Pepper Built Venice: The Spice Trade Before the Cape
Venice never grew a peppercorn. The pepper that seasoned the tables of western and central Europe in the later Middle Ages came from southern India, crossed the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, and reached the Mediterranean at Alexandria or Beirut. Venetian galleys met it there on a calendar set by the monsoon. The city's fortune rested on standing in the middle of that chain, and it struck a gold coin and signed a commercial treaty with the sultan of Egypt to keep its place. Then, in 1498, a Portuguese fleet reached India by sea. What followed was shorter on collapse and longer on argument than the usual story, and pepper sits at the center of it.
A bitter seed Rome could not stop buying
Pepper was an old habit long before Venice existed. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s CE, gave its price in Rome as four denarii a pound for black pepper and fifteen for long pepper, which made black pepper one of the cheaper aromatics on his list. He still complained that it was so popular despite its bitter taste. The Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius puts black pepper in 81 percent of its nearly 500 dishes, sweet ones included. Rome stored spices in warehouses such as the Horrea Piperataria, which probably helped keep prices steady. The historian Matthew Cobb argues that pepper's popularity reached well beyond the Roman elite.
When Alaric's Goths besieged Rome in 408, the price of lifting the siege, as the historian Zosimus recorded it, was five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk tunics, three thousand scarlet-dyed hides and three thousand pounds of pepper. A seasoning that went into four Roman dishes out of five was still worth demanding as ransom.
How the pepper reached the Rialto
Venice's hold on the eastern trade was built in steps. In 1204 it led the crusader conquest of Constantinople. A commercial treaty with the Mamluk sultan of Egypt secured Venetian trade at Alexandria, Tripoli and Beirut. In 1284 the city struck its first gold ducat, and within about 150 years the coin was common currency across much of the Middle East. In 1423 the Arab chronicler al-Fasi wrote that "the Venetian ducat has invaded the major cities of the world: Cairo, the whole of Syria, the Hijaz and Yemen."
The pepper came home on the mude, the state-owned and state-regulated galley convoys that ran on fixed lines to Alexandria and Beirut. They left toward the end of August, sailed through the Adriatic and the Aegean to Cyprus and Egypt, timed their arrival to meet the goods carried west by the monsoon, and were back in Venice eleven months later. Privately owned round ships carried Venetian trade in the region as well. Three Venetians, Domenico Malipiero, Girolamo Priuli and Marino Sanudo, copied the convoys' cargo lists into their diaries, which lets historians reconstruct what the galleys carried in the trade's last decades.
At the northern end of the chain stood the Fondaco dei Tedeschi beside the Rialto, the German merchants' warehouse and lodging, on a site Venice bought between 1222 and 1225. German traders brought lumber, metals and fine textiles, and bought spices from the East to take home.
The sultan's warehouse and the falling price
The Egyptian end was never easy. From the 1420s, Sultan Barsbay and the sultans after him forced Venetian merchants to buy part of their pepper from the sultan's own warehouses at a high price, a policy the historian Benjamin Arbel calls "the source of many difficulties."
The price at Venice, meanwhile, went down. The economic historian Frederic C. Lane assembled wholesale pepper prices at Venice and found that pepper fell about 50 percent between the 1420s and the 1440s. It stood near 50 ducats a load in 1432, drifted lower in the 1440s and 1470s, sometimes below 40, and did not return to its old high until after 1498. By Lane's evidence, pepper was not growing scarcer and dearer in the decades before the Portuguese sailed, so, he argued, rising prices could not have pulled them toward India.
The news from Lisbon
Vasco da Gama left Portugal on 8 July 1497 with four ships, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage journal records the first conversation ashore: one of the convicts aboard was sent on land and taken to two Moors from Tunis who spoke Castilian and Genoese, and when they asked what had brought the Portuguese so far, he told them "we came in search of Christians and of spices." Da Gama's fleet came back to Lisbon in 1499 and Pedro Álvares Cabral's in 1501, both carrying spices.
Girolamo Priuli, whose diary runs from 1494 to 1512, set down what the cargoes might mean for Venice. "These new facts are of such importance to our city," he wrote, "that I have been carried away with anxiety."
Both ends of the old route came under strain. The new Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghuri, quarrelled with Venice in 1503, and in 1505 he tried to raise sharply the amount of pepper Venetians had to buy directly from him. No Venetian galleys sailed to Alexandria or Beirut in 1505, or to Alexandria in 1506. That same year Portugal opened a crown trading house in Antwerp to sell its spices to northern Europe. At home, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi burned on the night of 27 to 28 January 1505, and the Republic rebuilt it from 1508, larger than before, with frescoes by Giorgione and Titian on its façade.
In 1514 the galleys lost their monopoly on carrying spices, which could now travel on private Venetian ships. Three years later the Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the Mamluk state and took Alexandria and the Levantine ports. Around 1527 the Venetian Senate is thought to have proposed a contract to buy all the pepper arriving in Lisbon beyond Portugal's own needs.
