The Spice Trade on the Silk Road — The Silk Road Atlas

If silk gave the overland network its modern name, the spice trade gave it much of its profit. The dried berries, barks, flowers, and seeds of South and Southeast Asia — pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, cardamom, and turmeric among them — were the most consistently valuable cargoes to move along both the land and sea routes of the Old World for more than fifteen centuries. At various points in that long history, spices have functioned as currency, as tribute, as diplomatic gifts, and as the financial engine of entire trading companies and empires. The demand for spices in the West, in particular, was so great and so durable that it ultimately financed the voyages of discovery that broke the overland system altogether.

This article surveys the spice trade in its breadth: the principal spices in circulation, the regions that produced them, the routes by which they moved, the merchants who handled them, and the long political and economic consequences of the trade. For the broader context of long-distance commerce, see the article on Silk Road trade, goods, and economy. The geographic setting is treated in the article on the routes and map of the Silk Road, and the parallel sea trade in the article on the maritime Silk Road. The economic logic that made the trade viable is examined in the article on the Silk Road economy.

A note on “spice”

The modern English word “spice” covers a wide range of plant products whose common feature is the intensity and persistence of their flavour. In the medieval and early modern world, the category was broader still. “Spice” in older usage could encompass any aromatic and expensive import: not only the dried fruits, barks, and seeds of South Asia, but also substances we would now classify separately, such as aloes, benzoin, camphor, frankincense, myrrh, and sandalwood. For the purposes of this article, however, “spice” will be used in the narrower modern sense: the condiments, flavourings, and medicines drawn principally from South and Southeast Asia.

Spices made the long-distance trade economically possible.

The reason spices were so valuable in the West is partly a matter of taste and partly a matter of medicine. In the European and Middle Eastern medical traditions inherited from Galen and Avicenna, the body was thought to be governed by the four humours, and digestion was thought to be a process of “cooking” food in the stomach. Spices, which were hot and dry in the Galenic system, were believed to aid this cooking, to warm a cold stomach, and to drive off the corrupt humours that caused disease. A medieval European kitchen without spice was thought to be a kitchen that produced ill-digested food, and therefore ill health. The wealthy consumed spices in astonishing quantities: the household accounts of English and French aristocrats in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries record the purchase of pounds of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves for daily use, in addition to large quantities reserved for sauces, preserves, and the spiced wines known as hippocras and clarry.

The principal spices and their sources

The major spices of the Old World trade can be grouped by their region of origin, since the geography of supply was remarkably concentrated.

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) was, by volume and by value, the single most important spice in the pre-modern world. The pepper vine is a climbing plant native to the Malabar Coast of southwestern India, where it had been cultivated for at least three thousand years. Two regions, in particular, dominated production: the Malabar Coast, with its principal port at Calicut (modern Kozhikode), and the Sumatran port of Pasai, which produced a related variety. Pepper was comparatively cheap at the source — a labourer’s wage might buy a large quantity — but the cost of moving it through a long chain of middlemen to Europe raised its price a hundredfold or more by the time it reached the consumer. Pepper’s value as a near-currency in late medieval Europe is difficult to overstate: rents, fines, and dowries were often quoted in pounds of pepper, and the spice served as a common standard of value in many commercial transactions.

Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) was, in the ancient and medieval periods, a more prestigious and more expensive spice than pepper. Genuine cinnamon comes from the inner bark of a tree that was, in the pre-modern world, cultivated almost exclusively in Sri Lanka. The closely related cassia, less aromatic and less expensive, came from southern China, Burma, and northern Vietnam; the two were often confused in European sources, but Chinese cassia had been traded westward along the overland routes since at least Han times. The cinnamon trade is one of the most ancient: cassia appears in the biblical book of Exodus among the ingredients of the holy anointing oil, and Chinese records of the Han dynasty note that the bark was a standard item of import from the south.

Cloves (Syzygium aromaticum) came, until the late eighteenth century, from a single small archipelago: the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, of eastern Indonesia. The clove tree is a tall evergreen whose dried flower buds produce the familiar spice. Centuries of European competition for the clove trade would, in the end, give the word “Monopoly” its modern form, after the Dutch East India Company exterminated the clove tree on all islands except Ternate and Tidore in order to control supply.

Nutmeg and mace came from the Banda Islands, another small archipelago in the Moluccas. The two spices are produced by the same tree, Myristica fragrans: nutmeg is the seed, mace the lacy red aril that surrounds it. Like cloves, nutmeg was a Moluccan monopoly for most of its history as a traded good, and the Dutch would, in the seventeenth century, enforce that monopoly by military means.

Ginger, cardamom, and turmeric were produced across a wide range of South and Southeast Asia, and although individually less valuable than pepper or cloves, they were major items of trade in bulk.

Long pepper (Piper longum), a related species to black pepper, was a more important spice in the early medieval trade than it is today. It was the dominant pepper in Roman and Sasanian commerce and was the principal form in which the spice reached the Mediterranean in the first centuries CE.

A personal note

On terminology: “Spice” in the medieval European sense was a much broader category than the modern one. Medieval spice included not only the modern condiments (pepper, cinnamon, cloves) but also aloes, benzoin, camphor, frankincense, myrrh, and sandalwood. The economic history of “spice” before the eighteenth century is not the history of the modern spice rack; it is the history of aromatics, medicines, and ritual substances.

A note on “spice”

The principal spices and their sources

A personal note

Further reading

Related pages