Spices helped draw Europeans into their age of expansion, but the Western world was far from ignorant of them before that time. Turner's lively and wide-ranging account begins with the voyages of discovery, but demonstrates that, even in ancient times, spices from distant India and Indonesia made their way west and fueled the European imagination. Romans and medieval Europeans alike used Asian pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace to liven their palates, treat their maladies, enhance their sex lives and mediate between the human and the divine. While many of these applications were not particularly efficacious, spices retained their allure, with an overlay of exotic associations that remain today. Turner argues that the use of rare and costly spices by medieval and Renaissance elites amounted to conspicuous consumption. He has perhaps a little too much fun listing the ridiculous uses of spices in medieval medicine—since, as he notes in a few sparse asides, some spices do indeed have medicinal effects—and fails to get into the real experience of the people. His account of religious uses, on the other hand, paints a richer picture and gets closer to imagining the mystery that people found in these startlingly intense flavors and fragrances. It is this mystery and the idea that sensations themselves have a history that make the entire book fascinating.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Critics agree that Turner knows his spices. In this first book, he proves himself a skillful researcher, as comfortable with medieval resources as he is with electronic ones. For many, Turner’s wide knowledge and his flair for the anecdote—one section describes the use of spices to preserve Sir Thomas More’s head—make for a highly entertaining read. A few found troubling omissions in the work, and called for more emphasis on the modern spice trade or on non-European perspectives. And Turner’s refusal to stick to a chronological structure left some feeling a bit lost. However, a few detractors aside,
Spice will likely prove as fascinating for modern readers as its subject was for explorers centuries before.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
According to Turner's insightful interpretation of history, European expansion in the fifteenth century arose not out of wanderlust or missionary zeal but out of a hunger for more and cheaper cooking spices. Driven neither by starvation nor by nutritional need, this hunger reflected the power of an aesthetic of taste. The brazen Portuguese navigators eagerly broke Venice's monopoly on cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. When other nascent empires realized the possibilities and profits to be had, they jumped into the race for the best, most reliable, and least costly ways to fill European pepper shakers. The resulting "discovery" of the New World took history in wholly unexpected directions. Turner takes this thesis to its roots, delving also into ancient history and showing how in the Dark Ages spices already were a valued medium of exchange. Even earlier, in Roman times, the appetite for spices stimulated imperial economies, and spices were no less highly regarded than precious metals. Turner displays erudition without pretension in compelling prose; the result is a highly readable account of the oft-reported quest for spices. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"In his fascinating new book…Jack Turner not only gives the reader a wonderfully vivid history of the quest for spices and the lucrative spice trade, but he also provides some intriguing insights into why spices once exerted such a hold over the human imagination -- and how they catalyzed the Age of Discovery." -- New York Times
"Turner impressively weaves a tremendous amount of information into a cohesive, pointed narrative…His study of spice illuminates modes of social behavior that are as prevalent now as they were centuries ago, reflecting humanity's timeless tendency toward stratification, fantasy and greed." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Jack Turner handles his subject with discernment and confidence, his style appropriately brisk and animated…Impressive and reassuring is his combination of sympathetic understanding and toughminded rationalism. Although he never condescends to the past, neither does he ever blur the line that separates fascinating lore from the objective truths of science." -- Los Angeles Times
"A nifty grab bag of a book. Entertaining and informative." -- San Jose Mercury News
"Based on research that is broad and deep, Turner succeeds remarkably well in capturing the evanescent attractions of spice." --Orlando Sentinel
"Turner combines erudition with a breezy style, and some wonderful touches of humor. Spice is history that hits home." -- Christian Science Monitor
“Spice is deliciously rich in odors, savors, and stories. Jack Turner quickens history with almost bardic magic, pouring his personality into his narrative without sacrifice of scholarship.” —Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
“Jack Turner possesses the two ingredients most essential for the great historian–scholarly detachment allied to a passionate obsession with his subject. He also writes uncommonly well. A splendid book.” –Philip Ziegler
“A fascinating and scholarly book that can help you improve both your cooking and your sex life. An excellent piece of work.” –Peter Mayle
From the Inside Flap
A brilliant, original history of the spice trade—and the appetites that fueled it.<br><br> It was in search of the fabled Spice Islands and their cloves that Magellan charted the first circumnavigation of the globe. Vasco da Gama sailed the dangerous waters around Africa to India on a quest for Christians—and spices. Columbus sought gold and pepper but found the New World. By the time these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers set sail, the aromas of these savory, seductive seeds and powders had tempted the palates and imaginations of Europe for centuries. <br><br> <i>Spice: The History of a Temptation </i>is a history of the spice trade told not in the conventional narrative of politics and economics, nor of conquest and colonization, but through the intimate human impulses that inspired and drove it. Here is an exploration of the centuries-old desire for spice in food, in medicine, in magic, in religion, and in sex—and of the allure of forbidden fruit lingering in the scents of cinnamon, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and clove.<br> We follow spices back through time, through history, myth, archaeology, and literature. We see spices in all their diversity, lauded as love potions and aphrodisiacs, as panaceas and defenses against the plague. We journey from religious rituals in which spices were employed to dispel demons and summon gods to prodigies of gluttony both fantastical and real. We see spices as a luxury for a medieval king’s ostentation, as a mummy’s deodorant, as the last word in haute cuisine.<br><br> Through examining the temptations of spice we follow in the trails of the spice seekers leading from the deserts of ancient Syria to thrill-seekers on the Internet. We discover how spice became one of the first and most enduring links between Asia and Europe. We see in the pepper we use so casually the relic of a tradition linking us to the appetites of Rome, Elizabethan England, and the pharaohs. And we capture the pleasure of spice not only at the table but in every part of life.<br><br> <i>Spice </i>is a delight to be savored.