The revival
The old route did not die. In 1531 Venetians complained that the four galleys sent to Alexandria and Beirut had found few spices, sold at "precii excessive," excessive prices. Five years later both voyages were again judged important, especially Beirut, whose supply line with the Persian Gulf had remained mostly unharmed. Lane showed that the Levantine routes revived around the 1560s. The Portuguese historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho placed the recovery earlier, in the 1530s. Niels Steensgaard argued in 1974 that the Levant route competed vigorously with the Cape from the 1560s to the 1580s and had overtaken it by the 1590s, while C. H. H. Wake defended the Cape route's overall importance.
In 2005 the economists Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson went back to Lane's figures, adjusted them for inflation, and added prices from Iberia and northern Europe. On their evidence, Lane's hypotheses fail, and "the impact of the Portuguese was profound on all fronts." The disagreement comes down to measurement. Counted in the ducats of the day, the old route looks resilient. Counted in real terms and across the continent, the Cape reshaped the pepper market.
Timeline
| Year | What happened | What it meant for pepper |
|---|---|---|
| c. 77 CE | Pliny prices black pepper at 4 denarii a pound, long pepper at 15 | Black pepper was already a mass import, cheap among spices |
| 408 | Alaric's ransom of Rome includes 3,000 pounds of pepper | Still valuable enough to demand in a siege |
| 1204 | Venice leads the conquest of Constantinople | Venice takes a commanding position in the eastern trade |
| 1222 to 1225 | Venice acquires the Fondaco dei Tedeschi site | A fixed market where German merchants bought spices |
| 1284 | First gold ducat | Venice's gold coin; by the 1420s current from Cairo to Yemen |
| 1420s | Barsbay forces Venetian pepper purchases from the sultan's warehouses | A state monopoly at the Egyptian end |
| 1420s to 1440s | Venetian wholesale pepper falls about half | By Lane's reading, no scarcity pushing Europe toward the ocean |
| 1497 to 1498 | Da Gama sails from Portugal and reaches Calicut | A sea route that bypasses Egypt and Venice |
| 1499 and 1501 | Portuguese spice fleets reach Lisbon | Priuli records his anxiety for Venice |
| 1505 to 1506 | Pepper quarrel with the sultan; convoys suspended; Portugal opens its Antwerp house | Northern buyers gain a second supplier |
| 1508 | Fondaco rebuilt with Giorgione and Titian frescoes | The Republic rebuilds the German merchants' house |
| 1514 | Galleys lose their monopoly on carrying spices | Pepper moves on private ships |
| 1517 | Ottomans conquer the Mamluk sultanate | A new power holds Alexandria and the Levant |
| c. 1527 | Venetian Senate is thought to have proposed buying Lisbon's surplus pepper | Venice considers buying from its rival |
| 1530s to 1560s | Levant route recovers | Venice returns as a major supplier |
| 1590s | Steensgaard: the Levant has overtaken the Cape | Disputed, and still argued today |
The same seed, now
The berry in these ledgers is the one in a pepper grinder today. The spice harvest guide follows it through harvest to black and white pepper, and freshness and storage are covered in the black pepper answers guide. The single-origin spices guide explains why origin is on the label again. Salt, the other seasoning governments taxed and fought over, has its own salt history article and a complete salt guide.
Burlap & Barrel makes both kinds: Zanzibar Black Peppercorns (shop Zanzibar Black Peppercorns) and Fermented White Pepper (shop Fermented White Pepper). The Burlap & Barrel producer guide covers the company. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.
Sources & Further Reading
- Frederic C. Lane, "Pepper Prices Before Da Gama," Journal of Economic History 28:4 (1968)
- Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "Did Vasco da Gama Matter for European Markets? Testing Frederick Lane's Hypotheses Fifty Years Later," NBER (2005)
- Benjamin Arbel, "The Last Decades of Venice's Trade with the Mamluks," Mamluk Studies Review 8:2 (2004)
- João Teles e Cunha, "The Carreira da Índia and the Struggle for Supremacy in the European Spice Trade, ca. 1550 to 1615," RiMe
- Angelo Cattaneo, "Portugal and Italian Cities (14th to 16th Centuries)," Encyclopedia of Portuguese Expansion (NOVA FCSH)
- Fordham Internet History Sourcebooks: Vasco da Gama, Round Africa to India, 1497 to 1498
- Matthew Cobb, "Black Pepper Consumption in the Roman Empire" (2018)
- Encyclopaedia Romana, University of Chicago: the sack of Rome and Alaric's ransom
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), "Alaric"
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ducat"
- AramcoWorld: Monsoons, Mude and Gold (2005)
- Finestre sull'Arte: The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, history and transformations
- Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (Random House, 2012), quoting Priuli's diary
