Portuguese Carrack Ships
The Spice of Life
In the medieval and early mod periods, ‘ spice ’ was a condition liberally applied to all kinds of alien natural products from pepper to sugar, herbs to animal secretions. Spices had been imported from the East into Europe since ancientness, and Europeans had developed a definite like for them. part of the attraction was the flavor they gave dishes, although the long-held view they were primarily used to disguise the taste of bad kernel is faulty. Another attraction was their identical rarity, making them a fashionable addition to any table and a real condition symbol for the affluent. Spices were used to add season not alone to sauces but besides wines ; they were even crystallised and eaten on their own as sweets .Remove Ads
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Where merchants themselves got their exotic spices from was not certain & many tall tales developed as to the origins of spices .
valuable spices used in food planning across Europe included pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, saffron, anise, zedoary, cumin, and cloves. Although most of these were reserved for the tables of the rich, even the poor classes used pepper whenever they could get it. Spices, despite their cost, were used in great quantities. Sacks of spices were required for royal banquets and weddings, and we know, for exemplar, that in the fifteenth hundred, the family of the Duke of Buckingham in England went through two pounds ( 900 grammes ) of spice every day, largely pepper and pep .
Spices had other uses besides their flavor. In the Middle Ages and early modern time period, it was believed that many spices had medicative value. first, they could be used to purge the body. second, the idea that a healthy body required a balance of its four core elements or liquid body substance was still prevailing. A healthy diet, therefore, besides needed to balance these humours, that is, one ‘s food should not be besides hot or cold, dry or damp. Spices helped put certain foodstuffs into balance. fish, for exercise, was a cold and wet food and sol by adding certain spices to fish dishes, these two characteristics became more balance .Remove Ads
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Spices were burned like infuriate for their perfume or scattered on floors or even added directly to the clamber. everywhere from churches to brothels used spices to improve the broadly bad olfactory property of the chivalric indoors. The most sought and expensive perfumes were frankincense, myrrh, balsam, sandalwood, and mastic. There was another group of scents that came from animals which were evenly prized. These included secretions from baseless cats ( civet ), beavers ( castoreum ), and deer ( musk ). A third base category of aromatic spices was those substances scraped off ancient mummies and other eldritch exotica .
Medieval Spice Merchant
Spices could besides be taken as medicines in their own properly and sol were crushed and made into pills, creams, and syrups. Black pepper was considered a thoroughly discussion for coughs and asthma, it could, the chemists claimed, bring around superficial bark wounds and even act as an antidote to some poisons. Cinnamon was thought to help cure fevers, nutmeg was good for flatulence, and warmed pep was considered an aphrodisiac. several strong-smelling spices were thought adequate to of combatting fetid smells, which themselves were thought to cause diseases. For this argue, during the many waves of the Black Death plague that swept across Europe, people burnt ambergris to ward off the often black disease. Ambergris was a fatty means, which came from the inside of whale intestines. Gemstones and semi-precious stones, besides being rare and difficult to get hold of, were often categorised as spices. Certain stones like tan were thought to ease haemorrhoids, lapis lapis lazuli was estimable for malaria, and powdered pearls, desegregate with vitamin a many expensive spices as possible, were taken to prevent old long time. Love History ?
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The Search for Spices
There were some voices of protest at these beliefs by some medical practitioners, and some members of the Church were much outspoken in their belief that all this money spent on spices could be better used elsewhere. Nevertheless, with all of these possible uses and their condition as the must-have lavishness good, it is no wonder that some of Europe ’ s elite began to ponder how they could get aim access to the spices of the East without paying through the nose to Eastern and Arab merchants. Where these merchants themselves got their spices from was not certain. many grandiloquent tales developed as to the origins of spices, but by the thirteenth hundred, travellers like Marco Polo ( 1254-1324 CE ) and missionaries were beginning to improve Europe ’ s geographic cognition of the across-the-board earth. India seemed afloat with black pepper. Sri Lanka was rich in cinnamon. sandalwood came from Timor. China and Japan were getting spices like cloves, nutmeg, and mace from India, South East Asia, and the Maluku Islands or the Moluccas in what is today Indonesia – not for nothing were they nicknamed the Spice Islands .
then, in 1453 came the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and therefore one of the principal land routes for spices into Europe was lost. This was one more rationality for european merchants to find their own access to the spice trade routes and, if possible, achieve master of their production at the generator. european powers like Spain and Portugal might besides be able to deal a austere fellate against their rivals in Europe, particularly the italian nautical states like Venice and Genoa. There was the add bonus, besides, that by circumventing the Islamic traders who dominated the deal in the spice markets of Aden and Alexandria, Christendom would not have to give its gold to its number one ideological enemy. There might even be christian allies in Asia who were adenine so far stranger to Europe .Remove Ads
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More practically, discovering newfangled agrarian farming to grow cereal crops would help reduce trade deficits. There was, besides, the real prospect of acquiring prestige and riches for the European elect and those mariners who dared cruise into the strange. finally, the feudal system in Europe was degenerating as land was parcelled out in ever-smaller pieces to generation after generation of sons. many lords merely did not know what to do with their third or one-fourth sons and sending them to extraneous lands to make their luck was a felicitous solution for both parties .