About the Author
Jack Turner was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1968. He received his B.A. in Classical Studies from Melbourne University and his Ph.D. in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Foundation Junior Research Fellow. He lives with his wife, Helena, and their son in Geneva. This is his first book.
From The Washington Post
What counts as a spice? Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his book Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft (literally Paradise, Taste and Reason, but published in English translation as Tastes of Paradise, 1980), uses the term for what we laypersons commonly think of as spices (cloves, say, or nutmeg and mace). But his book is really about Genussmittel, a German word only badly translated as "semi-luxury" or "means of pleasure." The dozen pages he devotes to spices are enormously illuminating, but Schivelbusch then moves quickly to tea, coffee, chocolate and tobacco, and concludes by dealing with opium.
Jack Turner's Spice deals precisely with its subject. Though Turner, a scholar of international relations, thinks no single definition works, he cites the Oxford English Dictionary's: "One or other of various strongly flavored or aromatic substances of vegetable origin, obtained from tropical plants, commonly used as condiments or employment for other purposes on account of their fragrance and preservative qualities." Turner explains why an herb is not a spice and suggests that herbs "tend to grow in temperate climates, spices in the tropics." This all makes sense. Though we treat coriander seeds as a spice and coriander leaves (culantro, cilantro, Chinese parsley) as an herb, and though the saffron crocus is widely cultivated outside the tropics for its stigmata, such seeming exceptions do not invalidate the difference that enables Turner to indicate his field of inquiry.
He specifies his outlook as well, eschewing "the larger questions of cause and effect in favor of a more intimate, human focus. This book is written with a sense that history too often comes deodorized, and spices are a case in point. . . . their past has suffered from being too often corralled into economic or culinary divisions, the essential force of their attraction buried in a materialist morass of economic and political history."
Having foresworn materialist morasses, Turner demurely bares his own point of view: "Insofar as I have a thesis, it is that spices played a more important part in people's lives, and a more conspicuous and varied one, than we might be inclined to assume." He seems to be on safe ground. But having avoided thorny questions, he then enchants us with a paragraph on how spices did, in fact, change the world -- a claim he had not made earlier -- and poses his own riddle: "Yet it is easy to overlook the question from which the others derive: why the trade existed in the first place." His answer: "It all sprang from desire" -- an answer some readers may not find a revelation.
Turner's history is chronological only for particular places; each definitive episode mostly stands on its own. Turner aims to "tease out the more important continuities of spices' past and follow them down through time." Hence readers must be prepared to move from the spread of Islam after the death of Mohammed -- which cut Europe off from the clove islands for a time -- back to the peppercorns discovered in the nose of the mummy of Ramses II. In principle there is no reason why this serial presentation -- selected anecdotes about spices as flavorings, as medicines, as embalming agents, as magical agents and so on -- should not serve the reader well. And this is entertaining, for a while. Yet because of it, the book takes on something of the quality of a trip to the zoo, where one moves from the aviary to the monkey cage, with each case standing on its own.
