those jaded appetites. It’s hard to know just how much of these imported seasonings the high-living emperor stirred into his pots, but if we can trust the few recipes that actually give quantities, the seasoning was varied but not overly prodigious.
It doesn’t seem that the fine spices we associate with medieval and Renaissance Europe were especially valued over other condiments in the middle years of the Byzantine Empire. More likely they were part of a multihued palette of local and imported seasoning. Perhaps they were not as exotic to the Byzantines, who were in constant contact with the spice-savvy culinary cultures of Persia and Baghdad. When the Byzantine army marched into the Persian palace at Dastagert in 626, we find out they looted about seventy-five pounds of aloeswood (another resinous compound used in cooking), but when it came to the silk, linen, sugar, and ginger they also pilfered, it seems they were not sufficiently impressed to bother noting the quantities. Spices certainly fetched a good price in Constantinople, but they were assuredly less expensive than in Venice, and vastly less so than in France or England. Was there perhaps less snob appeal to spices because they were relatively affordable here?
All the same, in Constantinople, spice dealers made a good living off these exotic roots and berries for well over a thousand years. Some traveled as far west as Burgundy to peddle their wares, and at least one Byzantine merchant was apparently spotted at the court of Ceylon sometime around 550. Typically, though, most of the profits fell in the laps of other middlemen who controlled a network spanning more than eight thousand miles across a continually reconfigured chessboard of shifting nations and inconstant religions. For cloves and nutmeg, the long voyage began in the Moluccas, a minute archipelago of volcanic outcroppings in Southeast Asia, where Indian and Chinese traders loaded their ships for the three-thousand-mile sail to India’s pepper coast. At the end of that trip, the resident merchants—Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and Jews—exchanged silver and gold for pepper and nutmeg before loading up the waiting dhows. The little ships, once filled, would flit with the autumn winds across the Indian Ocean and into the Red and Arabian seas. Once more, the spices were reloaded, this time onto thousands of camels, which marched like never-ending columns of ants across the dusty plains to deliver their scented booty to their spice-hungry sovereigns in Egyptian Alexandria and Byzantine Trebizond, on the Black Sea. Then finally came the Mediterranean galleys and Constantinople. After the seventh century, all the overland routes were under Islamic rule, but at least the last leg was run by the Byzantines. But not for long. The Venetians were waiting in the wings.
It should be noted that the Venetians weren’t the only ones to muscle in on the Mediterranean spice trade. The Genoese and even the Pisans gave them a good run for their money. Still, in the end, the fishermen from the boggy lagoon prevailed.
MERCHANTS AND PIRATES
Look at a map of the Mediterranean and you’ll see a body of water broken up into numerous gulfs, inlets, and estuaries. If you consider it as a whole, though, you’ll notice the sea divides more or less neatly in two uneven halves: the smaller, western Mediterranean, which ends at the Italian boot, and the larger, eastern half, which lies south and east of Sicily. Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, sits more or less in the middle of the northern coast of the eastern half, perched like a spider above the web of sea-lanes in the Aegean and strategically located to control all traffic with the Black Sea. On the arid southern coast, the great city of Alexandria is located at the very western end of the fertile Nile Delta, the outlet of the caravans bringing pepper and other luxury goods up from the Red Sea. Venice is positioned at the very northwest corner of the Adriatic, the largest gulf of the eastern Mediterranean and just across the Alps from the German-speaking lands. From Venice, it’s more or less a direct shot down the eastern Adriatic coast, skimming mainland Greece, past the island of Crete, and then straight down to Egypt. This voyage is easily the most direct path between the spice emporia of the Orient and the silver mines in the heart of Europe.
Controlling this route became the dominant foreign policy concern of the rulers of the Republic of Saint Mark from the moment they began to send their galleys out of the Aegean. To safeguard its program, the city gradually expanded its sphere of influence, first by setting down trading colonies in ports along the route, then strong-arming them into protectorates, and finally, especially after 1204, seizing them outright as colonies. If you travel this route today, you can still see mini-Venices all down the Dalmatian coast, and plenty of Greek towns in the Aegean continue to be overshadowed by the wrecks of Venetian citadels.
The merchants who ran the Venetian state often resorted to the techniques they had learned in the salt trade. This meant that no one who interfered with the Republic’s business was off-limits. The Venetian navy was sent to fight Italian city-states just as often as any other interlopers. In particular, the wars with Genoa came almost as regularly as the tides throughout most of the Middle Ages as the two cities wrestled for control of the eastern Mediterranean. But violence wasn’t always the best approach. When the doges calculated that sending in the battle triremes was a bad bet, the city’s agents arranged for all sorts of deals and exemptions, even if it meant negotiating with ostensibly hostile Muslim potentates.
While the motivating spark for the city’s imperial expansion was the need to protect the spice route—whether the odiferous cargo was coming from the Black Sea, the Levant, or Egypt—the trade network that resulted from the policy involved just about anything that could be loaded onto a vessel. So Bohemian silver might be exchanged for Slavic slaves in the Crimea, who were in turn traded for pepper in Alexandria, which was then bartered for Florentine wool in Venice, from whence it was shipped to Trebizond and sold for ginger, which could be used to buy Apulian grain in the south of Italy and sent on to Venice, where it then fetched a good price in Bohemian silver. Consequently, Venetian merchants, no matter what was in their ship’s hold, benefited from the bases established to further the pepper trade.
All the same, it was the spices that were critical to keeping Venice Inc. in the black. This was widely recognized, and the administration kept tight control of the details of the spice trade. To ensure the safety of the cargo, spices could be transported only in an armed convoy referred to as the muda. The muda had a legal monopoly on spices for some two hundred years, starting in the 1330s. Armed galleys were designed and built in the Arsenale, the massive government shipyard, exclusively for this lucrative trade and were then leased to the highest bidder. He, in turn, was required to accommodate even small-time merchants at standardized rates. As a result, in 1423, Doge Tomasso Mocenigo estimated that Venetians of all stripes invested some ten million ducats in the spice trade, annually reaping an impressive profit of some four million, and this at a time when government revenues were less than one million!*4
As in Byzantium, the European definition of what was called a spice was rather loose in those days, encompassing perfumes, medicines, and even dyes along with the likes of cinnamon and ginger. A list of purchases by the Venetians in Damascus in the early fourteen hundreds gives a good idea of what was in demand. The Italians loaded up on what we would call “spices” of varying qualities, including black pepper and long pepper, five kinds of ginger, galingale (similar to ginger), zedoary (related to turmeric), nutmeg, mace, cloves, clove stalks, three types of “cinnamon,” cubebs (a kind of pepper), cardamom, but also several varieties of incense, dyes, and a half dozen drugs and other chemicals, some thirty items in all. But this long list is a little misleading, since most of these Oriental exotics were traded in minute quantities. The only two commodities that were traded in bulk (making up some 50 to 65 percent of the Damascus spice purchases) were pepper and ginger. And pepper was king. In the fifteenth century, Venetians imported some five pounds of pepper for every two pounds of ginger. Moreover, the quantity of black pepper traded was typically more than all the other spices combined. Accordingly, when Venetian doges fretted about keeping their sea-lanes safe and their ships well provisioned, they were mostly concerned about the flow of the wrinkled black berries from Malabar.
Most traders made a perfectly good living buying and selling more mundane commodities, so why the obsession with spices? The short answer is money. On average, Venetian traders earned a net profit of some 40 percent from spices. The great Florentine bankers of the time were getting half that return on investment. Other merchandise might earn 15 to 20 percent if you were lucky. And although certain commodities, especially grain in times of famine, could occasionally be more lucrative, the market for spices remained nice and steady, fat years and lean. Moreover, you did not need a huge investment to enter the market. As a young man with limited resources, a twenty-something merchant could get on a boat to Egypt and return with a couple of sacks of pepper and still make it worth his while. To make a similar profit on grain, you would need to invest serious money, hire an entire ship, and fill it with literally tons of wheat.
But spices had something else going for them, a seldom-remarked quality that may explain why pepper, in particular, was the bait that drew so many Venetian galleys to trade with the infidel and later lured the Spanish and the Portuguese to distant oceans. Spices don’t spoil—or at least, not quickly. We are so used to nibbling Chilean grapes and chomping on shrimp from Thailand that we may forget how difficult it used to be to transport all but a few specialized commodities over any great distance. There would have been no demand for Indian-grown pepper in medieval Europe if the dry little berries had not been light enough and sufficiently nonperishable that they could withstand being shipped halfway across the world. For a bale of pepper to get from Quilon to Cologne, it would likely endure months of transportation by ship, camel, and mule, interrupted by many more months of storage in every port along the route—and all this without a noticeable decline of quality. Pepper, in particular, is remarkably stable and can be stored up to a decade as long as it’s kept reasonably dry. Imagine trying to ship a sack of mangoes halfway across the world or lugging a crate of china across the Alps. And while Asian spices were never really worth their weight in gold, they were a whole lot lighter for those camels to carry! The only other goods that were worth transporting over such a long distance were precious stones and silk. Marco Polo’s trading family, for example, seems to have specialized in pearls and such when they trekked across Asia in the late twelve hundreds. The problem with jewels, though, was that they were relatively pricey even at the point of purchase, and thus, the potential for profit was inevitably smaller. Spices, on the other hand, were a cheap agricultural commodity that was easily obtained by low-skilled foragers in the forest. This explains why princes and businessman could get away with jacking up the price 1,000 percent between the time the dried condiments left Asia and their arrival at the Adriatic port.
Pepper, as depicted in Garcia da Orta’s late-sixteenth-century herbal.
Still, the long-distance trade wasn’t without its risks. Overseas were alien rulers who wanted to wring ever more revenue from the trade; foreign merchants demanding a fatter slice of the pie; and rivals from Genoa, Barcelona, and Marseilles bidding up the price. Once your cargo was loaded, you had to worry about shipwrecks, pirates, and, once again, the European competitors, who could be worse than the pirates. The merchant who not only wanted to make a profit but also to survive needed to keep one hand on the hilt of his sword as the other reached for his purse. In some ways, even to characterize the traders aboard Mediterranean galleys strictly as merchants is a little misleading. Rather, imagine highly organized, well-armed gangs prowling the sea, en route from port to port, seizing any opportunity that might present itself. Throughout most of history, whether a transaction ended up as looting or trade often depended on the strength of the opponent. The Venetians were always calculating whether to haggle or fight, but in either case, it was wise to be well armed if for no other reason than that the threat of harm might result in a better price. While fellow citizens of the Republic were generally considered off-limits for piracy, other Italians were considered fair game, especially if a precious cargo of spices or pearls was suspected on board. The situation on land was not much better, and while all sorts of treaties and legal statutes were supposed to regulate trade in the spice ports, there was always the possibility one side might not like the deal and pull their daggers. Even once the goods were in hand, they had to be locked up under vigilant guard. In part, this is why local authorities sometimes permitted or acquiesced in the erection of surprisingly elaborate fortifications for each trading “nation.”
The Venetian semimilitarized vessels had a distinct advantage over the lightly armed merchantmen of the Byzantines. The rulers of the Eastern Empire put what resources they had into their navy, which was a strictly military outfit and did not meddle in trade, whereas the large, heavily armed crews of the Venetian ships were not only able to ward off potential attackers, they could attack at will, buying and selling all the while. Recognizing their naval prowess, Byzantine emperors hired Venetian navies on at least two occasions to fend off Norman incursions. As a reward, Venetians would enjoy tax-free status throughout the empire.
It wasn’t just shipping that was subjected to Venetian attack, though. The poorly garrisoned coastline of the southern Aegean was a tempting target for the Venetian corsairs as well. As they passed through, the armed galleys would descend on undefended fishing ports at will, demanding provisions (if you were lucky) and kidnapping children and young adults to sell into slavery (if you weren’t). Technically, Christians were supposed to sell only nonbelievers into slavery, but this distinction was not always strictly observed. It isn’t that Venetians were any more rapacious than the others; they were just the most capable predator in a shark-infested sea.
At first, the Venetians took over the export trade from Byzantium to the Adriatic; then, along with the Pisans and Genoans, they began to supply Constantinople itself; and finally, by the time of the First Crusade, Italians were doing most of the shipping inside the empire. The splendid old dominion of the eastern Caesars was having a tough time of it all around. Central authority had broken down to such an extent that most of the provinces were now run by regional strongmen who seldom bothered to send any tax revenue to the capital. In the East, Seljuk Turks had gradually consumed large chunks of what is now Turkey. By the late eleven hundreds, all that remained of the realm that had once controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean were the Balkans and fragments of coastal Turkey. As the once-great empire wasted away, Venetians moved in to feed off the carcass, swelling, in turn, the purses of the upstart republic. In 1204, Frankish and Venetian pilgrims, armed for the Fourth Crusade, arrived to deliver the fatal blow.
COOKS AND CRUSADERS
As you arrive in Venice today, the city that floats upon the sea presents a skyline of soaring cupolas and pointed bell towers. Every campo, every square, every neighborhood, is dominated by a church. Many are still graceful and limber, even though others are increasingly doddery and infirm. But still, with all those domes and steeples, you’d think the Venetians a religious lot. The truth is rather more nuanced. As far as the rest of medieval Europe was concerned, the Venetians were always on the verge of apostasy. They were particularly notorious for cutting deals with the Moor to maintain their trading privileges. The popes regularly excommunicated the entire town—though, admittedly, there was usually a political motive for this. In the Republic of Saint Mark, local clergy were strictly subordinated to the secular authorities. Here, the slogan was Veneziani, poi Christiani! (“Venetians [first], then Christians!”). As a result, many historians have attributed Venice’s involvement in the Crusades to purely mercenary motives; the whole bloody affair as little more than a hostile-takeover bid for the pepper business. But that’s just too pat. To discount religion from Venice’s strategy toward the Arab world would be as simplistic as it would be to remove the ideological component from America’s adventures in the Middle East. Sure, pepper (like oil today) was important, but that didn’t mean the Venetians weren’t dedicated Christians just like every other medieval European. Which isn’t to say that—much like fervent American Christians today—the Venetians let their religion get in the way of their business practices.
By the time the Italian city-states became involved in the pepper trade during the waning years of the first millennium, the Mediterranean world was irrevocably split between the Christian North and the Islamic South. After Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies thundered across the Middle East and North Africa. They seized Iberia and Sicily. Their mounted horsemen surged deep into France, where they were finally checked by Christian knights at the battle of Poitiers in 732. In the aftermath, there was a more or less stable entente between the faiths for the next three hundred years. By the early years of the new millennium, however, an increasingly prosperous Europe was emerging from the slumber of the Dark Ages. One sign of this was a new imperial religiosity, a widespread desire to push back the borders of Islam. When, in 1095, Pope Urban II appealed for a crusade to liberate Jerusalem, men (and even some women) across Europe took up the cause by the thousands, donning the white tunic emblazoned with the red Crusaders’ cross.
