Pepper by a New Route: Venice's Merchants Debate, 1502

Pepper, Venice and a New Sea Route

1Pepper grew on vines along the Malabar Coast of southwestern India, and cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon came from other lands around the Indian Ocean. For centuries, merchants carried these spices by ship to ports on the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. From there, camel caravans and boats moved them on to Alexandria in Egypt or to Beirut and Damascus in Syria, lands ruled by the Mamluk sultans of Cairo. Rulers along the way collected taxes, and each merchant who bought and resold the spices added a profit.

2Venetian merchants bought spices in Alexandria and Beirut and carried them home in large galleys owned by the city. In Venice, merchants from Germany, Hungary, Flanders and France bought them and took them north. Wealthy Europeans prized pepper for flavoring food and for showing off at feasts, and they paid well for it. By the time a sack of pepper was sold in Venice, it cost many times what it had cost in India.

3In 1498 a Portuguese fleet led by Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and reached Calicut, a pepper port in India. When the ships returned to Lisbon in 1499, they carried pepper and other spices. More Portuguese fleets sailed nearly every year after that. Their spices crossed no Mamluk lands, so they paid none of the sultan's taxes. Portuguese warships also attacked Muslim merchant ships in the Indian Ocean to keep spices from reaching the Red Sea. In several years soon after 1500, Venetian galleys came home from Alexandria and Beirut with only a small part of their usual load.

4The Portuguese never fully closed the old route. Their ships could not guard the whole ocean, and by the middle of the 1500s large amounts of pepper were again moving up the Red Sea to Alexandria, where Venetians bought it. Historians still debate how much Venice's spice trade suffered over the long run.