There were then, economic, political, and religious motives for finding a ocean route from Europe to Asia. With backing from the Crown and Church, equally well as secret investors who dreamed of huge returns, explorers set sweep for nameless horizons .
Portuguese Colonial Empire in the Age of Exploration
A Maritime Route to Asia
The Eastern spiciness trade had been going on since antiquity. Prior to the sixteenth century, spices came over farming and sea routes from the East, up the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, across Egypt or Arabia, and into the Mediterranean. The Silk Routes from China through Eurasia was another way spices entered into european markets. As the historian M.N. Pearson summarises, the costs required to get spices to Europe using the traditional Middle East routes were very high indeed :Remove Ads
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…the price of a kilogram of pepper as it changed hands was enormous – costing 1 or 2 grammes of silver at the production point, it was 10 to 14 in Alexandria, 14 to 18 in Venice, and 20 to 30 in the consumer countries of Europe. ( 41 )
Riches could be won, then, if the Europeans could bypass the established routes and meet the ever-rising demand for spices in Europe. In order to achieve this, a maritime route to Asia had to be found .
In 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he could find it by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean but he only succeeded in finding another landmass in his way : the Americas. The Portuguese believed they could find Asia by sailing around the African continent. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias sailed down the coast of West Africa and made the first ocean trip around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of the african continent ( now South Africa ). He was followed by Vasco da Gama who, in 1497-9, besides rounded the Cape but then sailed on up the coast of East Africa and crossed the indian ocean to reach Calicut ( immediately Kozhikode ) on the Malabar Coast of southerly India. finally, the Europeans had found a lead maritime route to the riches of the East. From the Malabar Coast of India, European ships could then sail further East to the Spice Islands and South East Asia. A path was opened up by Francisco Serrão, who sailed to the Spice Islands in 1512, and Ferdinand Magellan ( 1480-1521 ) when he made the first circumnavigation of the earth in 1519-22 in the service of Spain .
Vasco da Gama Arriving at Calicut, India
Portuguese Colonization
Getting geographic access to the spice deal was one thing, muscling in on the trade itself was quite another. The first gear and biggest problem for the Portuguese in their trade ambitions in the East was that they did not very possess any goods the indian or muslim traders desired. many rulers were already vastly ample, and they were antipathetic to make any changes to a regional trade net that was working highly well and, more importantly for everyone, peacefully. The Portuguese decided to use the one thing they had in their prefer : transcendence in weapons and ships. indian rulers and some arabian traders did have some cannons, but these were not of the same quality as the european ones, and more significantly, trade ships in the indian Ocean were built for cargo and speed, not for naval war. The Europeans, in contrast, had been fighting sea battles for some time .Remove Ads
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One quintal ( 100 kg/220 pound ) of pepper could be bought for six cruzados & sold in Europe for at least 20 cruzados .
The solution was simple, then : take over the trade net by force and establish a monopoly on the spice deal not only in terms of Asia with Europe but besides within Asia, besides. Spices could be acquired from zest growers a cheaply as possible for relatively low-value goods like cotton fabric, dry foodstuffs, and copper, and then sold in Europe for adenine much as potential. inside Asia, spices could be traded from one port to another and exchanged for precious goods like gold, silver, gems, pearls, and fine textiles .
accordingly, more and more warships were sent around the Cape of Good Hope, and forts were built everywhere, starting with Portuguese Cochin ( Kochi ) in India in 1503 and finally spreading to Japan. rival ships were blasted out of the water and uncooperative towns were given a barrage of broadsides. Goods were confiscated and traders pressured into golden deals. Undeterred by the enormousness of the geographic area the Portuguese would have to patrol, King Manuel I of Portugal ( r. 1495-1521 ) declared a royal monopoly on the spice trade. A viceroy of India was appointed in 1505, even though the Portuguese had no veridical territorial aims beyond controlling coastal trade centres. portuguese Goa was established in 1510 on the west coast of India, and within 20 years it became the capital of portuguese India. In 1511 Malacca in Malaysia was taken over. Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf followed in 1515, and a garrison was established at Colombo in Sri Lanka in 1518 .