Lacking any navy to speak of, the Frankish knights of western Europe had to charter ships in order to get their men and horses to the Holy Land. Consequently, they turned to the nautically endowed Italian city-states. Genoa offered a measly 13 ships. Pisa was more generous, providing a flotilla of about 120 vessels. The Venetian authorities took close to a year to sort out the pros and cons of joining the holy war, but when they finally did, their 200 ships were to be the single largest contribution to the Crusader navy. There were certainly many Venetians who were swept up in the religious fervor of the time; nevertheless, there were also a good number who were more calculating in the matter. When the then-current doge, Vitale Michiel, exhorted his fellow citizens to join the jihad, he did not forget to add that the potential for gain was not merely of the spiritual variety. Under the terms of the deal, the Italian cities were supposed to get one-third of any territory captured in the Holy Land in payment for transport. Though the Italians never got quite as much as the contracts stipulated, they did get enough territory to set up commercial bases across the Levant.
For the Venetians, the Crusades were undoubtedly an enormous strategic as well as financial windfall, whereas, for the rest of Europe, the consequences were ultimately to be more cultural than directly economic or even political. The Latin knights who disembarked, first in Byzantium and then in the Holy Land, were in for a culture shock. Only when confronted with the plush lodgings and refined cuisine of the East would most of them have realized just how dank and dismal were their drafty donjons and how dull their diet back home.
In Constantinople, the great lords of Europe were fed spiced delicacies in the perfumed palace of the emperor, but even lesser souls were exposed to the decadent ways of Byzantium at inns and bathhouses across the great metropolis. The imperial capital was the kind of place where, on Easter Sunday, the ruler would parade to the world’s largest church, the Hagia Sophia, past a fountain “filled with ten thousand jars of wine and a thousand jars of white honey…the whole spiced with a camel’s load of [spike]nard, cloves and cinnamon,” an event reported by a Muslim hostage a century earlier.
Meanwhile, in the boomtowns of Palestine, common Italian merchants lived better than Burgundian princes. Their salons were decorated with mosaics and marble and decked out with carpets of plush damask. Perfumed meats arrived on platters of silver, if not gold. Fresh water ran from taps, carried by the still-standing Roman aqueducts. Chilled wine flavored with the spices of the Orient filled delicate goblets and beakers.*5
Many Crusaders would have spent as much as a year exposed to Constantinople’s spice-laced cooking, though, of course, this was nothing compared to the decades some would spend in Palestine—or Outremer, as they came to call it. Western European pilgrims came to the Holy Land by the thousands. There were those who settled so that they could live a step closer to paradise. Others found God in more earthly rewards. “Those who were poor [in France],” wrote the royal chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, “God has made rich here. He who had a few pennies possesses bezants [a gold coin] without number; he who held not even a village now by God’s grace enjoys a town.” But for every pilgrim made rich by conquest or trade, there were many more who spent their last penny to get here, and then they were stuck. Yet as numerous as they were, the Catholic immigrants remained a tiny minority among the indigenous Syrian Christian and Muslim population. What’s more, since most of the conquerors were male, they were desperate for local women to be their consorts, servants, and cooks—and they found them, whatever the means. If all else failed, the necessary help could be purchased at the slave market, though buying women slaves for sex was technically illegal. Fulcher describes the mutation he witnessed: “We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is here a Galilean or a Palestinian…. We have already forgotten the places where we were born…. Some have taken as his wife not a compatriot but a Syrian or an Armenian, or even a Saracen [that is, Muslim] who has received the grace of baptism.”
Whether they liked it or not, the Europeans ate a largely Arab, Middle Eastern diet. No doubt, many were nauseated by the local cuisine and, much as some homesick Americans resort to McDonald’s when in Rome, stuck to a western European diet of thick beer, plain meat, garlic, and beans. But less conservative palates would surely have thrilled to the new ingredients and flavor combinations. The local cuisine was closely related to what they had tasted in Byzantium—after all, the region had been a part of the Eastern Roman Empire for centuries—but it must also have echoed the kind of sophisticated food that was dished up in Baghdad and Alexandria. Baghdad, in particular, was the foodie capital of its day, where (much like today) cookbooks were written as much to be read and discussed as to be utilized for their directions. At a time when European dukes and counts were satisfied with great, gristly haunches of grilled venison, the connoisseurs of the Arab capital could dine on pasture-raised mutton and tender chicken redolent of imported Asian spices; they could pick and choose among a wide assortment of freshly baked breads and nibble on confections crafted of local fruits and imported sugar. These delicacies could even be cooled with ice that was carried from distant mountains, something that hadn’t been seen in Europe since Roman times. In Baghdad, a host was judged by the diversity of ingredients and the variety of preparations rather than crude quantity. The Arabic cookbooks of the time give us recipes aromatic with spices layered over a distinctly sweet-and-sour taste. To give just one representative example, an Egyptian fish stew called sikba was seasoned with pepper, “perfumed spices,” onion, saffron, and sesame oil as well as honey and vinegar to give it the requisite tang. Of course, the Arab cooks in Palestine could hardly have been up to the standards of a caliph’s court, but they surely had some idea of what the Muslim gentry were eating.
However, the pilgrims who made it as far as Jerusalem didn’t always get to taste the best local cooking. We can infer this from the name given to the central market where Westerners got their takeout. They called it the Malquisinat, or “Place of Bad Cookery.” Presumably, the food was better in the Crusaders’ quarters, where Western residents of the city would typically employ local women to do their cooking. Arab cooks were in high demand, at least according to Usmah ibn Munqidh, a Muslim warrior and courtier who seems to have been a regular visitor in the occupiers’ homes. He writes that some Franks—though apparently not the majority—had become acclimated to local customs. During the course of a social call at the home of a soldier of the original Crusader generation, Usmah was offered lunch. “The knight presented an excellent table with food extraordinarily clean and delicious. Seeing me abstaining from food, he said, ‘Eat: be of good cheer! I never eat Frankish dishes, but I have Egyptian women cooks and never eat except their cooking.’”
So, clearly, in spite of the antagonism between the faiths, the mounted, mailed, malodorous invaders holed up in their fortified Jerusalem residences must have had at least an inkling of how the other side lived. For they, too, hired couriers to bring snow from the mountains of Lebanon—a two-to three-day run—in order to chill their wine in the heat of summer. They, too, sprinkled their food with sugar. (This luxurious “spice” had been cultivated in well-watered enclaves of the Holy Land for generations and exported to Europe in minuscule quantities.) And apparently, the Crusaders even started to bathe! In imitation of local ways, the Frankish women are known to have gone to the baths three times a week, and it is supposed that men, who were less constricted, might have gone even more often.
Moreover, for Europeans, their culinary education wasn’t limited just to the Holy Land. After all, Muslims ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula well into the twelfth century (Islamic Granada held out even longer, until it was conquered in 1492) as well as Sicily for more than two hundred years. In their day, Moorish Palermo and Córdoba were the largest cities in Europe and accordingly major outposts of Muslim culture and cuisine.*6 And as Usmah’s memoir shows, relations between the two confessions were not always combative. Especially in Spain, Christians and Muslims (and Jews) lived together in relative harmony for centuries. The dominant culture of these western caliphates was naturally Arabic and drew inspiration for its music, literature, and food from Baghdad and points east. The introduction of oranges, lemons, eggplant, and other fruits and vegetables to the West is generally ascribed to Arab intervention. Pasta as we know it seems to have been invented in Moorish Sicily. Arabic recipes soon insinuated themselves into Italian compilations, while these were, in turn, disseminated north. Culinary ideas flowed across Europe in much the way that Gothic art and architecture spread across the continent. In the same way that the Arabic arch was incorporated into Western cathedrals and then transformed into an indigenous art form, the Middle Eastern way with spices was adapted to the European kitchen. John of Salisbury, a twelfth-century English Crusader and scholar, gives us some sense of the new culinary melting pot when he criticizes a dinner he was served at the house of a merchant in the southern Italian province of Apulia. The menu reportedly included “the finest products from Constantinople, Babylon, Alexandria, Palestine, Tripoli, Syria, and Phoenicia,” but then the priggish pilgrim has to add, “as though the products of Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Campania were insufficient to adorn such a refined banquet.”
Needless to say, the Arabic influence wasn’t limited to food and architecture. The Middle East had plenty to teach the Western barbarians about mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. Most medieval nutritional theory came straight from Arabic writers, who had, in turn, picked up the earlier Greek medical tradition. The scholars in Baghdad, however, altered the old system to suit their taste and culture, giving their dietary advice a distinctly Arab accent. It is no coincidence that medieval dietitians in Bologna and in Paris would suggest the same ingredients (expensive Eastern imports such as spices, sugar, dried fruit, citrus, almond milk, and rose water) as their Muslim sources.
There was virtually no influence flowing in the opposite direction. Usmah’s admiration for the Western invaders was limited to their fighting skills, dismissing them “as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else.” But even the knights’ pugilistic prowess couldn’t save them when confronted by the superior forces of Salāh Ad-dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, better known in the West as Saladin. After a bare eighty years in control, the Franks were expelled from Jerusalem in 1187, though Europeans managed to hold on to parcels of what is now the coast of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Turkey until 1291.
During these almost two hundred years of colonialism and crusade, tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, English, and French had traveled back and forth across the whole Mediterranean. The ruling classes of Europe wouldn’t be this well traveled until the invention of the jet set. The ex-colonists who returned to Cologne, Bordeaux, and St. Albans brought with them a remarkably similar idea of what made up sophisticated cuisine. Like the tourist who returns after a week’s stay in Tuscany toting olive oil and porcini mushrooms, those ancient travelers must have craved the complex flavors left behind. As a consequence, the European gentry would increasingly demand that their pigeon pie be flavored with imported seasonings. And, of course, it was Venice that was best placed to take advantage of this burgeoning need.
There are few hard numbers on just how much spice was imported into Europe in the years following the Franks’ capture of Jerusalem. The spice trade had never entirely dried up in the Dark Ages, and elite cooks were certainly sprinkling pepper and possibly ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and galingale onto lordly joints by the time Pope Urban II called Christendom to arms, but just how much of these seasonings made it to Western ports is anybody’s guess. Most historians do think, though, that there was a steady increase that came with the Crusades. In part, this was because there was just more back-and-forth traffic across the Mediterranean. Undoubtedly, the demand was also fueled by a contemporary European population explosion. In the Christian West, there were more people and more money to pay for more and more imported pepper.
It was no accident that the expansionist Crusader era happened to coincide with one of the most prosperous times Europe would see until the nineteenth century. The twelfth century was an age of broadening horizons and progress in just about every field, from agriculture to mining, from transportation to banking. As a result, feudal lords were able to skim off increasingly greater profits from the multiplying mills, fishponds, breweries, and mines under their control. And what did they do with their profits? A lot of them (sometimes more than the petty knights could afford) were spent on life’s little luxuries. The ruling classes of Europe finally had the time and money to be bored, to need entertainment. You might say that the mounted heirs to the Vandals and Huns had gone soft. Instead of bloody battle, men showed their mettle through (relatively) genteel jousting, hired poets to compose weepy romances, and lingered over increasingly complex tasting menus. As usual, we find out about the improved quality of contemporary life by people’s griping about it. Around the end of the thirteenth century in Milan, the curmudgeonly Galvano Flamma contrasted the honest and simple past with the current prosperity:
Life and customs were hard in Lombardy [at the beginning of the century]. Men wore cloaks of leather without any adornments, or clothes of rough wool with no lining. With a few pence, people felt rich. Men longed to have arms and horses. If one was noble and rich, one’s ambition was to own high towers from which to admire the city and the mountains and the rivers. The virgins wore tunics of pignolato [rough cotton] and petticoats of linen, and on their heads they wore no ornaments at all. A normal dowry was about ten lire and at the utmost reached one hundred, because the clothes of the woman were ever so simple. There were no fireplaces in the houses. Expenses were cut down to a minimum because in summer people drank little wine and wine-cellars were not kept. At table, knives were not used; husband and wife ate off the same plate, and there was one cup or two at most for the whole family. Candles were not used, and at night one dined by light of glowing torches. One ate cooked turnips, and ate meat only three times a week. Clothing was frugal. Today, instead, everything is sumptuous. Dress has become precious and rich with superfluity. Men and women bedeck themselves with gold, silver, and pearls. Foreign wines and wines from distant countries are drunk, luxurious dinners are eaten, and cooks are highly valued.
Despite the fact that you could now finally get a decent meal in northern Italy, Flamma’s Milan was by no means the fashion center it is today. At this point, Italians—or at least, the ones in the up-and-coming merchant republics of Florence, Genoa, and Venice—were more interested in making money than spending it. In early medieval Europe, the fashion makers were to be found at the courts of rich and powerful princes, not in places run by bankers and businessmen. It was the feudal magnates who had to secure their position by spending fortunes to impress potential rivals and awe their underlings. And mostly, these aristocrats spoke French—or at least, some variant of it. In the thirteenth century, the rulers of England, France, the Low Countries, Naples, and Sicily as well as the Crusader kings of the Holy Land were all part of the French sphere of influence. Even in the city-states of northern Italy, the Provençal dialect of French was the trendy vernacular in the twelve hundreds. The account of Marco Polo’s travels (1298) was originally distributed in French, and some have suggested that Dante almost wrote the Divine Comedy (circa 1308–21) in Provençal rather than in the Tuscan dialect that he would eventually choose. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the first “Italian” cookbook that we’re aware of, Liber de coquina, came out of the royal court in Naples, ruled by members of the French house of Anjou.
In fact, the culinary fashion had much in common wherever French was spoken. This was the cuisine partially adapted from the Arabs, with a similar penchant for sweet and sour complemented by a robust addition of spice mixtures. Specific spices went in and out of vogue, but remarkably, this approach to seasoning, even while it became more artful and incorporated new ingredients, did not go out of style until the seventeenth century. Accordingly, no self-respecting nobleman could make do without a steady supply of spice. This “need” for imported luxuries (not only spices but silks, pearls, and gemstones) meant that every prince and aspiring aristocrat could be counted on as a cash cow for the Italian city-states.
