Frankincense and myrrh, incense and cinnabar, cinnamon and cassia, and
all the spices we associate with long ago times, have traditionally been thought
of as arriving in the Mediterranean from the East. The “spices of Araby” found
their way to the Mediterranean, the story goes, from the Hadhramaut in the
southwestern portion of the Arabian peninsula in a trade controlled by Meccan
traders. The spices arrived in Arabia from the Orient or East Africa before
continuing their journey north to their terminus in Syria and Egypt, where they
were sold to European traders. These Arab traders were said to be in an
excellent location and they kept the origin of these spices secret so they could
protect their monopoly from their Mediterranean customers. By the seventh
century A.D. the trade declined and it was only to revive in the medieval
era.
The story of the spices of Araby, told by every food writer, is an
exciting story, but is completely untrue. After the publication of the
controversial, but compelling, argument made in Patricia Crone’s Meccan Trade
and the Rise of Islam, published in 1987 by Princeton University Press, we
must rethink the spice story. Mecca, which is traditionally described as the
center of a far-flung trading empire at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, was
not in an “excellent location.” It was not at the crossroads of trade, but was
off the beaten track. In fact, Crone claims, the Meccans did not trade in
incense, spices, and other luxury goods. Their trade was much humbler: clothing
and leather, and they could not have founded a commercial empire of
international dimensions based on clothing. Arabia is “indelibly associated with
the spice trade in the minds of every educated person,” and, as the traditional
story goes, spices had traded through Arabia for 1,500 to 2,500 years, coming to
an end by the time the Arabs conquered the Middle East. Crone says all this is
untrue. Some of the famous spices described in antiquity, such as cinnamon and
cassia, thought to have come from the East, were not the cinnamon and cassia we
know today. It is clear from the classical descriptions of these plants by
Theophrastus and Pliny that the plants in question belonged to a genus quite
different from that of Cinnamomum. They are, in fact, a xerophilous shrub
of the kind that proliferates in the thorn- woodlands of the regions that border
the Red Sea. The cinnamon and cassia known in antiquity were products native to
Arabia and East Africa and did not come from the East. This famous “spice route”
that went from south Arabia to the Mediterranean was never used for foreign
spices but simply for local Arabian aromatics, clothing, and leather.
The Greco-Roman world imported many Arabian spices in a trade that was
quite large. But by the sixth century hardly any spices remained on the market.
Six of the most heavily traded spices--frankincense, myrrh, cancamum, tarum,
labdanum, and sweet rush--had gone out of fashion, disappeared altogether, or
came from within the Greco-Roman world. Two others, aloe and cinnabar, were
imported by sea. Cinnamon and cassia, and calamus, were now obtained exclusively
from East Africa. One spice, cardamomum, has an unsure identity because it
clearly is not the cardamom we know today, and two cannot be
identified--bdellium and comacum. Not one of these spices is associated with
Meccan trade items. The spice trade dwindled to nothing by the seventh century,
and it would not be for another five hundred years before the spice trade would
rise again into a veritable orgy.
There were three reasons for the rise of the medieval Mediterranean spice
trade. First, the monotony of a lifetime of consuming bread, more bread, and
gruel resulted in a powerful desire to, literally, spice up the food. Even today
it is people in the poorest countries of the Third World who are most likely to
use spices in their food. Second, there was the need for the emerging new class
of bourgeoisie to culturally demonstrate its power and superiority, which it did
through the purchase of luxury items like spices, used in foods, medicines, and
ointments. Third, there was the insatiable desire for gold and silver among the
Mediterranean’s trading partners in the East, the Chinese and Indians. |