The Taste of Conquest (11 page)

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.

M
ALABAR

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.