The Florentines, Genoans, and Pisans were all well located to be the middlemen in the growing luxury trade precisely because they were in the middle, between Byzantium and the Arabs, and the Catholic kingdoms to the north. Typically, Genoa and Pisa supplied France and the Low Countries, while Venice provisioned central Europe. But there were other players in the spice trade, too. Both Marseilles and Barcelona gave the western Italian towns a run for their money. Venice, on the other hand, not only had no competition across the Alps, she was also the closest of the major spice-trading powers to the Oriental ports as well as the silver mines of Germany and Bohemia. As the Germans sent silver down the Brenner Pass, the merchants of Venice sent pepper-laden mules back. Though Venice wouldn’t be able to monopolize the spice trade until the early fourteen hundreds, in the interim, she was clearly the leader, and she meant to keep it that way.
As the Asian aromatics became increasingly important to the city’s dynamic economy, the government paid more and more attention to securing the pepper galleys. The armed convoy system of the muda solved the problem of piracy, but even before this was in place, the Republic was confronted with a more pressing issue. In Byzantium, the people were increasingly getting fed up with the aggressive tactics of the Adriatic upstart. As a result, Venetian residents were targeted for violence, but what was even worse, the emperor had begun to cozy up to the Genoans. Back at the doge’s palace, the decision was made that Venice’s “national interest”—mainly, the route to the Eastern spice emporia that ran straight through the heart of the empire—was at risk. The leadership’s solution to the problem was to mount a military assault in the guise of a crusade, an action that would culminate in one of the most egregious incidents of “collateral damage” in the whole history of the spice trade.
THE CRUSADER DOGE
I am always reminded of the shrunken assemblages of New York and Paris they’ve built on the Vegas strip when I see the Basilica of San Marco. It, too, is a pastiche, though this one of Constantinople. There is, however, at least one significant difference between the design of the gaudy church and the garish casino hotels in the desert. Here, the fragments of the Eastern imperial capital are real, not simulated. The great, glittering chapel is encrusted with genuine Byzantine loot both inside and out: the undulating corkscrew columns planted into the façade; the famous bronze racehorses cavorting—incongruously for a city devoid of horses—above the basilica’s entry; the very altar, the gorgeously bejeweled Pala d’Oro, many of its two thousand plus emeralds, rubies, amethysts, pearls, and 255 icons ripped out of Byzantine churches and monasteries. And these are just the most obvious. At one time, there used to be an ampoule with the blood of Christ, the arm of Saint George, and a segment of the head of Saint John the Baptist brought back to the basilica to keep Saint Mark’s body parts company. The resulting edifice also sent a different sort of message than the playful desert casinos. This was dead serious. It was Venice’s signal to the world that she now owned and ruled the remains of the old Eastern Empire, that the Queen of the Adriatic had donned the mantle of ancient Rome.
The motives for the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent looting of Constantinople by Franks and Venetians were an unfortunate, if all too common, collusion among religion, greed, and realpolitik. As such, it foreshadowed the later actions of Portuguese conquistadores in Africa and the Indies. These Crusaders, though, weren’t going after Muslims (like the earlier Franks and later Iberians); their target was a city of fellow Christians. Of very wealthy Christians, it’s worth adding. When I read contemporary descriptions of the Fourth Crusade, I keep thinking of American dollar bills with their motto “In God we trust.” To the Crusaders, their faith and their greed were simply the opposite sides of the same coin. The accounts of the day point out how especially adept the Venetians were at manipulating a holy war to serve their financial goals. Which is not to say they weren’t all practicing, devout Catholics, I’m sure.
The Venetians had long maintained a sizable colony in the Byzantine capital, and though they were nominally subject to imperial law, they largely acted as they pleased. A Greek eyewitness (admittedly not the most impartial judge) describes the resident merchants as morally dissolute, vulgar, and untrustworthy, “with all the gross characteristics of seafaring people.” Their insolence apparently knew no bounds, so that they even abused and assaulted the local Greek nobility. It didn’t help matters that they paid no taxes while the locals got squeezed. In 1172, the emperor, who was increasingly concerned by the Adriatic city’s sway, decided to trade in the Venetians for the Genoese, but just to make sure the Republic didn’t cause trouble, he seized ten thousand of her citizens as hostages. Eventually, most of the people were recovered, but the spice trade was in shambles, and it became all too evident that the Venetians needed a longer-term solution to the Byzantine problem. Then, conveniently, in 1198, Pope Innocent III called for yet another crusade to retake Jerusalem.
As usual, the (mostly) French knights needed transport and turned to the only city capable of mass-producing a navy, Venice, for “there they might expect to find a greater number of vessels than in any other port,” to quote Geoffroi de Villehardouin, one of the French noblemen who led the expedition. The Venetian doge cut a deal with the Crusaders to provide food and transport for their men and horses in exchange for eighty-five thousand marks as well as half the booty derived from the operation.*7 Supposedly quite taken with the whole enterprise, the nearly blind ninety-year-old Doge Enrico Dandolo declared that he, too, would take on the cross and join the Crusaders. This was an unusual move for the Venetian executive, though how close to Jerusalem he intended to take his pilgrimage is less than clear. Dandolo came from a long line of Venetian merchants and politicians. Like most of Venice’s wealthy elite, the family’s business interests spread across the eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria and its spice markets to the imperial capital on the Bosporus. While we have little information on the doge before he was elected to the leadership in 1192 (at the age of eighty!), it is a safe assumption that he spent a good portion of his youth traveling on business—this was the pattern in almost every Venetian family of note. We do know that in his later years, he served as a sort of ambassador in the Middle East. He also seems to have taken part in a disastrous rescue operation meant to free the emperor’s Venetian hostages in 1172, which must have given him firsthand incentive to remove the Byzantine obstructionists once and for all.
When the flotilla was ready in 1202, only a fraction of the expected Crusaders showed up. The ships were ready, but there weren’t enough men to cover the costs for the trip. At first, the Republic threatened to deny the foreign army food and drink until they paid up, but then Dandolo wrangled a new deal in which the Venetians would get their share of the Crusaders’ booty before anyone else got theirs.
In the meanwhile, Constantinople was in the midst of a dynastic squabble that involved fraternal eye-gouging and other unsavory acts. The emperor was deposed, and in the aftermath, his young son Alexius showed up in Venice, hat in hand. This gave Dandolo and the Crusaders what they had been waiting for all along—a rationale for a profitable detour.
From a purely mercenary standpoint, gold-filled Constantinople was a much plumper fruit to pick than the war-ravaged cities of Palestine, and her defenders an easy target when compared to the formidable Muslim battalions in the Holy Land. Venice could regain her strategic commercial base in the Byzantine capital and secure the spice route; the knights could come home rich. To their credit, some of the pilgrims—most notably, Cistercian monks—refused to take part in this sham crusade, and the pope expressly forbade it. But even as the dissenters went home and the pope’s missives went mysteriously missing, the majority of the Latin army sailed for Constantine’s city, and on April 12, 1204, after a long siege, Venetian and Frankish soldiers breached the walls. The ensuing rampage was heartrending.
“How shall I begin to tell of the deeds wrought by these nefarious men!” writes a Byzantine survivor. “Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden under foot! Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places!” Our reporter, Nicetas Choniates, describes the altar of Hagia Sophia torn into pieces; mules and horses brought into churches, where they were laden down with booty; the doors of monasteries ripped down and the nuns raped. “In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.”
What distinguished the sack of Constantinople from the conquest of other medieval cities was hardly the brutality and greed shown by the attackers. The viciousness experienced in the sieges of Jerusalem, by Christians and Muslims alike, was, if anything, worse, and we can point to all too many equally reprehensible war crimes committed in our own time. But what made the sack so remarkable was its sheer scale and the coldhearted calculation that went into it. While it is unlikely that Constantinople held two-thirds of the world’s riches, as one of the veterans of the attack claimed, the gold and jewels in its churches and palaces exceeded those of any other Christian city by several orders of magnitude.
For Doge Enrico Dandolo’s merchant republic, the Fourth Crusade turned out to be one of the best mergers and acquisitions in history. Not only did the city earn a handsome profit in transport fees and a huge windfall in the form of gold, silver, and precious jewels, but the adventure amounted to a vast real estate coup, giving Venice three-eighths of the empire. Henceforth, each doge would be known as “Lord of One Quarter and One Half [of a quarter] of the Empire of Romania,” or three-eighths of the Roman Empire. The spice route was secure.*8
When young Alexius refused to cooperate with the conquerors, Doge Enrico dismissed him. “We have raised you off the dunghill, and on the dunghill will we cast you back again” was his send-off to the man who would be emperor. He was duly thrown into prison and strangled. Thereupon a French nobleman grabbed the imperial throne. And although the Greeks did eventually get the seat back after sixty years of Latin rule, the emperor’s palace would be a gloomy place from now on. In 1453, its light was extinguished once and for all by Mehmed the Conqueror when his Turkish troops bombarded the city into subjection. However, the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium wasn’t a loss merely for the Greeks. The inevitable result of the Muslim invasion was that Venice’s entire strategic plan for the eastern Mediterranean began to crumble. Her fate had always been tied to Constantinople, whether as satrap or as conqueror, so once the Islamic crescent rose above Hagia Sophia’s great dome, it was only a matter of time before Venice’s star would set. Still, in the intervening 250 years, the Queen of the Adriatic would become the undisputed ruler of Europe’s spice trade.
PEPPER ON THE RIALTO
In Enrico Dandolo’s day, the church of San Marco was by far Venice’s flashiest structure, towering over a town much homelier than today’s panorama of churches and palazzi glittering in the reflected sunlight. A map from about 1150 shows a watery village of modest dimensions. The great basilica looks across a canal at the stocky walls of the doge’s fortress. The famous Piazza San Marco is a muddy meadow. Much as it is today, the city depicted on the map is a jigsaw puzzle of islands fitted around the double arc of the Grand Canal, but instead of the cheek-by-jowl stone façades and paved squares that surround you today, you would have seen wooden houses, vineyards, and plots of vegetables. The walk from San Marco to the Rialto commercial district took you through the most densely built-up part of town. Here, pedestrians had to dodge garbage flung out of windows, tiptoe past pig feces in the alleys, and make sure they didn’t sink too deep into muck during the rainy weather or high tide. (Mud was so ubiquitous that Venetians invented platform shoes a foot or more high to keep themselves above the filth.) Pigs were encouraged in the alleys so that they would consume the accumulating garbage, while along the banks of the Grand Canal, cows grazed, as best they could. But then, just as you approached the wooden Rialto Bridge, which was freshly built in the Crusader doge’s old age to let people cross over the cattle-lined canal, you would be enveloped by a perfumed haze.
For here, on the Campo San Bartolomeo, was the epicenter of Europe’s spice trade. In the three hundred years that followed the Fourth Crusade, this long, rectangular piazza was where spice merchants just returned from Alexandria and London would trade their bales of pepper and precious cloves and exchange gossip—rumors as well as hard intelligence—about deals on cinnamon in Damascus and the going rate of ginger in Bruges. It was here that the whispers of the Portuguese arrival in India were greeted first with derision and then with dismay. The two decades following da Gama’s trip were a dismal time for the traders on the Campo San Bartolomeo, but then business picked up. By the mid-fifteen hundreds, happy days seemed to have returned. Nonetheless, by century’s end, the flow of spice was finally and definitely cut off by the sharp-eyed financiers of the Dutch East India Company. In the interim, though, the city grew up into the ravishing vision you still see today.
If you could stand at the peak of the nearby Rialto Bridge (it was a drawbridge all those years to allow for the passage of sailing ships) and watch the scene unfold for the centuries between the Latin Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople and the Dutch conquest of the Spice Islands, you would see a city transformed. Grand warehouses arise, erected for both Venetians and foreigners. The Germans build their trading house, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and hire Titian and Giorgione, two of the most glorious painters Venice ever produced, to decorate the exterior. In later years, the Turks move into their own business center, the Fondaco dei Turchi, constructed in a typically Venetian Gothic-Byzantine style. As you look down to the water’s edge, the wooden piers are torn out and replaced by broad stone wharves. Palazzi grow in place of the grass and cow dung that once framed the canal. The bell towers of splendid churches sprout amid the skyline of soaring masts. Yet the one thing that’s constant is the gold and merchandise that slip from hand to hand—even as they do today.
In the galleries of the Accademia, there is a picture of this very spot from about 1500 by Carpaccio, the same painter who was later the namesake of a twentieth-century dish of raw beef and shaved cheese (supposedly because he had a thing for red and white). Though the painting is titled The Miracle of the True Cross at Rialto, the real subject is the beautiful people of Venice, the young aristocrats and businessmen who rub velvet-clad shoulders on the embankment by the Grand Canal. If you want to look in the face of a fifteenth-century Venetian (whether merchant or slave) and examine the fine points of his grooming and haberdashery, no artist is more useful. The voluminous cloaks and tight-fitting hose shimmer with silk, furs, and gold trim. You can see a hint of the city’s international population in the Greek costumes of two men at the edge of the canvas, in the turban of a Turk conferring with a fellow countryman in the background, and in the gaudy livery of a black African gondolier poling a boat across the green waters under the wooden bridge. There is something of Norman Rockwell in Carpaccio’s obsession with the everyday, and like the American illustrator, he often included his friends in the pictures. Luca Colferai is a dedicated student of Carpaccio because he can practically take one of the paintings to a tailor, the depictions of the outfits are so detailed. Even better for his purposes, many of the canvases are peopled by members of the compagnie de calza, recognizable by their insignia.
Yet what do we really know of these dapper merchants who stand around in paintings of miracles and wonders? There are occasional contracts, wills, and account books, but they tell us little of the risky trips from port to port or of the tricky transactions required to secure a better price on a bale of spice. Most Venetian businessmen were none too keen to set down their professional secrets, and few had the time or the writing skills to pen idle thoughts as they waited for their ships to come in. There is, however, at least one diary composed by a young Venetian nobleman who profited from the Indian summer of Venice’s spice trade in the middle years of the fifteen hundreds.
Alessandro Magno sailed for Alexandria on April 4, 1561, bringing with him two thousand ducats and silk cloth to trade. The spice business had changed since the days when Venetian galleys had evacuated the last Crusaders from the Holy Land, but not as much as you might think. There weren’t as many traders now. In Venice, money had become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and whereas spice merchants of an earlier generation might have been content to come home with a couple of bales of cloves, the entrepreneurial classes of Renaissance Venice had more cash at their disposal. The sailing conditions were better, too. In the old days, the young traders would spend the trip down to Alexandria in the back of an open galley, with no more than a canopy to keep the rain off their heads. Alessandro at least had a cramped little cabin on the Egypt-bound Crose, now that large, round sailing ships had replaced the narrow medieval galleys.