Turner initially explores the European rivalries born of the search for a route to the Indies, focusing on Columbus, the pope, Magellan, da Gama and the disappointing lack of cloves and nutmeg in the New World. Other chapters explore issues relating to spices through interesting anecdotes. In one case, Turner recounts the death of Henry I after eating lamprey. Turner is not only trained in the classics but also clearly loves them. Classic and medieval subjects -- myths, literature, archaeology, religion, medicine -- dominate the text, and those drawn to these early eras will revel in them. Rome's lively interest in pepper (Piper nigrum) and other, more remote spices is fully documented. Though there is less evidence, the spice trade apparently declined after Rome fell, only to be revived by the Italian city states in the 9th century. But I, neither classicist nor medievalist, found the book so replete with detail as to be completely fatiguing. (Perhaps the afterword to the chapter titled "The spice of love" -- "How to Make a Small Penis Splendid" -- will wake up nodding readers.) Turner's epilogue chronicles the theft of cloves and other spices from the Dutch Moluccas and their subsequent diffusion to the tropical colonies of rival powers, which soon became new sources of supply, marking what the author calls the end of the spice age. By the 17th century, Turner tells us, sugar (described here as a novelty) and the capsicums from the New World were gaining global notice. Meanwhile the old magic of spices, once rare and costly products of a mythical paradise, had vanished.
Reviewed by Sidney W. Mintz
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 .
The Spice Seekers
The Taste That Launched a Thousand Ships
According to an old Catalan tradition, the news of the New World was formally announced in the Saló del Tinell, the cavernous, barrel-vaulted banquet hall in Barcelona's Barri Gòtic, the city's medieval quarter. And it is largely on tradition we must rely, for aside from a few sparse details the witnesses to the scene had frustratingly little to say, leaving the field free for painters, poets, and Hollywood producers to imagine the moment that marked the watershed, symbolically at least, between medievalism and modernity. They have tended to portray a setting of suitable grandeur, with king and queen presiding over an assembly of everyone who was anyone in the kingdom: counts and dukes weighed down by jewels, ermines, and velvets; mitered bishops; courtiers stiff in their robes of state; serried ranks of pages sweating in livery. Ambassadors and dignitaries from foreign powers look on in astonishment and with mixed emotions-awe, confusion, and envy. Before them stands Christopher Columbus in triumph, vindicated at last, courier of the ecosystem's single biggest piece of news since the ending of the Ice Age. The universe has just been reconfigured.
Or so we now know. But the details are largely the work of historical imagination, the perspective one of the advantages of having half a millennium to digest the news. The view from 1493 was less panoramic; indeed, altogether more foggy. It is late April, the exact day unknown. Columbus is indeed back from America, but he is oblivious to the fact. His version of events is that he has just been to the Indies, and though the tale he has to tell might have been lifted straight from a medieval romance, he has the proof to silence any who would doubt him: gold, green, and yellow parrots, Indians, and cinnamon.
At least that is what Columbus believed. His gold was indeed gold, if in no great quantity, and his parrots were indeed parrots, albeit not of any Asian variety. Likewise his Indians: the six bewildered individuals who shuffled forward to be inspected by the assembled company were not Indians but Caribs, a race soon to be exterminated by the Spanish colonizers and by the deadlier still germs they carried. The misnomer Columbus conferred has long outlived the misconception.
In the case of the cinnamon Columbus's capricious labeling would not stick for nearly so long. A witness reported that the twigs did indeed look a little like cinnamon but tasted more pungent than pepper and smelled like cloves-or was it ginger? Equally perplexing, and most uncharacteristically for a spice, his sample had gone off during the voyage back-the unhappy consequence, as Columbus explained, of his poor harvesting technique. But in due course time would reveal a simpler solution to the mystery, and one that the skeptics perhaps guessed even then: that his "cinnamon" was in fact nothing any spicier than the bark of an unidentified Caribbean tree. Like the Indies he imagined he had visited, his cinnamon was the fruit of faulty assumptions and an overcharged imagination. For all his pains Columbus had ended up half a planet from the real thing.
In April 1493, his wayward botany amounted to a failure either too bizarre or, for those whose money was at stake, too deflating to contemplate. As every schoolchild knows (or should know), when Columbus bumped into America he was looking not for a new world but for an old one. What exactly he was looking for is clearly delineated in the agreement he concluded with the Spanish monarchs before the voyage, promising the successful discoverer one tenth of all gold, silver, pearls, gems, and spices. His posthumous fame notwithstanding, in this respect Columbus was only a qualified success. For in what in due course turned out to be the new world of the Americas, the conquistadors found none of the spices they sought, although in the temples and citadels of the Aztecs and Incas they stumbled across riches that outglittered even the gilded fantasies they had brought with them from Castile. Ever since, it has been with the glitter of gold and silver, not the aroma of spices, that the conquistadors have been associated. But when Columbus raised anchor, and when he delivered his report in Barcelona, seated in the place of honor alongside the Catholic monarchs, ennobled and enriched for his pains, the perspective was different. The unimagined and unimaginable consequences of his voyage have clouded later views of causes, privileging half of the equation. Columbus sought not only an El Dorado but also, in some respects more beguiling still, El Picante.
