Spices:Dawn of the Modern Age

“For Christ and spices!”

Vasco da Gama Malabar Coast (India)

Great demand & highly controlled supply

Vasco de Gama arrival in Calecut on 1498

Ceremonial & culinary function

Inadequate food-preserving techniques

Emissaries from a fabled world

Status symbols for the ruling class

Means of separating the classes

Borrowed culture

Foreign trade was the spice trade:most highly prized luxury goods

Spice trade lucrative, complex & prone to dislocation

Venice(Venice, as rendered by Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis in his Kitab-i Bahriye,

a book of portolan charts and sailing directions produced in the early 16th century.

Change in taste signaled the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern age

Crisis!

• increased demand

• stagnant transportation technology

• spiraling customs duties

Spices lured the Old World into the New, where it lost its way