But, just like in the old days, Alessandro traveled as an independent agent, and his goal was the same as it had been for thousands of Venetians before him: to buy spices and, in particular, pepper. The journey of some fifteen hundred miles took about a month, and on his arrival in the Egyptian harbor, he was assigned a room in the fondaco, the walled Venetian compound. There must have been something of a college dorm atmosphere to these concentrations of twenty-somethings, with nothing to do but wait for the spice caravans to arrive. Given the inevitable collision of alcohol and boredom, it should come as no surprise that there were frequent complaints of brawls among the different Italian colonies in Alexandria and Constantinople. At night, at least, the young men were locked in by the Muslim authorities, but during the day, the Christian merchants were more or less free to wander at will. But there was very little for them to do.
Used as he was to the cosmopolitan vibe back in Venice, Alessandro quickly grew bored of the fondaco’s stultifying atmosphere and Alexandria’s provincial scene. The formerly great harbor that was once second only to Caesar’s Rome was now little more than a second-rate port town barely scraping by on the passing trade. Alessandro, hankering after the big-city life, exchanged part of his cash and all of his silk for pepper and hopped on the first barge headed up the Nile to Cairo. The Egyptian capital was easily a match for Venice. “I do not think that there exists another city in the world as populous, as large, as rich, and as powerful as Cairo,” a European visitor had described it a few years earlier. During his weeks there, Alessandro did what anyone with time on his hands in Egypt would do: he went sightseeing. He spent a good part of the torrid Egyptian summer exploring the pyramids and other sites around Cairo. Then, just before leaving the capital, he must have witnessed the weeklong party that celebrated the annual rise of the fertile Nile. He watched people ride out on rug-bedecked boats as they spent all their savings on food, perfume, and musicians. Add in the wine drinking and sexual promiscuity that were apparently the rule, and you can imagine how homesick Alessandro must have been for his own Carnevale.
Due to the pattern of the monsoon in the Indian Ocean, spices typically arrived in the Red Sea ports in the fall and then made their way by caravan to Cairo and Alexandria to arrive a couple of months later. Naturally, prices fell when the camels unloaded their plentiful cargo. But unfortunately for Alessandro, the caravan did not show up on time, and the captain of the Crose decided not to wait. The ship was making preparations to leave even as the young merchant arrived from his summer vacation. Alessandro reports how he was caught up in a scrum of desperate dealing. “Everyone began to buy furiously,” he writes. “Pepper, which before had been worth twenty ducats a cantar [about ninety pounds] went to twenty-two, and could not be had, and everything else similarly.” Alessandro decided to cut his losses and invest in cloves and ginger. Even though she sailed in October, before the caravan had arrived, the Crose was still packed with more than half a million pounds of spices. According to records of the Venetian consulate—the spice trade remained a matter of the utmost importance to the Republic—pepper accounted for about 80 percent of the cargo, while various kinds of ginger made up the bulk of the remainder.
The ship would sail back the way it came, stopping in Crete to pick up provisions, perhaps adding to its cargo some of the local wine, the thick, syrupy malmsey they loved to guzzle in the transalpine courts, and definitely loading up on the hard Cretan cheese produced for the export market. We’re told that each sailor was supposed to get about an ounce and a half per day as part of his ration, admittedly not much to flavor the daily pound or more of dry biscuit! If you wanted more, you could apparently buy it, much as discount airlines sell snacks today.
Typically, the armed spice convoy made it home by the late fall. You can get some sense of what the arriving Alessandro would have seen if you take the traghetto, the passenger ferry, from Lido Island across the lagoon. Pretend for a moment that the stench of diesel that permeates the boat is the smell emitted by half a million pounds of spice. Ignore the plastic seats and fluorescent life jackets. The ship glides from the choppy, deep blue Adriatic into the placid waters of the bay. Far to the north, you can barely make out the shimmer of snowcapped peaks. The lagoon is aswim with traffic. Oar-propelled galleys, fuste, and galeotte slice through the salt green sea. Cogs, barze, and galeoni lumber along under their partly furled sails. Look ahead to where Venice floats upon the horizon, her white edifices washed pink by the failing winter light. The city resounds with bells, welcoming you and your odorous cargo to her piers. Alessandro was back in Venice on November 18 and managed to sell his spices for almost twice what he’d paid. He figured he made about 266 ducats on the whole trip, a decent but hardly extraordinary profit margin. But certainly enough to throw a party. I can see Alessandro, seeking out his friends, perhaps the original I Antichi, in order to celebrate his return, in order to fulfill the confraternity’s mission, Divertire divertendosi.
The annual return of the spice ships poured new life and fresh cash into the wintry alleys and squares. The trade in Asian aromatics, even though it was hardly Venice’s only source of wealth, structured not just its foreign policy but also the very rhythm of the city. The collusion of money and leisure that came with the return of the pepper convoy turned the city into one nonstop party that would end only with Carnevale. That pattern persisted for centuries, even when the pepper on the Rialto arrived in Dutch and English ships.
MALABAR
In Carpaccio’s picture, just behind the Turks, there is a dark-skinned man climbing the steps of the wooden bridge. He is dressed in only a loincloth and doubled over beneath the weight of a large white sack. I was reminded of him when I stood in Jew Town Street, some forty-five hundred miles distant, as the crow flies, from the Rialto, and saw barefoot Indian men clothed in the same basic way, loading and unloading large sacks of spice. Whereas, in Venice, the spice trade sometimes seems no more than a skeleton in the family closet, here in the city of Cochin, spices are still the mother’s milk of prosperity. What’s more, the pepper business has changed surprisingly little in India in the last couple of thousand years.
Cochin (Kochi on the official government maps) is the bustling commercial capital and principal port of the southern Indian state of Kerala, a region long known to Arabs and Europeans as Malabar. I arrived during the pepper harvest, in January, to see those little black berries picked and dried, to get a more intimate whiff of the aromatic cargo that drove at least some medieval Europeans to go on holy war. In the bustling spice market of the old city’s “Jew Town,” you get a sense of the biting aromas that must have hovered across the quays of the Rialto five hundred years back. In the winter, the warehouses are filled with enormous mounds of ginger, so, as you pass the open doors of the wholesale traders, the scent of the tangled knobs wafts out of every other doorway, flavoring the noonday heat with their sickly sweet smell. If you should step inside, the aggressive perfume invades your nostrils and quickly coats the throat with incendiary grit.
Medieval texts distinguished between some half dozen varieties and grades of ginger, and the Keralan spice was considered the best. In Europe, micchino ginger (named after Mecca, where it was marketed) typically costs less than pepper, whereas colombino(named after the Malabar city of Quilon, or Kollam) could be as much as 50 percent more.*9 When you taste it today, there is a clear difference between the local ginger, which has a much denser, earthier quality, and the lighter, almost lemony roots (technically, rhizomes) typically imported from Hawaii into the United States. Keralan ginger is much better suited to the complex seasoning mixtures used in Indian cooking than the varieties grown in East Asia. Similarly, it would have been a good fit for the spice-rich recipes of medieval Europe.
The spice merchants of today’s Kerala are as eclectic a mixture of religious and ethnic groups as the blend that goes into the Indians’ beloved masala powder. Over the years, the port of Cochin has attracted Christians, Muslims, Hindus, but especially Jews, who give the spice market its name. Depending on the season, they deal in ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, and imported cloves, but pepper is still the black gold that pays the bills. Up until very recently, when the winter pepper harvest arrived, they all used to crowd into the faded pink block that houses the pepper exchange and stand on a central platform yelling out bids under the whirring fans. That is one thing that has changed. Since 2004, the business transactions are now funneled through a small, threadbare room lit up by a computer screen, and mouse clicks have replaced the shouts and murmurs.
Mostly, though, the pepper business is as it’s always been. Just a few steps from the exchange, down a crumbling passageway, is the Kishor Spices Company. Downstairs, as you enter the company complex, a squat pyramid of hundreds of pounds of pepper is protected by a large blue tarp and secured behind thick bars while barefoot bookkeepers sit cross-legged and shuffle papers in a cramped alcove next door. Upstairs, on the other hand, the owner’s air-conditioned office might as well be in an Atlanta corporate park; yet, even so, his business model would have been familiar in Enrico Dandolo’s day. Traders such as the Kuruwa, the company owners, acquire their pepper mostly from small-scale farmers who might have as little as ten pounds to sell. These small lots are collected through a network of country dealers and brought to the company’s warehouses, where they are cleaned and shipped across the world. In the old days, the middlemen had to lug bales of rice and salt up the mountain paths to exchange for the pepper; rupees and SUVs make that part a lot easier now. Heman Kuruwa, the third generation in the family firm, assures me that the locals would never be enterprising enough to run this sort of import-export business. His family are Muslims from the northern Indian state of Gujarat. He reminds me that Gujaratis have dominated this trade for hundreds of years, that they were here long before the Portuguese ever nosed their way into the Indian sea.
The method of growing pepper has seen even fewer changes since that time. It would be hard to improve on the fourteenth-century description of the Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone:
[Pepper grows in a] certain kingdom where I myself arrived, being called Minibar [Malabar], and it is not so plentiful in any other part of the world as it is there. For the wood wherein it grows is 18 days journey around…. In the foresaid wood, pepper is had after this manner: first it grows in leaves like unto potherbs, which they plant near great trees as we do our vines, and they bring forth pepper in clusters, as our vines do yield grapes, but being ripe, they are of a green color, and are gathered as we gather grapes, and then the grains are laid in the sun to be dried, and being dried are put into earthen vessels: and thus is pepper made and kept.
At the behest of the pope, the thirty-year-old friar had embarked from Venice in 1318 on a journey that would take him across Asia. His account was written down upon his return in 1330 and was widely read in Europe, including by the author of Mandeville’s Travels. (Parts of Mandeville’s pepper forest description are lifted almost verbatim.) The pepper groves of southwest India were noted by every traveler who passed through this part of the world. Marco Polo describes the kingdom of Coilum (Quilon), where pepper “grows in great abundance.” The Arab travel writer Ibn Batūtah describes the city as one of the finest in Malabar, “with splendid markets and rich merchants.”
Quilon is a slow, three-hour ride south of Cochin on India’s improbable answer to a rail system. What remains of the ancient city today is a modest provincial town of middling size, depending more on rubber than pepper to fill the cash registers. The spice ships had long since moved north to Cochin and Calicut even before da Gama and his lot started meddling in Malabar.
I was met at the Quilon train station by Thomas Thumpassery, a local planter, who had consented to give me a tour of one of Friar Odoric’s pepper woods. He was waiting for me on the platform, cell phone in hand, waving down the Westerner amid the parrot hues of swirling saris, circling food vendors, and Indian businessmen on the march. A moment later, I was bundled into a brand-new SUV, and we sped out of town. The drive from Quilon was a blur of magenta, lime, and tangerine, the road lined with somnolent cows standing before huge billboards of sexy, sari-enveloped models and with rice paddies little bigger than tennis courts hemmed in by ragged banana bushes. About an hour later, the flat coastal landscape gave way to thick and lovely hills.
Thomas, I soon learned, is part poet, part schemer, part dilettante. “I’m lazy,” he says more than once over a glass of chai that we drink at a minimall just opposite the ritual pool of a Hindu temple. His latest scheme is a hamburger bar–cum–billiard parlor, and he is full of questions on the minutiae of hamburger and pizza making. He comes across as skinny and younger than his thirty-five years and clearly amused by his own wacky ventures, a penchant he seems to have inherited from his father along with the family plantation. His estate is mostly planted with rubber trees, though there are a few small plots devoted to ginger, nutmeg, bananas, and coconut palms. But he also grows about eight hundred pounds of pepper annually, as a sort of sideline, a kind of insurance. This is typical for India, where pepper plants are cultivated in the shade of other, more dependably profitable crops.
One of those soft south Kerala hills is covered by the Thumpassery plantation, the whole thing, from top to bottom, forested with rubber trees, each of which is tapped like a sugar maple to yield a milky sap, which is then dried into raw rubber. But there is also pepper in the woods. As the SUV pulls up to the ranch house that sprawls across the hill’s summit, Thomas almost knocks a worker off a stool to avoid the mat spread in the middle of the driveway covered with drying peppercorns. Driveways are particularly well suited for drying pepper, especially when they are flat and exposed to the sun. For farmers without paved driveways, the Indian Spices Board (a government agency) provides subsidies to pave a section of their property in concrete.
At first, the pepper vines are hard to identify, but when you look carefully, the scruffy vines are everywhere, climbing up spindly arepa palms, gangly mango trees, or whatever else happens to be growing in the area. Here, there are none of the prim lines of a European farm or vineyard. Instead, there is jungle, with the unruly pepper vines looking more like rapacious weeds rather than the fountain of wealth for distant empires. The palm-sized leaves surround the supporting trees like ten-foot-high hula skirts, with the dark green pepper clusters, referred to as “spikes,” hiding out among the heart-shaped foliage.
Thomas takes me deep into the pepper wood. Its air is clear and fragrant, filled with clucks and cackles that easily drown out the barely audible cadences of the Hindu prayers coming from a distant temple. He explains how the bisexual pepper flowers, the color of clotted cream, are pollinated by early morning mist, the dewdrops condensing on the flowers and dripping from tiny blossom to blossom. He tells me about the one hundred or more wild varieties that still grow in the high hills and the hundreds more that have been domesticated. He points out the wild long pepper vines that meander in the shadows.
Friar Odoric was quite correct about the harvesting of black pepper, which takes place when the berries are dark green. In Kerala, this typically occurs in January. Once picked, the berries are spread out to dry on bamboo mats for several days until they turn a rich black. Although piperine, the chemical that gives pepper its bite, is contained in the berry itself, most of the flavor components are in the skin. To make white pepper, the green berries are blanched in boiling water, and the outer peel is removed before they are dried. Indians, though, have little use for white pepper, which, while just as hot as black, lacks much complexity. Thomas’s mother laughs when I ask her about white pepper. They sell all of it to Western-style hotels, she tells me, to season the food of foreigners. Green peppercorns, however, leave her puzzled, having never heard of such a thing. Thomas has read about them on the Internet, and he informs her of their use in fancy French recipes. She shakes her head as she returns to the kitchen, where dinner is cooking over a wood fire.