Why this was so may be answered with varying degrees of complexity. The simplest answer, but also the shallowest, is that spices were immensely valuable, and they were valuable because they were immensely elusive and difficult to obtain. From their harvest in distant tropical lands, spices arrived in the markets of Venice, Bruges, and London by an obscure tangle of routes winding halfway around the planet, serviced by distant peoples and places that seemed more myth than reality. That this was so was as much a function of the geography as the geopolitics of the day. Where the spices grew-from the jungles and backwaters of Malabar to the volcanic Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago-Christians feared to tread. Astride the spice routes lay the great belt of Islam, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. As spice was a Christian fixation, so it was a Muslim milch cow. At every stage along the long journey from East to West, a different middleman ratcheted up the price, with the result that by the time the spices arrived in Europe their value was astronomical, inflated in some cases on the order of 1,000 percent-sometimes more. With cost came an aura of glamour, danger, distance, and profit. Seen through European eyes, the horizon clouded by ignorance and vivified by imagination, the far-off places where the spices grew were lands where money grew on trees.
Yet if the image was beguiling, the obstacles that stood in the way seemed insuperable-prior, that is, to Columbus. His solution was as elegant as it was radical. It was not inevitable, said Columbus, that Eastern goods should arrive from the East; nor that Westerners should pay such a premium, thereby lining the pockets of the Infidel. The world being round, was it not simple logic that spices might also come around the other way: around the back of the globe, from the west? (Contrary to one hoary myth, hardly any well-informed medieval Europeans were flat-earthers. That the earth was spherical had been accepted by all informed opinion since ancient times.) It followed, then, that all one had to do to reach the Indies and their riches was head west from Spain: the ancients had said so, but thus far no one had put the idea to the test. With a little endeavor spices would be as common as cabbages and herrings. Columbus, in not so many words, proposed to sail west to the East, to Cathay and the Indies of legend; or, in the words of one of his intellectual mentors, the Florentine humanist Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, "ad loca aromatum," to the places where the spices are.
It was an idea of hallucinatory promise-not for the promise of discovery for discovery's sake nor even because the idea was particularly original, but because of the fiscal rewards. In the event of success Columbus's scheme would deliver his Spanish patrons a limitless source of wealth. For the small outlay required to fit out the expedition-a sum roughly equivalent to the annual income of a middling Castilian nobleman-Columbus proposed to drag the Indies out of the realms of fable and into the mainstream of Spanish trade and conquest. Though the story of his voyage has been endlessly mythologized, buried under a mountain of romantic speculation and scholarly scrutiny, in effect his success depended on convincing a coalition of investors and then the Crown that his relatively inexpensive plan merited the gamble. There were experts who disagreed, but in fifteenth-century Spain no more than in a modern democracy did expert opinion or the weight of evidence always carry the day. With a powerful syndicate and capital on his side, those who labeled him crackbrained no longer mattered. His voyage was possible because he got the backing and the cash, and he got the cash because of the promise of more-vastly more-to come back in return. Today he would be labeled a venture capitalist of a particularly bold and inventive hue.
Hence, very briefly summarized, the scene in the Saló. And if the returning discoverer's choice of exhibits made a good deal more sense then than now, so too, in his defense, did his mistakes. Very few Europeans had been to the real Indies, and fewer still had looked on the spice plants in their natural state. Reports of spices and Indies alike arrived rarely, often heavily fictionalized, a situation that left the fertile medieval imagination free to run riot, and few had imaginations more fertile than did Columbus. A month after first sighting land he had seen enough for his own satisfaction, writing in his log that "without doubt there is in these lands a very great quantity of gold . . . and also there are stones, and there are precious pearls and infinite spicery"-none of which he had thus far laid eyes on. Two days later, as his small flotilla picked its way through the coves and reefs of the Caribbean, he discerned hidden treasures beyond the palms and sandy beaches, convinced that "these islands are those innumerable ones that in the maps of the world are put at the eastern end. And he [Columbus] said that he believed that there were great riches and precious stones and spices in them." The evidence was lacking, but his mind was made up. He had set out to find spices, and find spices he would. Desire was father to discovery.
Yet for all Columbus's confidence there was, undeniably, something odd about his "spices"-not least the fact that they did not taste, smell, or look like the spices he and his p...