The Royal Monopoly
Enforcing a monopoly on the spice trade across one-third of the globe was much impossible but the Portuguese had a very estimable stab at it. Besides the use of cannons as mentioned earlier, administrative controls were put in seat. First, any private trader – european or otherwise – get with a cargo of spices was arrested, his wares and ship confiscated. Muslim traders fared the worst and were often executed. After it was realised this policy was impossible to enforce everywhere, some local traders were permitted to trade spices in limited quantities, but much only one, most normally pepper. Crews of european ships were permitted to take quantities of spices as a substitute for pay ( a small sack could buy them a house back home ) .
Another room to control the zest trade wind, and that in other goods, was to only permit ships to visit certain ports if they had a royal license. In short, the seas were no longer free. flush ship trade goods other than spices had to travel with a Portuguese-issued pass or cartaz, and if they did not, the cargo and embark were confiscated and the crew imprisoned or worse. In summation to the cartaz, ships had to pay customs duties at their port of call. Yet another method to extract duties was to oblige all ships to sail in Portuguese-protected convoy, the cafilas. Pirates were a menace in the indian Ocean and beyond, but the real aim was to ensure all trading ships stopped at a Portuguese-controlled port where they would have to pay duties ( plus leave a cash depository guaranteeing they returned to make a second payment ) .
In these versatile ways, customs duties came to account for some 60 % of the integral portuguese gross in the East. In addition, profits were, equitable as had been hoped, made from the spices themselves. The Portuguese could now buy the spices at the source. For example, one quintal ( 100 kg/220 pound ) of pepper could be bought for 6 cruzados ( a amber mint of the period ) and sold in Europe for at least 20 cruzados. There were transport costs and the expense of maintaining patrol ships and forts but, all in all, the Portuguese could make a identical big 90 % profit on their investment. Further, the more spices that were imported, the lower the overall costs. The portuguese desire to buy and control spices became insatiate .
The undertake to control the spice trade had other consequences besides those already mentioned. The deal net was shifted to new areas so that some established centres like Cochin went into worsen and others like Goa rose. Missionaries spread the christian religion. Plants and animals were introduced to new places, often causing unanticipated repercussions in habitat and upsetting the balance of local ecological systems. Diseases spread in all directions to find newly victims .
The Port of Calicut in 1572
The Opening Up of Asia
The Portuguese had more or less established a monopoly on the spiciness barter in Europe, but their authority in Asia was short-lived. asian merchants avoided the Europeans whenever potential and carried on with their duty-free barter. It is important to note that Europe accounted for entirely around one-fourth of the global trade in spices. many portuguese officials were themselves corrupt and traded without paying the Crown its slice of income. The Middle East domain and sea routes to transport spices, never entirely replaced by the Cape of Good Hope path, began to prosper again in the second half of the sixteenth hundred thanks to the ever-increasing demand for spices in Europe .
other european nations soon got hoist of the riches available to those with lead access to the spices. between 1577 and 1580, the Englishman Francis Drake ( c. 1540-1596 CE ) made his circumnavigation of the world which included a stop off at the Spice Islands to take a cargo of cloves. The first to actually challenge the Portuguese, though, were the Dutch who, from 1596, had no qualms about attacking forts at portuguese centres, which were ailing garrisoned and which much suffered from a miss of care. The territories involved were sol bombastic, that the Portuguese could not patrol even a little divide of them. The Dutch took direct command of the Spice Islands and captured Malacca ( 1641 ), Colombo ( 1656 ), and Cochin ( 1663 ). By controlling the generator of the spices, the dutch could immediately impose their own terms on the global spice trade wind and consequence to Europe three times the quantities of spices the Portuguese could transport. interim, the Persians, with English aid, took over Hormuz in 1622. The Hindu Marathas were winning bang-up victories in southerly India and threatening portuguese centres there. The Gujarati traders were dominating the Bay of Bengal barter. In brusque, everybody loved spices and the wealth they brought .
even more significantly, the european nations were now adapting their foreign policies. It was no longer a lawsuit of exploration and discovery to establish a handful of coastal craft centres. colonization was now about holding territory, conquering autochthonal peoples, and resettling Europeans. trade companies were set up by the Dutch and English which allowed for much more efficient skill and distribution of goods. Sugar cane, cotton, tea, opium, aureate, diamonds, and slaves would take the plaza of spices in the earth economy as the european powers raced to carve up the worldly concern and build an empire. The drive to control the spice trade, then, had opened up the worldly concern, but it was to become a much more violent and precarious one in the centuries to follow.