Ironically, Keralans use very little pepper in their cooking. For them, it is the money that grows on trees, and most would prefer to sell rather than eat it, or better yet, store it up for a rainy day. People in the business give all sorts of estimates of how much pepper is being held in reserve in India. Heman Kuruwa, the dealer in Cochin, guesses twenty thousand tons, but this is not something anyone can really know. Thomas alone has some two tons of it, a bulging pile of plastic mesh bags, shoved against the back of a shed that is also used to store smoked sheets of rubber. Some growers will keep pepper up to ten years, waiting for the price to rise or perhaps using it to pay a daughter’s dowry. Thomas has three young daughters. Though, in his case, I wonder whether the pepper will still be there when he needs it or whether it will be the capital for another improbable scheme.
Though pepper originates in the Western Ghats, the mountains that rise from India’s western coast, it was probably transplanted to Sumatra (and possibly other parts of today’s Indonesia) as early as two thousand years ago and was certainly quite common throughout the region by the time Marco Polo passed through on his way home in the late twelve hundreds. Today, pepper is grown in Brazil and China as well, while Vietnam has overtaken India as the world’s largest exporter. In Europe, though, they still like Indian pepper best.
Europeans have been importing pepper from this part of India at least since Roman times. Large numbers of Roman amphorae have been excavated at Pondicherry, in South India, dating to the first and second centuries C.E. The route remained more or less the same for the next fifteen hundred years, and at least some pepper continued to be shipped over the old caravan routes long after the Portuguese opened the route around Africa.
Nevertheless, the routes did shift over all those years, depending on the vagaries of geopolitics. The Silk Road of Marco Polo’s day, which carried spices, jewels, and silks between China and the Middle East, endured only as long as Genghis Khan and his successors kept an iron grip over central Asia. But once their empire fell in the early years of the fourteenth century, the flow of Eastern luxuries had to be sluiced through a new set of channels. Now the bulk of Malabar’s riches was loaded onto Arab dhows (but also some Chinese junks), which skimmed up the Red and Arabian seas, then at Aden, and later Jeddah, the spices were loaded onto enormous camel caravans. In his early days, Muhammad had the job of supervising one of these dromedary delivery services between Mecca and Syria. For later Arab merchants, one of the attractions of the port of Jeddah was its proximity to the Prophet’s hometown; Muslims were just as adept at mixing business and religion as any Venetian Crusader. The processions of camels, each beast laden down with a quarter ton of spice, passed through Mecca in caravans that grew to be so huge they took two days and nights to pass through the gates on the last leg of the journey to Damascus or Alexandria.
Once in the Mediterranean, the spices passed into Christian hands. At first, the western Mediterranean market was split up among the Genoans, Provençals, and Catalans, who kept the spice flow coursing not only to western Europe but also to Arab towns in western North Africa, while Venetians sent most of their pepper across the Alps. But by the early fourteen hundreds, Venice began to monopolize the spice route straight through to the Atlantic, even sending her perfumed galleys all the way to England and the Low Countries. All over Christendom, the appetite for spice, whetted by the Crusades, would grow and grow for at least five hundred years. Generations of (well-off) Europeans would grow up with the taste of Malabar on their tongues.
A TASTE FOR SPICE
Just what the food in the Middle Ages and Renaissance tasted like is impossible to say. The old cookbooks are too imprecise, the technology is hard to replicate, and the ingredients are utterly different. Animals, fruits, and vegetables were all smaller. Even the spices were different. The spices we have today have undergone centuries of selective breeding to concentrate and standardize their flavor, whereas most of the aromatics of 1400 were still gathered in the wild from bushes and trees. Then there is the issue of freshness and storage. When you consider that cloves, nutmeg, and mace might have been in transit for an absolute minimum of a year, and all the spices were often stored for years at a time under often dubious conditions, you have to wonder just how potent they were.*10 Under ideal storage conditions, pepper holds up extremely well, but the others have nothing like pepper’s shelf life. No doubt, many of the spices that reached such European backwaters as England and Scandinavia were about as fresh as the jar of allspice that has sat in my spice cupboard for the last six years.
But just because it’s impossible to replicate the cuisine of the past hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. I am particularly intrigued by the efforts of Sergio Fragiacomo in Venice to try to turn gastronomic time travel into a business model. Sergio owns a restaurant, some five minutes’ walk away from Piazza San Marco, called, somewhat incongruously in French, Bistrot de Venise. Sergio comes across more like a genial professor than a restaurateur, and like so many Venetians, he is an amateur (in the old sense of the word) on the subject of Venice. He has the old lover’s devotion to the city, enamored as much of her foibles as her charms. “I want to have a conversation with her past,” he tells me. His obsession is to bring the old tastes alive, to introduce the tourists not merely to mortar and marble but to the very flavors of the ancient republic. But he also has to make a living, so he offers two menus, one of traditional Venetian food—grilled fish, polenta, risotto, and such—and another inspired by old Venetian sources. “The other restaurateurs think I’m crazy,” he tells me as we sip a distinctly twenty-first-century cocktail of Prosecco and pomegranate juice. “There is no sense of the history of our culinary culture in today’s Venice,” he says. “It’s so stupid!”
The mostly French and English tourists (“The Italian public think with their stomachs,” he grumbles) who order from the historical menu can sample dishes that date back to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. That the flavors can never be entirely authentic goes without saying. At best, this is culinary tourism; however, in a sense, Sergio’s re-creations are no less representative of the past than the medieval palazzi that have been ripped apart and reassembled to install indoor plumbing and fiber-optic lines. In the same way that the sensitively modernized mansions remind us of a glorious past, the attractively arranged plates give us hints of ginger, turmeric, and pepper, sufficient to recall the spice-laden galleys but sparing us too much authenticity. I suppose I am just as pleased to do without the medieval city’s stinking canals, drafty rooms, and omnipresent fleas, even if I long for a little more spice.
Dinner proceeds in small, delicate courses, beginning with a fennel soup gently scented with cinnamon. We then move on to “ravioli,” more like superdelicate gnocchi in this case, with an admixture of sweet spices and herbs resting atop a yellow ocher reduction thickened with rice flour and turmeric—all this inspired by an anonymous fourteenth-century recipe compilation known as the Anonimo Veneziano. Next, a dish of sea bass arrives. The sweet fish is topped with an almond crust arranged atop a little ginger-infused puddle, the sauce with that slightly bitter, even chalky flavor that reminds you that ginger is dug out from the earth. The menu pointedly reassures the diner that although the ingredients are strictly traceable to the great Renaissance chef Maestro Martino, the recipe has been adapted to modern taste. Sergio insists I finish with fritelle da imperador magnifici, two small fritters of ricotta and pine nuts, gently crunchy on the outside, creamy inside, resting like two little pillows on a coverlet of sauce composed of vin cotto, honey, cinnamon, and cloves. The fritters (though not the sauce) are also cribbed from the Anonimo Veneziano. The original fourteenth-century recipe calls for a mixture of egg whites, fresh cheese (that is, ricotta), flour, and pine nuts. Once fried, they are sprinkled with sugar—lots of sugar to make them worthy of an emperor, the imperador of the name. I’ll forgive Sergio the sauce, because it happens to be delicious and I can’t resist his quiet enthusiasm. He’s probably right—authenticity has its limits.
Sergio insists that the moderate hand with the seasonings reflects the past as much as his desire not to offend contemporary European palates. Like Luca, he believes that the scholars who speak of an “orgy of spice” are talking through their hats. If only those medieval cookbooks were just a little more precise! One of the few medieval texts that is pretty consistent in its instructions is the Anonimo Veneziano. Perhaps because it was intended for a Venetian audience that was predominantly bourgeois, the quantities needed to be more specific than similar compilations used by highly trained professionals in aristocratic homes. Oddly, recipes from the Venetian cookbook are often used to prove how those insensate medieval diners consumed enormous quantities of spice. Luca thinks the misunderstanding comes from a faulty assumption about portion size. It may simply be that most historians just don’t know how to cook for a crowd. A quick glance, for example, at a recipe for ambrosino, a kind of chicken stew with dried fruit, would lead you to believe that a dozen guests will be consuming a dish seasoned with almost half a pound of spices (mostly ginger and cinnamon but also some bay leaves and a very small quantity of nutmeg, saffron, and cloves), in addition to a little more saffron and nutmeg. The problem with this analysis is that there is no way twelve people could eat this much food.*11 Unlike the discreet little portions that arrive at Bistrot de Venise, the medieval tables of the wealthy were enormous smorgasbords where only a small portion of the food was likely to be eaten by the guests. That all the food was not intended to be eaten at these feasts is nicely illustrated in the Ordinaciones of 1344, a set of rules promulgated by Peter III (the Great) of the Iberian kingdom of Aragon. The king brought an accountant’s precision to the table arrangements: “Since it is appropriate that some persons are honored more than others according to their status, we desire that our plate should include food enough for eight persons.” The royal princes, the archbishops, and the bishops dining with the king would receive enough for six, while lesser prelates and ordinary knights were assigned a portion for four.
Nevertheless, even the moderate quantity of spice called for by the Anonimo Veneziano is a great deal more than Sergio’s clients are used to when they go out for Italian food. (Italians are just about at the bottom of Europe’s generally measly spice consumption statistics, each contemporary Italian eating less than a quarter pound per year.) But that is probably the wrong comparison. The flavor combinations in contemporary Italian food have very little to do with medieval tastes. North Africa would be a better model. The ingredient list of the ambrosino—almonds, dates, raisins, prunes, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron cooked with chicken—reads like a contemporary Moroccan recipe, and the spicing is only marginally more copious. Indeed, the Arabic influence on medieval food is always implicit even where it is not explicit. The slightly earlier Neapolitan cookbook Liber de coquina, mentioned above, has several typically Arabic recipes, including a Saracen-style soup. That collection, originally written in Latin, was one of the first widely disseminated cookbooks in Europe. It calls for spices in many of its recipes, though nowhere near as many as the Venetian compilation. It would seem to make sense that in Venice, where Oriental seasonings were considerably cheaper than elsewhere, and where the Near Eastern cultural influence was the strongest, a more liberal hand with seasoning would prevail.
All the same, the late-fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris, roughly contemporary with the Anonimo Veneziano, seems at least as generous with the spicing—though, admittedly, this can only be deduced from the few recipes that actually give quantities. A recipe for meat in aspic has you cook a pig, four calves’ feet, two chickens, and two rabbits with ten or twelve cloches (knobs) of ginger and five or six cloches of galingale (a spice similar to ginger) as well as much more modest quantities of melegueta, mace, zedoary, cubebs, spikenard, bay leaves, and nutmeg. All these spices are ground up and tied up like a big tea bag to stew along with the meat. Although it’s hard to know just how big a cloche of ginger is, it is safe to say we’re dealing with close to a pound of ginger and another ounce or two of the other spices combined. But then we’re also cooking well over a hundred pounds of meat! What’s more, the Ménagier’s pound of ginger, after its long trek round the world, was certainly not as spicy as it would be today. To make ypocras, the spiced wine that medieval Franks loved just as much as the Byzantines, the author instructs you to add a little sugar and half an ounce of a mix of cinnamon, ginger, melegueta, nutmeg, and galingale to a quarte (a little over two liters) of wine—in other words, about a quarter teaspoon of spice in each wineglass. But even this was typically served in modest doses at the end of dinner as a sort of digestif. For anyone still convinced that the wealthy people of the time buried their food under avalanches of spice, it’s worth parsing the shopping directions the Ménagier gives for throwing a wedding party. This is the famous two pounds of spices intended to season the dinner (and supper) of some forty guests that appears on the same checklist as some 650 pounds of meat! In other words, a paltry few grams, less than a half teaspoon for every pound of meat.*12 Of course, looking at averages won’t tell us how much seasoning went into any particular dish. Some were surely spicier than others. But it does tell us something about the level of spicing in the cuisine overall.
Though cookbooks of the time from Venice, France, Catalonia, England, and Germany are all more or less generous with Oriental seasoning, the fashion for spice was not uniform across western Europe. The French, as is clear from the Ménagier’s recipes, seemed much more eclectic in their choice of spices than the Italians. The slightly earlier Viandier (circa 1375), attributed to the French royal chef Taillevent, mentions some seventeen “spices,” including those Byzantine favorites zedoary and spikenard along with the more common mace and cinnamon. By comparison, the Anonimo Veneziano’s spice rack is limited to about a dozen. German collections are more restricted still. Yet despite certain other regional preferences (melegueta shows up regularly in France but hardly ever in Italy; pepper more often in Germany than France), the similarities among the cookbooks are more striking than the differences. In the fourteenth century, the trendy spices are the same everywhere. Ginger is by far the favorite, with saffron coming a close second.
Interestingly, pepper is less common, especially in the French collections. Was it already assumed that you added pepper (the recipes don’t include salt either) to your food without having to spell it out? Or, perhaps more likely, pepper was already too commonplace to be served to the genetically stuck-up consumers of these culinary style sheets. Early account books tend to back up the latter argument. Typically, as you went up the social scale, the shopping list for spices grew longer and longer, while more common people could afford little more than pepper. Thus, the French king Jean II and his entourage, while imprisoned by the English in the 1350s (evidently under rather cushy conditions), went through some dozen spices but no black pepper. A roughly contemporary French viscount limited himself to four: pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron. Pepper by itself, on the other hand, is mentioned as part of a 1258 consignment to a French poorhouse and commended as a “sauce for field laborers who mix it with broad beans and peas” by at least one medieval diet guide.
Needless to say, trying to figure out what fourteenth-century Europeans actually ate based on elite cookbooks is about as easy as extrapolating the typical American’s diet from a Martha Stewart entertaining guide. Here, some numbers serve as a useful corrective, even if coming up with any sort of hard statistics for the Middle Ages is a tricky affair. Economics historians do have a rough idea of how much spice Europeans were importing, at least after the fourteenth century, when Venice ruled the spice trade.*13 In 1400, it’s been estimated that Christendom consumed about two million pounds of pepper and perhaps another million of the other Asian spices, with ginger by far the most popular of these, followed at a distance by cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and the others. When you consider that there may have been about three or four million people (roughly 5 percent of the population) who could afford the more expensive aromatics, you realize that average per capita consumption couldn’t have been all that high. To give some sense of comparison, Americans today eat about 11/2 pounds of spices per head every year. Contemporary Europeans eat about half that, and Moroccans roughly double. So was the medieval elite eating food that, on the whole, was about as spicy as what most Americans eat now? Well, perhaps the kings and queens were, but for the rest, spicy dining must have been a special-occasion treat. There just weren’t enough spices to go around for everyone to eat spicy food day in and day out. What’s more, many of the more expensive and obscure spices ended up in medicine, and even the likes of cinnamon, ginger, and melegueta were used to season beer and wine as often as food. Even the embalming business swallowed up some unknown percentage of the imports. So, at best, that top 5 percent may have been eating something on the order of two or three ounces of spices (other than pepper) a year in 1400, and perhaps double that a hundred years later.
