Spices are small, light, and for most of history worth more than their weight in almost anything else. That made them the first global trade: bark from Sri Lanka, flower buds from the Moluccas, dried berries from the Malabar coast, riding monsoon winds toward kitchens that had no idea where any of it grew. These stories follow the plants, the routes, the people who chased them, and what spices were actually for.
Every tile in a Spices and the Spice Trade game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
The Spices
nine stories
1Black, white and green are the same berry
On the tile: Black Pepper
Black pepper grows on a vine native to Malabar, the tropical coast of southwestern India, and its fruit is a small drupe that hangs in clusters called spikes. What color the spice ends up being is a matter of timing and handling. For black pepper the berries are picked while still green, left to ferment, then dried in the sun until they shrivel and darken. Green, white and red peppercorns come off the same plant, picked or processed another way.
In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder set down what a Roman paid for pepper by the pound: fifteen denarii for long pepper, seven for white, four for black. Long pepper, which he describes as the pod picked before it opens and dried in the sun, was the costly one, and easily faked, he adds, by cutting it with Alexandrian mustard. Pliny also grumbled that pepper had nothing to recommend it but its bite, and that Rome bought it by weight anyway, like gold or silver.
Herodotus reported that nobody could say where cinnamon grew. Great birds, he wrote, carried the dry sticks off to nests plastered on cliffs no person could reach, so Arabian traders cut up oxen and donkeys, left the pieces near the eyries, and waited for the birds to haul them up until the nests broke and fell. Medieval Europe repeated the tale for centuries. In fact the spice is inner bark, taken from the pruned branches of an evergreen tree, and no cliff is involved.
Cinnamon is the dried inner bark of evergreen trees in the genus Cinnamomum, and more than one species supplies it. Ceylon cinnamon, from Sri Lanka, is the mild one. The tangier types known as cassia carry far more coumarin, a flavoring compound that can damage the liver of sensitive people. Germany's federal risk assessment institute studied how the body takes up coumarin from cinnamon and advised anyone using large quantities as a condiment to choose the low-coumarin Ceylon kind.
Nutmeg and mace come from the same tree, Myristica fragrans, and from the same fruit. Split the fruit open and there is a glossy brown seed wrapped in a red lacy web. Dry the seed and you have nutmeg. Dry the web, which botanists call an aril, and you have mace. Until the French and British broke the Dutch monopoly with plantations of their own at the end of the eighteenth century, the tree grew nowhere but the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia, which is how one fruit came to interest empires.
A clove is not a seed or a fruit. It is a flower bud, hand-picked from an evergreen tree native to the northern Moluccas, and picked deliberately early: growers wait until the buds turn bright red, then take them before they bloom. Dried, they harden into the little nails that gave the spice its name. Most of what you smell is a single compound, eugenol, which makes up more than eighty percent of clove essential oil.
Each saffron crocus opens three crimson stigmas, and every one of them has to be plucked by hand or with tweezers. Penn State's extension service puts the arithmetic plainly: roughly fifty flowers go into one teaspoon of dried saffron, and about four thousand blossoms into a single ounce. The plant cannot even seed itself. Crocus sativus is a sterile triploid, so every field is grown from corms divided and replanted by hand.
Vanilla is the seed pod of an orchid, and the name says so: it comes from the Spanish vainilla, a little sheath or pod. The main commercial species is the flat-leaved Vanilla planifolia, with two relatives grown on a smaller scale. Each flower carries male and female parts separated by a membrane that keeps it from pollinating itself, so in its native Mexico the work falls to bees of the genus Eulaema. Move the vine away from those bees and the fruit stops.
Star anise is the dried fruit of Illicium verum, a Chinese tree, and it is shaped like the thing it is named for. It is also a small chemical works. Its pods are rich in shikimic acid, the starting material chemists use to build oseltamivir, the antiviral sold as Tamiflu, and the pods can run as high as about seventeen percent shikimic acid by dry weight. A flu scare could therefore become a run on a cooking spice.
Long before pepper reached Europe in bulk, the aromatic trade that mattered was frankincense and myrrh, carried north out of southern Arabia to Mediterranean ports. The Nabateans ran the desert leg, and four of their towns in the Negev grew up along it: Haluza, Mamshit, Avdat and Shivta, with forts, caravanserais and clever irrigation to make a hard country pay. UNESCO lists them together. The traffic flourished from the third century BC to the second century AD.
Berenike was Rome's southernmost port, a town on Egypt's Red Sea coast with no fresh water nearby and a hard trek to the Nile. Ships came in from India anyway. Excavations led by Steven Sidebotham have turned up Indian mats and baskets, teak planking from Kerala, and a jar holding more than sixteen pounds of peppercorns, the largest cache of pepper yet found from antiquity. An empire's grocery order, left in the sand.