Of course, average numbers obscure the fact that not every meal was as spicy as the next or that some people just didn’t go in for all that much seasoning. But that is as true today as it was in medieval France. No doubt the hyperelite consumed quite a bit more. For them, those special-occasion meals of spiced capons and hippocras were an everyday occurrence. You could compare them to today’s executives on expense accounts who don’t think twice about dropping several hundred dollars on a restaurant dinner that less privileged mortals eat once or twice a year. But even so, it isn’t likely that King Jean II, even after his return home from English captivity in 1360, would have been eating much more than the monthly couple of ounces consumed by today’s average American. The rest of the population, presumably, had to wait for weddings and holidays to indulge in expensive foods such as chicken and eggs spiced up with ginger and cinnamon.
Or did they? Did they really use spices (other than pepper) as infrequently as we serve cranberry sauce? Cost alone couldn’t have been a determining factor. Some grades of ginger were actually cheaper than pepper, and you could buy clove stems for much the same price. If spices were eaten so infrequently, why would the cookbooks have dozens and dozens of recipes calling for pepper, cinnamon, and ginger? More than likely what actually happened was that special occasions called for pulling out all the stops, but that did not mean that everyday food was entirely devoid of spice.
The food of the time was different from contemporary European fare not merely in the way spices were used. Honey, and later sugar, along with dried fruit was combined with vinegar or verjuice (the sour juice of unripe grapes or apples) to produce a distinctly sweet-and-sour taste. A similar strategy is often adopted in contemporary cuisines in which spices are widely used. In Indian cooking, for example, spices often complement a dish sweetened by the addition of raw sugar and made sour from unripe mangoes.
The Italian food historian Massimo Montanari has described modern Italian and European cooking as predominantly “analytical” in character, by which he means that we like to distinguish between flavors. As a result, we keep bonbons away from salami and segregate our spices into sweet or savory ghettos. The idea that “cabbage soup should taste of cabbages, leeks of leeks, turnips of turnips,” as one seventeenth-century Frenchman would put it, was not a concept with much currency in the centuries between the Crusades and the Reformation. To use Montanari’s terminology, the cuisine of that era was “synthetic.” Rather than trying to keep flavors apart, the art of the cook required careful synthesis so that, ideally, all the main flavors would be present in any given dish. In addition, contemporary dietary beliefs emphasized the need to balance or correct, as they would see it, the “natural” flavors of many ingredients. Spices were considered highly useful in this respect, but, theory aside, the people who got used to eating highly seasoned food would have found cabbages that taste like cabbages a bit of a bore.
THE PRICE OF SPICE
Buried in the Venice State Archive, there is a court record that gives us a clue about the price of spice (and incidentally, of cabbages) for upper-middle-class citizens in the 1340s. Apparently, a certain Bernardo Morosini had been charged with taking care of his younger brothers after his father’s death. Apart from his three young-adult brothers, he was responsible for feeding a household that consisted of some three servants as well as an elderly former slave who had been freed in his father’s will. Occasionally, others had to be fed, such as a nurse hired to take care of Bernardo during a protracted illness, as well as the porters who would arrive with the wine, wood, and grain.
Bernardo’s carefully recorded purchases give us a somewhat surprising insight into the diet of an upper-middle-class Venetian on the eve of the Black Death. (It’s worth remembering that this was a time of increasing famine and population pressures, which made food more expensive than it had been in centuries past or would be for the hundred years following the plague.) The register covers only the winter and spring months, so it is naturally skewed toward foods available or permitted (in the case of Lent). It should come as no surprise that meat would be more available in the colder seasons (it wouldn’t spoil and was relatively cheap); still, who would think the Morosini household would, in the three months preceding Lent, be consuming, on average, almost seven pounds of beef per day, over and above the geese, chickens, and fish they bought? And this for a paltry eight to ten people! During Lent, meat intake plummeted, but the fish, cheese, and egg purchases easily took up the slack. Wine consumption was similarly generous, with the household sopping up some sixteen liters daily! In other respects, the diet must have been dull, indeed. Cabbage is practically the only vegetable recorded for several months (it must have been cheap, even though exact figures are absent), only to be replaced by le erbe, most likely salad greens or radicchio. Intriguingly, pepper and saffron appear in the register, too, though it’s unclear whether these were intended purely as medicine or whether some of that beef was turned into steaks au poivre (or the medieval Venetian equivalent). Still, it’s obvious that for the Morosinis, pepper was no extraordinary luxury. Which is not to say that it wasn’t expensive, but then eggs were, too.
What is striking when you look at food prices across Europe—and this is more or less the case right through the Industrial Revolution—is that many foods we take for granted were virtually unaffordable for all but a small slice of the population. In good years, working-class Europeans would be spending some 80 percent of their income on bread or its equivalent. When a bad harvest hit, that figure could top 150 percent.
In other words, they’d starve. They certainly couldn’t afford imported spices; however, eggs, poultry, oil, and wine were also out of reach.
Somewhat surprisingly, when you compare the cost of spices to some of today’s more commonplace foods, the relationship was more or less the same in Bernardo Morosini’s lifetime as it is now. An ounce of pepper or the lesser grades of ginger was worth about a dozen and a half eggs. (Cinnamon and the most expensive grades of ginger were typically about twice that price.) And this is not an isolated case. That ounce was worth about ten eggs in Venice in 1225, a dozen or so in London in 1450, and much the same in Wroclaw (Poland) in 1506. Seventy years later in Vienna, eggs had gotten more expensive: you’d get only about nine eggs for your ounce. Compare that to today. My local supermarket charges around a dollar fifty to three dollars for an ounce of pepper, just about the same price as a dozen eggs. Similarly, when the Ménagier listed the prices paid for the wedding banquet, chickens were running about eight pennies a pound, while ginger could be had for six pennies an ounce. Compare the cost of a free-range chicken to ginger today. You’ll find the ratio is roughly similar.
So you can see that when we look at the recipe books from the fifteenth century, it isn’t merely the presence of ginger and saffron that distinguishes them as the cuisine of the well-to-do; it is also the abundance of poultry, sugar, and eggs. The spices stand out because we are not used to cooking with them, yet it would be hard to argue that they were extraordinarily expensive in relation to many other foods.*14
What has changed, though, is how much people earn. In the late fifteenth century, a skilled employee of the Arsenale, Venice’s shipbuilding works, would have needed to work something like an hour and a half to buy an ounce of pepper (and more like two and a half hours in northern Europe), while today, an employee of General Motors would earn that same ounce in a few minutes.
All this is to say that by the fifteenth century, at least some of the less expensive spices were affordable luxuries, less like a bottle of Dom Pérignon (two hundred dollars per liter) than a Starbucks latte (eight dollars per liter). Which doesn’t mean that the average man or woman working at the Arsenale (women were employed as sailmakers) could afford them, but for the kind of people who could afford the occasional dozen eggs or a roast capon, pepper and ginger were not an especially big stretch. (Period cookbooks occasionally show that they are mindful of less than princely budgets, recommending cheaper substitutions so that your tastes would not outweigh the ducats in your purse.) By the time of Bernardo Morosini’s death, pepper had become much more ubiquitous outside the kitchens of the high and mighty than any other imported seasoning. This may explain why, when the fashion for spicy food among the elite had passed, Europeans as a whole never stopped using black pepper.
Before that happened, though, increasing numbers of Europeans got a taste for the more expensive Asian condiments. The fifteenth century, in particular, saw a spectacular rise in the consumption of ginger (up 200 to 300 percent), while the following century was a boom time for cloves, nutmeg, and mace (up some 500 percent). In the meantime, the population slowly recovered from its Black Death losses, rising some 60 percent in the two centuries. In contrast, per capita pepper imports rose just a smidgen in the fourteen hundreds and hardly budged during the next hundred years. Then, in the seventeenth century, when a price war between the Dutch and English sent the price of pepper to unprecedented lows, consumption doubled even as the overall population stagnated. It would seem that the skyrocketing cost of basic foods (the fifteen hundreds were a time of rampant inflation) made it necessary for the middle classes to scrimp on superfluities such as pepper in the sixteenth century—the poor just died of malnutrition—but when pepper got relatively cheap in the next century, then they sprinkled it on.
Ironically, even as the price of basic foodstuffs was going up, the overall cost of living for the wealthy may actually have gone down. In the fifteen hundreds, the rich never spent much more than a quarter of their income on food, while the well-to-do may have spent twice that. Most of the rest of their money was spent on luxuries (arguably, many of the foods they purchased would fit into that category, too). And it was precisely the goods that you needed to keep up with the sixteenth-century Joneses that got cheaper in those years. Books, fine clothing, and servants were more affordable than ever. This was especially true in the Renaissance Italian city-states, where the inflationary spiral was not as severe as elsewhere in Europe. In sixteenth-century Florence, almost a quarter of all households could boast two or more servants, surely a pretty good indication of who could afford the newly popular spices. In Venice, if anything, the standard of living was even higher. Wages certainly were, and this in a town where wheat was often cheaper than on the mainland. Here, a master builder earned enough in a day to buy some thirty pounds of bread or about ten or more pounds of beef. At this wage scale, he could certainly afford the occasional ounce of pepper or ginger, costing about the same as a half pound of beef. Architects and bank managers were earning perhaps two to three times that amount, so you would imagine that, at least once in a while, they could splurge on an ounce of nutmeg or cinnamon at twice the pepper price. But this was Venice. In far-off England, where spices were easily two to four times as expensive in comparison to the normal wage, lordlings didn’t have it this good.
This may in part explain why pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg were so widespread in Italian Renaissance cooking. But any economic explanation surely tells only part of the story. Luca has the most succinct answer to the popularity of spices in the glory days of I Antichi and the other compagnie de calza. “Fa più figo,” he says. (Spices were “cool,” he translates.) They were trendy. Everybody who could afford it wanted ginger and cinnamon in their food. A given fashion has many explanations, but to a certain extent, it also has a life of its own.
CELEBRITY CHEFS, THE NEW MEDIA, AND THE RISE OF THE PARTY TOWN
The Renaissance has been credited for cultural advances of all kinds, but one of that remarkable era’s lesser-known innovations may be the invention of the celebrity chef. “What a cook you bestowed, o immortal gods, in my friend Martino of Como,” bubbled the bookish Bartolomeo Sacchi (better known by his pen name, Platina) in his bestselling cookbook based on his friend’s recipes. One of the changes that came with the Renaissance was that craftsmen who had long labored in the shadows now stepped into the limelight. This phenomenon is well documented among painters, who morphed from anonymous blue-collar workers sprucing up palaces and churches into household names like Leonardo and Raphael. The same thing happened (admittedly on a much smaller scale) in the culinary arts. Not that we actually know all that much about Martino, “the chief cook of our age” (again, according to Platina), other than that he was probably born in Como, in the foothills of the Alps. He may have had red hair, since he was also known as Martino de Rossi.
Yet even if it were not for the cookbook author’s accolades, you can see from the chef ’s résumé that he was in high demand at Italy’s most glamorous courts. He appears to have worked for aristocrats in Milan and Naples. But his most prestigious assignment came when he arrived in Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century and took on the job of running the kitchens of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan. The cardinal was one of the richest members of the papal court and was famous for his appetites for gambling, horses, women, art, dogs, and fine cuisine. He was reputed to spend some twenty ducats a day on food alone. (That was the yearly wage of our laborer at the Arsenale!) He obviously snatched up the best cook in town, and it might have been at his house, around 1463, that the talented chef met the erudite Platina. Soon enough, they came up with a book of recipes. The fruit of their collaboration, De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Honest Pleasure and Good Health), was to be the most widely read cookbook of its time. Where Martino was clearly a practical chef—or scalco, as these culinary maestros were known—Platina was an academic, employed as the Vatican librarian. Platina was part of a Roman circle of Humanists who appear to have divided their time between quoting Virgil and planning dinner. Similarly, the book is divided between scholarly references to long-dead Romans and recipes for roast piglet and Sicilian macaroni.
Of course, Martino would have been nothing without his highbrow publicist. Martino’s recipes had been collected before this, but without the prestige of someone like Platina writing in polished Latin, it’s unlikely the book would have been read outside the peninsula. And it was. There were at least eight Latin editions before 1517, but the collection became even more popular when translated into the vernacular. All told, there were some fifteen French, seven German, five Italian, and even a Dutch translation by the late fifteen hundreds. Moreover, Martino’s recipe collection was plagiarized and bastardized under an assortment of disguises in dozens of editions in the two hundred years following its publication. As a result, cooks in Elizabethan England (and elsewhere) were stuffing their pies with fillings seasoned in the Italian style as much as Shakespeare was packing his plays with Italian characters.
So what did gourmets eat on the eve of Columbus’s and da Gama’s voyages in search of the spiceries? It’s clear from the beginning that Martino’s cookbook is not for the budget-conscious. There is plenty of pricey poultry and game. Eggs, meat, and fish of all sorts are common. And the majority of recipes include at least some spice. The most popular by far is saffron, closely followed by cinnamon, ginger, and pepper. Cloves, nutmeg, and melegueta make a token appearance. Gone, however, are all of the more obscure spices of the earlier collections. You will search in vain for long pepper and galingale, to say nothing of cubebs and zedoary. In that sense, at least, it is a more bourgeois cuisine, using the more restricted palette of seasoning accessible to bankers and architects, not just to princes and cardinals. If we look at Martino’s original recipe for the fior di ginestra sauce (the one Sergio uses at Bistrot de Venise for his sea bass), it is actually a model of simplicity. Martino instructs you to make an almond milk–based sauce, which is then “tempered” with verjuice, thickened with egg yolk, colored with saffron, and scented with ginger. Presumably, salt would have been added as well. So here, at least, the seasoning is relatively austere. More typical, however, is a recipe for eel torta (a sort of pie), flavored with ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron as well as a little sugar and rose water. As in so many cookbooks of the late Middle Ages, you just can’t tell how much of any of these spices went into the food, since neither Martino nor Platina thought to include quantities. If you look at slightly later Italian cookbooks, such as the 1549 edition of Cristoforo Messisbugo’s Banchetti (Banquets), the quantities of spice seem roughly commensurate with the Anonimo Veneziano; one to two teaspoons of spice per pound of meat are the norm.
Overall, though, the chef whom you meet in Platina’s popular book (as well as in Martino’s own earlier manuscripts) is a cook at the top of his game, using a broad battery of cooking styles and seasonings to create a complex and sophisticated cuisine. And yet, although the cooking is decidedly more refined than the recipes we find in earlier Italian or French cookery manuals, its flavor structure is still largely Byzantine and Arabic. Sweet is blended with acid and balanced with spice, even if sugar has mostly replaced honey. The earlier medieval penchant for ginger is beginning to shift somewhat to cinnamon, and the use of pepper is much more explicit than it was in some of the earlier sources. But the cosmopolitan approach of the earlier cuisine is also still there, with Catalan and French recipes right beside dishes from Italy. In other words, this is no culinary revolution. Among Roman foodies, Martino may have been more famous than Michelangelo, but he was no iconoclast like the ceiling painter down at the Vatican. Yet even if Renaissance Italian cooking didn’t invent the culinary equivalent of perspective, it was just as influential in the kitchens of northern Europe as the radical Italian picture makers were in Flemish and German artists’ studios.
A late-Renaissance banquet, as illustrated in Cristoforo da Messisbugo’s Banchetti.
In the two hundred years or so between the last Crusades and the arrival of the all-too-worldly popes of the late fourteen hundreds, the centers of fashion had drifted away from the French-speaking world. In part, this was simply a matter of a shrinking French sphere of dominance. The Franks were ejected from Outremer, the Gallic kings of the house of Anjou lost southern Italy, the English ruling classes stopped speaking French, and the popes returned to Rome from a long sojourn in Avignon. Then there was the cataclysm of the Black Death, the pandemic that wiped out somewhere between a quarter and a third of Europe’s population. The fleas that carried bubonic plague apparently first arrived in western Europe in 1348 in the same way as the fork: on Venetian ships from Constantinople. The routes that transported pepper to Paris and cloves to Cologne turned out to be an all too efficient vector for the disease. This is not to suggest that the Black Death was a consequence of the spice trade; however, the same network of exchange that had encouraged the diffusion of a cosmopolitan cuisine among the elite now facilitated the spread of the bacterium among the population at large. Trade suffered enormously as a result of the plague, not merely because, in some urban centers, half the customers were dead but also due to the onerous restrictions placed on travel in the following years.*15 This constriction in exchange made every town a little more provincial in the next few years, Paris included. France, however, had the additional tragedy of over a century of more or less continuous carnage, the so-called Hundred Years’ War, which would peter out only in the middle of the fourteen hundreds. This made room for Italy to become the undisputed capital of style for the continent.
The recovery from the Black Death was patchy and slow, and Europe as a whole did not recover its preplague population until perhaps 1500. Venice was especially hard hit by the epidemic, though her moneymaking prowess, even if not her residents, recovered relatively quickly. It was Florence and Rome, however, along with a number of other minor northern Italian cities that would first play host to the phenomenon for which German nineteenth-century historians invented the term Renaissance. By this time, Florence was in her twilight as the manufacturing and banking center that had made her a world player in the preplague years. Rome was crusty and corrupt but full of people trying to make a name for themselves. Hiring the top decorator of the time to paint your chapel and the finest chef to cater your banquets was essential if you wanted to stand out from the crowd. Elsewhere in Italy, the petty princes did their best to keep up. Consequently, celebrity chefs were in high demand.
Still, to call Martino a chef barely begins to do justice to his job description. Sure, he had to make certain that the cooks didn’t arrive at work drunk and that breakfast was served on time like any professional today, but he also had to supervise extravaganzas that would test the skills of a circus impresario. While medieval banquets had always been a feast for all the senses—with a vaudeville revue of music, dancing, and other entertainments interspersed with the courses—the impression given by the descriptions of Italian Renaissance feasts is that you’ve stepped out of an off-Broadway variety show into a Busby Berkeley extravaganza.
The wedding dinner thrown by Giovanni II Bentivoglio in Bologna in 1487 to celebrate the wedding of his son Annibale to Lucrezia d’Este is typical of this kind of over-the-top spectacle. Our reporter at the event, Cherubino Ghirardacci, describes a supper that started at eight at night and lasted until three the next morning. The dinner opened with a selection of sweet, spiced wines and antipasti of various little birds, including partridges “with sugared olives and grapes.” The servants then brought in a castle of sugar “with artfully constructed battlements and towers” packed with live birds, which were set loose to careen across the dining room, “to the great pleasure and delight of the diners.” A seemingly endless procession of meat was then paraded into the hall. Deer and ostrich surrounded by pies, veal, capons, goats, sausages, and partridge, cooked in all sorts of ways, each with their own sauce, presumably seasoned with cinnamon, pepper, and ginger as Martino instructs; then peacocks “dressed up in their own feathers as if spreading their tails,” one for each guest; then mortadella, hares, and stewed venison re-formed into its skin so skillfully “as to appear alive” then doves and pheasant “from whose beaks issued flames,” accompanied by citrus and spiced sauces; then sugar and almond cakes, cheesecakes, and biscotti; then more meat and game birds as well as “a castle full of rabbits,” who ran out among the diners’ feet; then rabbit pies and dressed capons; then an “artful castle” imprisoning a large pig, which grunted and snorted within its crenulated cage; then the waiters arrived with whole, golden-brown, roasted suckling pigs, various other roasts, wild duck, “and the like.” Finally came sweets made from milk, jellies, pears, pastries, candies, marzipans, “and other similar favors.” And just before leaving, the guests were given spiced confections and “precious wines” on their way to bed.
As exhausting as all this sounds, it’s worth pointing out that most of this spectacle was just that, an impressive performance. The diners were not able to sample most of the food, if only for logistical reasons. But even if they could, they might not have found everything to their taste. In this respect, the Renaissance feast was the equivalent of one of those obscenely lavish buffets found on cruise ships: vastly too much food for the number of diners but also enough variety so that everyone will find something he or she likes. Also, much as on the Queen Mary, the guests were offered a different selection depending on their status. Medieval maître d’s saw it as part of their job to send the fanciest morsels to the VIP tables. All the same, everybody did get to watch the show.
In the coming years, the literate classes everywhere could read about these fantastic occasions in books such as Platina’s but even more explicitly in the likes of Messisbugo’s Banchetti, a kind of how-to guide on throwing a Renaissance feast published in 1549. The enduring but widely disparaged myth that Catherine de Médicis, when she married the French king in 1533, brought a fashion for all things Italian to the Parisian court isn’t without a grain of truth. Her arrival at the royal court certainly must have reinforced a trend that was already in full swing. The taste for spices had long been a feature of aristocratic cooking throughout Christendom; however, these new Italian cooking guides also made it trendy. The brand-new medium of the printed book spread the vogue for Italian seasoning to every corner of Renaissance Europe.
Venice was particularly well placed to take advantage of the communication revolution that swept across the continent after Gutenberg came up with movable type. While the Republic’s spice traders were increasingly shut out by the Portuguese and then wiped out completely by the Dutch, the city’s role as a world information hub blossomed. Venice had always been a communication center, if only because her pepper and silk merchants traveled the world and intelligence on everything from the price of rice in China to the latest harem coup in Istanbul was worth hard cash to the traders on the Rialto. Little wonder that four Venetian nobles once removed part of the roof of the Ducal Palace in order to listen to a confidential report from Istanbul. When rumors about Indian spices arriving in Lisbon reached Venice in 1501, the reaction of the government was to send an agent to Portugal to discover what was up. His report still survives. When Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza returned from his voyage round the world with Magellan, he visited Venice, where the bureaucrats charged with the spice trade heard his account of India “with the utmost attention.” Even more than a consumer of data, however, Venice was Europe’s preeminent distributor of information. This only increased with the arrival of printing in the city.
The technology came to Venice early because of the pepper routes that long connected her to central Europe. The first printers to arrive were the German brothers Johann and Wendelin von Speyer, who set up shop in the city a little before 1469. They had apparently learned the new technology in Mainz, where Gutenberg had started his printing business some fifteen years earlier. By 1500, about twenty-five German printing firms had opened in Venice. The city had two distinct perks for a printer: one was the ready supply of paper, and the other was that the church censors left you alone. Until the nineteenth century, Europeans made paper out of cotton or linen rags, and Venice was well supplied with both, and given the Republic’s mostly antagonistic relationship with Rome, the press was generally free of religious meddling. This, at least in part, accounts for the fact that there were more books printed in fifteenth-century Venice than in any other city in Europe (perhaps as many as 4,500 titles accounting for some 2.5 million copies), and while, in the next century, the city began to lose its lead over other centers such as Paris, it still managed to produce some 15,000 to 17,500 titles during the following one hundred years. These books were set in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavonic, German, French, and Spanish as well as various Italian dialects. Their subject matter ranged from theology to geography, from military treatises to handbooks on table manners. There were a good number of cookbooks and dietary manuals, too. It was only natural that the first cookbook ever published, Platina and Martino’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine, was set in type in Venice in 1475. At least five subsequent editions were printed here over the next thirty years.
There were, in fact, a great number of cookbooks published in Venice, including the first printed edition of Apicius, the sole surviving ancient Roman recipe collection. However, the majority were contemporary Italian food books by the likes of Cristoforo Messisbugo and the Venetian-born Bartolomeo Scappi, which were snapped up by trendy diners all over Europe. It’s clear from the many translations that cookbooks were in high demand, but the medical and dietary guides were even more popular. Many came out of Venice’s university at Padua, widely recognized in the fifteenth century as the Harvard Medical School of its day. Diet books, especially when endorsed by medical professionals, were as profitable for publishers then as they are now. It’s amazing to realize how quickly these Venetian books ricocheted across Europe. To give just one example, Girolamo Ruscelli’s Secreti, a collection of recipes and remedies, was first published in Venice (1555), then in a French translation (Antwerp, 1557), in English (London, 1558), Latin (Basle, 1559), Dutch (Antwerp, 1561), and German (Basle, 1575)—and this is the list only of those copies that survive in American collections!
This information revolution had an immense influence on the dissemination of culture. As books rolled off the presses in hundreds and thousands of copies, many more people could glimpse the culinary fireworks long hidden behind palace walls.*16 The wives of merchants in Bordeaux and investment bankers in Augsburg could try to replicate the dishes served at the feasts of princes and popes. Undoubtedly, this was often as successful as some of the famous chefs’ dishes I have tried to reproduce from the pages of Gourmet magazine, but, however muddled the results, the middle classes did get the idea that spices were necessary, even if a little expensive, if you wanted to keep up with the Medici. The popular diet manuals must have had a similar effect. The literate public could now prattle on about the need to balance the phlegmatic characteristics of sturgeon with the addition of a little cinnamon, all on the learned authority of esteemed doctors from Padua.
The Italian interest in food wasn’t always appreciated. The visiting French writer Michel de Montaigne was clearly fed up with all the food lectures he had received on his 1580 visit to Italy when he penned a portrait of the obsessive head cook, or scalco:
I asked him about his job, and he replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling, delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he had been expounding some great point of theology. He spelled out to me the differences in appetites: the one we have before eating, the one we have after the second and third course; the means now of simply gratifying it, now of arousing and stimulating it; the organization of his sauces, first in general, and then particularizing the qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences in salads according to the season, which one should be warmed up and which served cold, the way of adorning and embellishing them to make them also pleasant to the sight. After that he entered upon the order of serving, full of beautiful and important considerations.
Hand in hand with a desire to ape the sophisticated Venetian, Roman, and Florentine fashions came a reaction against the decadent ways of the Italians. For every courtier trying to flatter Catherine de Médicis by having his cooks re-create dishes from Messisbugo’s Banchetti, there was another who wanted to return to an idealized French simplicity. Venice, in particular, was both admired and reviled. Like New York, the city was considered the paradigm of sophistication and the incarnation of sin. Also a little like New York, its role as fashion center came somewhat late in the day.
When we look at Carpaccio’s paintings from the late fourteen hundreds, we see a society dressed to the nines and ready to party. While perhaps not the most cultured city in fifteenth-century Europe, Venice was the continent’s wealthiest. Its position as international entrepôt made it the best place in Europe to shop not only for spices but for every other ornament to wealth as well. The Milanese priest Pietro Casola noted the abundance on a visit in 1494:
Something may be said about the quantity of merchandise in the said city, although not nearly the whole truth, because it is inestimable. Indeed it seems as if the whole world flocks there, and that human beings have concentrated there all their force for trading. I was taken to see various warehouses, beginning with that of the Germans—which it appears to me would suffice alone to supply all Italy with the goods that come and go—and so many others that it can be said they are innumerable…. And who could count the many shops so well furnished that they also seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax! These things stupefy the beholder, and cannot be fully described to those who have not seen them.
That the city was fantastically rich is without question. The wealth, however, was increasingly settling in the purses of fewer people as the moneymen turned away from buying and selling. At the height of the spice trade, everyone made at least something, from the rowers on the galleys to the wealthy widows who invested their gold ducats in pepper. But now that profits were more often sunk into real estate and manufacturing than commerce, a smaller fragment of the population benefited. In this climate, the old, powerful, but not always flush families became especially prickly when the nouveaux riches and even the middling classes began to flaunt their affluence by building great big mansions on the terra firma and throwing lavish bashes at their canal-side palazzi. So laws were passed over and over in a vain attempt to limit conspicuous consumption. Excessive expenses for weddings and banquets organized by the compagnie de calza were specifically singled out in legislation passed in 1460, then again in 1466. The government set a maximum limit of half a ducat per guest, and anyone breaking the rules would get nailed with a hefty penalty of two hundred ducats, or worse.*17 Informants got to keep half the fine, and if the snitch happened to be an indentured servant or slave, he would get his freedom, too. Then, since the monetary limit didn’t seem to be working, the grumpy bureaucrats started to set rules about just what could be cooked. Doves, peacocks, partridge, pheasants, and other game birds were inscribed on the forbidden-food index. No more than three dishes were to be allowed, not counting confections, and the gilding of food was outlawed. (That spices don’t show up on this list of banished delights seems to reinforce Luca’s contention that they were not considered especially luxurious.) Dinners in public, the kind of parties today’s I Antichi regularly throw on the Campo San Maurizio outside of Jurubeba’s house, would also no longer be tolerated: “rather only private ones in the chambers as the ancients were accustomed to do, and only with small sweets [served].”