A second-century contract written on papyrus, now in Vienna, records a loan for a voyage from Roman Egypt to Muziris in southern India, and lists what came back aboard a ship called the Hermapollon: pepper, ivory and boxes of aromatic nard. Even after Rome's twenty-five percent import tax, the cargo was worth close to seven million sesterces. Scholars reckon that was enough to buy a luxury estate in central Italy, or pay forty thousand stonecutters for a year.
The Indian Ocean keeps a schedule. Its winds blow one way in summer and reverse in winter, so a ship leaving Roman Egypt could cross to India in a couple of months, then had to sit out the season before it could sail home. Cargoes landed at Berenike, crossed the desert by camel to the Nile, went down the river to Alexandria and on to Rome. Miss the wind and you lost a year.
A Tamil epic poem from about the second century told how Greek traders exchanged their gold for Indian pepper at Muziris. Then the great port fell off the map. In 2006 Indian researchers led by P. J. Cherian began digging at Pattanam, a quiet palm-shaded village on the Kerala coast, and found what archaeologists believe was likely Muziris: a wharf, a twenty-foot wooden canoe for ferrying goods out to anchored ships, and thousands of Mediterranean potsherds from amphoras that had carried wine, olive oil and fish sauce.
The emperor Domitian built a block of warehouses in the heart of Rome known as the horrea piperataria, the pepper stores: a storehouse and bazaar for pepper and spices out of Egypt and Arabia. They burned during the reign of Commodus, and the basilica of Maxentius later rose over the ruins and sealed them in. That turned out to be a kind of preservation. Archaeologists dug the rooms out from beneath the basilica, and on December 21, 2024, the pepper stores opened to visitors for the first time.
Vindolanda was a Roman fort in northern England, about as far from the pepper vines of India as the empire reached. Among the writing tablets recovered there is a thoroughly ordinary note from the second century: an ordinary soldier's order for two denarii, or eight sesterces, worth of pepper. Not a general, not a senator. A spice carried the length of the known world had become something a garrison cook could send out for.
Much of Venice's wealth was not made in Venice. It was made at Alexandria, the Egyptian port on the Mediterranean at the western edge of the Nile delta, where silks, perfumes, gems and above all spices arrived from the far side of Asia. Venetian ships carried goods out and brought spices back, which then went by barge up the Po valley and over the Alpine passes by mule, or out past Gibraltar to London and Bruges. The gateway was a foreign harbor.
Melaka was founded about 1400 by Sumatran exiles on the southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula, beside the strait that ships between China and India had to thread. Indonesian spices, Malayan gold and Chinese silks all passed through on their way west. A city sitting on a chokepoint could have squeezed that traffic. Melaka did the opposite: a stable government and a policy of free trade drew some 15,000 merchants by the late fifteenth century, and its harbor was said to hold more ships than any other port then known.
The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta rode the monsoon winds into Calicut, a chief port of India's Malabar coast where merchants gathered from all quarters, sent by the sultan of Delhi as an ambassador to the Mongol court of China. Drums and trumpets met him, and a welcome, he wrote, the like of which he had never seen in those lands. In the harbor lay thirteen Chinese junks, far larger than the dhows he had sailed, with four decks, lockable cabins for merchants, and a complement that could run to a thousand men.
Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 and got ready a gift for its ruler: twelve pieces of cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case holding six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil and two of honey. The officials who inspected it laughed. The poorest merchant from Mecca gave more, they said, and if he meant to make a present it ought to be in gold.
Romano Mairano was a Venetian merchant with a long career and, by 1173, nothing left of it. Two years earlier he had fled Constantinople, where the emperor had thousands of Venetians arrested and their property seized, his own ships burned or confiscated. Borrowing from a wealthy friend, he shipped a cargo of lumber to Alexandria and came home with spices. He settled with his creditors not in coin but in pepper, and sold what was left in Venice for many times the purchase price.
Afonso de Albuquerque grasped that the spice trade ran through a bottleneck. In August 1511, with nine hundred Portuguese and two hundred Indian mercenaries against a far larger force, he took Melaka on the Malay Peninsula, and Portugal held the city for the next 130 years, drawing enormous profits from the lucrative spice trade that passed through its port. It was the first European foothold in the spice trade of Southeast Asia, and it was won not by growing anything but by owning a narrow stretch of water.
Portugal guarded its sailing directions to Asia as a state secret. Jan Huygen van Linschoten spent five years in Goa working for the archbishop, befriending merchants and sailors, and quietly gathering what he could. Back home he published it. His Itinerario told merchants which spices could be had where and at what cost, and the sailing instructions were rushed into print in 1595 so the first Dutch expedition could carry them east.
Francis Drake reached the Moluccas in late 1579 and took on ginger, pepper and six tons of cloves, helped by a sultan who was then at war with the Portuguese. Soon afterward the Golden Hind ran onto a reef. To lighten her, Drake had cannon and several tons of cargo heaved into the sea, cloves among it, and the ship slid clear. He came home wealthy regardless, which says something about what the rest of the hold was carrying.
Garcia de Orta was a Portuguese physician who settled in Goa in 1534 and stayed the rest of his life. In 1563 he published the Coloquios, written as a set of conversations between himself and an imaginary colleague visiting India who wants to know about its drugs, herbs and spices. It was the third book ever printed in India, and a revelation to European readers. Translations into Latin, French and Spanish followed.
Vanilla vines grown far from Mexico almost never bore fruit, and the delicate method botanists had published was no use on a plantation. In 1841 on the island of Reunion, a planter named Bellier-Beaumont found two pods on a solitary twenty-year-old vine, and Edmond Albius, an enslaved boy of twelve, told him he had fertilized the flower by hand. Bellier-Beaumont did not believe it until more pods appeared. The quick method Albius showed him is still how commercial vanilla is pollinated.
Cloves are native to a handful of small islands in eastern Indonesia. In 1840 Said bin Sultan, ruler of Oman, moved his capital from Muscat to Stone Town on Zanzibar, half an ocean away, and encouraged clove planting there until the island was known for the crop. The plantations were worked by enslaved people, and that trade was ended under a treaty with Britain in 1873.
The old story is that medieval cooks buried spoiled meat under pepper and cloves. The arithmetic kills it. In the twelfth century a pound of pepper bought in London cost about what an unskilled laborer earned in a week, which put it well beyond anyone who could not also afford fresh meat. Heavy seasoning was a display of rank, closer to a gold chain than a disguise. Histories of the spice trade now call the disguise explanation plainly incorrect.
The recipe collection known as Apicius is the closest thing we have to a cookbook from the Roman empire, and it is soaked in one import. Pepper is called for in 349 of its 468 recipes, in everything from mulled wine to roast pork. The book carries the name of a first-century gourmet, but the text that survives was put together in the fourth or fifth century. Either way, a Roman kitchen of any standing treated a spice shipped across the Indian Ocean as an everyday staple.
Researchers analyzed the residues inside thirty-one labeled ceramic vessels from an embalming workshop at Saqqara and matched the chemistry to the Egyptian words written on the pots. Some of what they identified had come a very long way. Elemi and dammar are tree resins from tropical forests in Africa and Southeast Asia, so the aromatic trade that supplied Egyptian embalmers reached most of the way to Indonesia. The recipe was itself a map.
A pomander was a mixture of fragrant substances in a case of gold, silver, ivory or wood, worn at the neck or the waist because people believed a strong smell kept sickness at bay. One in the Victoria and Albert Museum opens into six separate chambers that hinge outward, each originally sealed by its own sliding lid. The divisions were practical. Particular spices were associated with particular ailments, so they were kept from mixing.
English law wants both sides of a contract to give something, so a landlord who intends to charge nothing must still charge something. That something became a peppercorn. The habit is old: a London toll list from about the year 1000, long ascribed to King Aethelred, charged foreign merchants landing at Billingsgate ten pounds of pepper at Christmas and again at Easter. Leases in one law library's collection run 99 years, 500 years, and in one case 3,000.
When Alaric and his Goths blockaded Rome in 408, the price of lifting the siege came to five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand of silver, four thousand silk tunics, three thousand scarlet-dyed skins, and three thousand pounds of pepper. The treasury was empty. To raise the gold and silver, the city stripped ornaments from images of its own gods and melted some statues down. The pepper, apparently, was the easy part.
Dabbing clove oil on a sore tooth is old folk practice, and in 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration found the evidence that it relieves toothache too thin to support the claim. The spice did leave dentistry something solid. In 1837 eugenol, the compound behind the smell of cloves, was combined with an oxide to make a filling material. Swap in zinc oxide and you get zinc oxide eugenol, still used as a temporary cement.
To garble once meant to sift. English took the word from Anglo-Norman garbeler, to sift, and behind that stands an Arabic verb formed on the word for a sieve. A garbler was a London official who inspected imported spices and removed the refuse, and his workers swore an oath never to buy, sell or quietly mix back the garble dust and light pepper they had sifted out. Only later did the word slide from picking out the bad parts to mangling the good ones.
Buyers pay more for turmeric that looks vividly yellow, and that preference carried a cost. Researchers chasing high blood lead levels in Bangladesh traced the problem to polishing mills, where some processors were dusting dull rhizomes with lead chromate, an industrial pigment used to color plastic and furniture. The dusting had gone on for four decades, and most of the processors did not know the pigment was toxic. After a campaign of publicity, testing and fines, adulteration in the markets studied fell from 47 percent in 2019 to none detectable by 2021.