In 1489, a special commission of “three of our honorable gentlemen, ready and enthusiastic” (later elevated to the rank of magistrates), was specifically charged to pursue spendthrift malefactors from its offices at the Rialto. The legislation must have been observed about as much as speed limits are today. You get a hint of this from a 1526 legal note: “And truly, those who would act so dishonestly as to throw bread or oranges at [the commission’s] employees, or push them or kick them out, will fall subject to a penalty of fifty ducats.”
The impression that Venice had been transformed from the hungry, hard-bitten merchant republic of Doge Dandolo’s time into a flabby, complacent party town by the early years of the sixteenth century would certainly be overstating the state of affairs. After all, the city had long had those prolonged periods of Carnevale, when indulgence temporarily replaced bookkeeping as the city’s main pastime. And business was still the city’s fountain of wealth in the sixteenth century. But changes both within the city and without presaged the twilight of its golden age.
THE BITTER END
In spite of the masks that Venetians are so expert at creating, it is still possible to peer behind the marble façades topped with cell phone antennae and find clues that point to an earlier Venice, a city that was once Europe’s spice emporium without peer. Among the edible hints and whispers that recall that glorious past, there is a dark cookie known as a pevarino that maintains a tenuous connection between the city of Saint Mark and the pepper woods of Malabar. This throwback to the spice-laced cuisine of the Renaissance is about the size of a hockey puck, studded with almonds and raisins, and faintly bitter with molasses. How much black pepper it contains depends on the baker. Some of the cookies burn the tongue with peppery pungency, while others are almost bland.
Venice developed many dry crispbreads, which wouldn’t spoil on long sea voyages. The taste persisted even as the port withered. Here, eighteenth-century vendors sell bussolai, a ring-shaped breadstick that is still sold in the city’s bakeries.
There are few as obsessed with these confections as Franco Colussi, whose bakery is tucked into a long alley off the Campo San Barnaba. As you open Colussi’s shop-front door, you are enveloped with the aroma of butter and spice, and yet the space and the selection here are simplicity itself. Modest baskets hold baìcoli, the crisp little biscotti that go back to the days when baking ship’s biscuit for sailors was a thriving industry. Panetoni of all sizes sit on a shelf like an army of Russian nesting dolls. Pevarini are displayed in orderly pyramids. Above all, though, the narrow room is dominated by a large oven and the irrepressible Franco. When he hears of my interest in peppery sweets, he skips from behind his marble slab, a jaunty chef ’s hat perched on his rosy head, all bubbling with enthusiasm about the subject. His pevarini are laced with nutmeg and cumin as well as pepper, he confides. But he doesn’t make them as often as he used to. Apparently, the demand just isn’t what it once was for these or other traditional Venetian pastries. With the passion of an archaeologist discussing a long-forgotten civilization, Franco describes a confection he now seldom makes called bussolà di Murano, a kind of super-pevarino that is in the form of a ring almost a foot across and weighs more than two pounds. It, too, is spiced with pepper, and cinnamon this time. “It is a savage thing,” he whispers, and then shakes his head, “But today, even the Venetians don’t recognize it. It [the island of Murano] is only five minutes from here, only five minutes, but they don’t know what it is!” Yet he insists on making his pastries the old way, because who knows if anyone else will? Though he hardly looks it, Franco is a grandfather, and despite all his best efforts, he can find no one to take over the store. Young people no longer want to stay in Venice, he tells me, launching into the standard complaint about the city’s decline. In the end, I thank the white-haired baker and close the door behind me. And as I walk away, loaded down with a panetone, a bag of pevarini, a satchel of baìcoli, I wonder if he really is the last of his line and if the little storefront will still be there when I next return.
Everyone in Venice complains about the disappearing stores, a result of an all too evident demographic collapse. Venice isn’t unique in this sense: Italy has the lowest birthrate in the world, and the country’s population is shrinking. As Luca points out over and over, Venice’s population always went up and down. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, plague would hit, wiping out enormous numbers of people, but others would quickly arrive to take advantage of the opportunities the city offered. But when the plague of 1575 laid waste to the vain city, it never quite recovered. It has been estimated that Venice hit its peak of about 180,000 in that fateful year (a census of 1581 showed only 134,000), a number it would not reach again until the 1950s. Since 1980, the slow trickle of exodus has turned into a flood. The city has lost more than a third of its inhabitants, and there are fewer people now than there were at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
The path to decline became inexorable in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks. Venice had succeeded in great part by taking over the maritime appendages of the Byzantine Empire but, in the process, made the fatal mistake avoided by all successful parasites—that you do not so weaken your host that it dies. The Venetians had so enfeebled the Byzantines that when the Ottomans arrived, the ancient realm gave up its last breath. From that point on, it was just a matter of time before Venice lost her empire in the Aegean.
By 1500, the geopolitical constellations that had long favored the Republic’s fortune were beginning to predict a not-so-happy future. The fall of Constantinople made the strategy that had been so effective since 1204—to protect and secure Venice’s route to the Orient—no longer feasible. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498 seemed as if it would throttle the spice trade at its very source. Even in its own neighborhood, the city couldn’t muster the resources to police the Adriatic Sea, where thugs and pirates now lay in wait to mug unsuspecting traders as they passed by. As the mercantile empire withered, the city shifted its gaze from the eastern Mediterranean, where it had been firmly fixed since the first Venetians loaded salt onto their galleys, to western Europe and the terra firma.
In this new climate, what was a young Venetian with money to do? Trade, and especially the still-lucrative but increasingly less predictable spice trade, now seemed too risky. As a result, more and more Venetian profits were pumped into real estate as well as into new luxury industries. Better to sink your money into growing grapes or making glass or setting up a publishing business than risk your shirt, or worse, by chancing the voyage to Alexandria. Venice was abuzz with stories of its citizens abroad abducted by Barbary corsairs (mostly, though not exclusively, Arab pirates from North Africa), sold into slavery, and forced to work under the most inhuman conditions for their godless captors.
All the same, Venetian merchants did not retire en masse from the spice trade to stay home eating contraband gilded pigeons. After a brief collapse of the Mediterranean spice business in the early sixteenth century—more a result of the wars against Turkey than the incursions of the Portuguese—Venice regained a huge portion of the spice trade for most of the remaining hundred years. (Both the Turks and the Venetians realized soon enough that it was better to exchange profitable trade goods than deadly volleys.) Partially as a result of the renewed fashion for spices that had been, to some extent, fueled by modish Venetian cookbook publishers, the Europe-wide demand for spices kept growing. Even while Lisbon was bringing in some 21/2 million pounds of pepper a year directly from India, the Venetians were still able to sell more than half that amount picked up from their usual suppliers in the Near East, even if fewer merchants were willing to run the increased risks.
It wasn’t the Portuguese but the Dutch who wiped out Venice’s role as spice merchant to Europe—not so much because they cut off the supply but because they lowered the price so much that spices bought in the Middle East were simply not competitive. Even the Ottomans mostly found it cheaper to buy spices from the Dutch and English rather than get their supplies by way of Persia and Arabia (even though some continued to arrive by the ancient caravan routes well into the eighteenth century). Consequently, by the first decades of the seventeenth century, the flow of spices through Venice had shrunk to a bare trickle. But the Rialto traders might still have been able to recover if it hadn’t been for the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which had sucked in almost all of Venice’s most profitable customers in central Europe and thereby wiped out what remained of a market north of the Alps. Even as the opening salvos of the long conflict were fired, it was clear that the merchant republic was out of the spice business for good.
In the wake of the first collapse of the spice business after 1498, the number of young nobles who, like Alessandro Magno, were still willing to follow the old Venetian pattern of a few years in trade followed by a political career began to dwindle. In part, it explains why groups such as I Antichi were such a draw. Venice, always a gerontocracy, offered no system for young men to clamber up the political ladder, and now that their traditional jobs as apprentice merchants had shriveled away, what were they supposed to do? One option was to organize public parties to show off to their peers and, along the way, make friends and influence people. It’s worth mentioning that unlike today’s I Antichi, the original confraternities were bachelors’ clubs. The demise of the commercial culture in Venice had resulted in a peculiar custom that discouraged all but one son from marrying so that the inheritance would not be spread too thin. Obviously, there is a close connection here to the widespread prostitution for which the city was renowned. I also wonder, though, about the effects of venereal disease on sapping the vigor of the population. This was the era when syphilis was first epidemic in Europe, and Venice would have made the perfect petri dish for STDs.*18 Whatever the explanation, the young aristocrats of Venice had plenty of time, and inclination, for wine, women, and song.
Art, literature, food, and music were the talk of Venice by the late fifteen hundreds. By the sixteen hundreds, when the city definitively lost her place in the pepper trade, visitors to Venice came as much to gamble at the card tables as to risk money on commerce. By the seventeen hundreds, Venice had become Europe’s Las Vegas, a city of brothels and casinos, a gorgeous vacation getaway where tourists would buy expensive trinkets and return home with postcard views of La Serenissima cranked out by the deft studios of painters such as Guardi and Canaletto. The Venetian aristocracy began to look to French chefs for inspiration, and spicy cuisine, which had characterized the Republic almost from the beginning, was relegated to just a few traditional specialties: the peverada,a pepper-laced sauce found mostly on the terra firma; the gnocchi still occasionally sprinkled with cheese and cinnamon in out-of-the-way villages in the Alpine foothills; the still-ubiquitous sarde in saor, the sardines smothered with a vinegary mix of raisins and onions, even though they are seldom finished with cinnamon as the more old-fashioned cookbooks suggest.
When Mark Twain visited in the late nineteenth century, there was little left to remind the visitor of the famed pepper fleets:
Today her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,—a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.
Even so, visitors continue to be seduced by the well-practiced charms of the dowager of the lagoon. And as a rule, the Venetians don’t complain about the tourists; they understand how important foreigners have always been to the city’s economy. No, they complain about the shopping. “This transformation is ruining our lives,” says Luca when I mention that bakers such as Franco Colussi can’t find anyone to take over their business. In Venice, there is little alternative to shopping on foot, and as the stores disappear, you have to walk farther and farther. From a transportation standpoint, the city makes absolutely no sense unless you are traveling by boat. If you look at Carpaccio’s painting of the Rialto, you notice that the crossing is a drawbridge, designed for the easy passage of cargo. It was replaced by immovable stone between 1588 and 1591. Early depictions of the city show floating bridges, one-piece flying bridges, pivoting bridges, and, of course, the usual kind of drawbridges that allowed sailing ships free passage. Every single one of these was gradually replaced by permanent footbridges, transforming a city of sailors into a town of boatless pedestrians stranded on sinking islands in the middle of a lagoon. The reality of Venice’s maritime patrimony became as insubstantial as all her other myths.
There is at least one holiday, though, when thousands of Venetians still sail out onto the sea. The city’s loveliest celebration is the Festa di Redentore (the Feast of the Redeemer), the party held to commemorate that most demoralizing plague of 1575. This particular plague hit the city at its precarious peak, just four years after the rout of the Turkish navy at Lepanto. It soon became evident that while the Venetian ships may have won the battle, the war against the Turk was lost and Venice would once and for all be shut out of the riches of the Orient. Soon after, the Ottomans took her colony of Cyprus, with its sugar and cotton plantations, and then the fluttering flags of Saint Mark started falling like dominoes across the remaining Aegean Islands. Meanwhile, back in Venice, many thought the plague had come as a punishment for the city’s ungodly ways, and a wave of newfound piety swept the population. As a result, the government, so long resistant to the power of Rome, was convinced to let in the Inquisition. The city’s university at Padua, the home to independent thinkers such as Galileo, now succumbed to the Jesuits, and the Queen of the Adriatic became a foot soldier in the Counter-Reformation.
Today, the sociopolitical details of the holiday’s origin are mostly forgotten, as half the population of Venice clambers into boats and paddles into the lagoon to picnic and wait for the midnight fireworks that mark the date. For the occasion, the members of I Antichi dress in radiant white and perch like seagulls on their banner-bedecked boat, the Manissa. As they drift in the lagoon, they spread the decks with fine damask and dine on a meal of bigoli in salsa, the sweet-and-sour sarde in saor, roast duck, and baked peaches filled with almonds, butter, and amaretti. Luca stuffs his duck with cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and rosemary, among other seasonings. “Fantastico!” he exclaims as he details the menu from last year’s event. “The Venetians always say how beautiful this year’s holiday was.” He laughs. “But the next sentence—and they just have to say it—is always the same. They murmur, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, yes. But last year, it was more beautiful.’”
Luca tells me this last story as we finish our long meal, which began with the canoce and bigoli at the old Zancopè house on Campo San Maurizio. For dessert, we spread creamy mascarpone and mostarda veneta on baìcoli, the crisp little biscotti from Franco Colussi’s pastry shop. The sweet and spicy mostarda is reminiscent of a Martino recipe (“Grind…together mustard, raisins, dates, soaked bread and a little cinnamon”), except that here the mustard is combined with pears and quinces instead of dry fruit and bread. The condiment comes from the last spezieria, or spice shop, in the city, the Drogheria Mascari, just over the Rialto Bridge from the once great spice emporium at the Campo San Bartolomeo. These stores once specialized in the spices and other “drugs” of the Orient, but gradually, as spices became less prized, they branched out into other foodstuffs. Still, this is where the grandmothers go shopping for their spices and mostarda. Jurubeba confides in me that she is planning to open another spice shop, “the old-fashioned Venetian kind,” on the Campo San Maurizio with an American friend, a longtime resident of the ancient city. To supply her shop, though, she needs to turn to a wholesaler on the terra firma, who, no doubt, is getting his spices from a trader in Rotterdam. The members of I Antichi work hard for their whiff of authenticity.
As our dinner in Jurubeba’s dining room moved from one course to the next, the group of diners slowly grew. We were joined by Mizue, Luca’s Japanese tutor and onetime lover, and then by Jurubeba’s half-Brazilian, half-Venetian son. I was reminded of a description by a seventeenth-century French visitor who commented on the “mighty concourse of strangers” in the city. Jurubeba insists that there are people moving to Venice: Brazilians and Japanese and Americans. She maintains that the city remains a magnet as it has been since Turk and German and Jew negotiated the price of pepper on the Rialto. But when I ask Luca, the only full-blooded Venetian here, what he sees of the future, his giant’s shoulders droop. “Son vecio…,” this vigorous forty-three-year-old says in Venetian dialect, only half in jest. “I am old….”
“On the other hand,”—he takes a final swig of Prosecco as the distant bell of San Marco rings midnight—“there is this feeling of resistance. The Venetian has become more determined to go on existing, fino alla fine—until the bitter end.”