There were no lemons to prepare acid drinks, there was no sugar for sweetening, the cheering tea and coffee were still lacking; even at the tables of the rich and the powerful, there was naught to relieve the sameness of perpetual gluttony—until, wonderful to relate, it was found that a touch of spice from the Orient, a dash of pepper, a minute addition of ground nutmeg, the mingling of a little ginger or cinnamon with the coarsest of dishes, would give an unwonted and wholesome stimulus to the jaded palate. Precious culinary overtones were interspersed between the crude treble and bass of sour and sweet, of sapid and vapid; and the still barbaric medieval gustatory nerves speedily found it impossible to dispense with these exotic flavourings. More and more of them was demanded. A dish was not properly prepared unless it had been pricked up with so gross an excess of pepper that it bit the eater's tongue immoderately. Even beer was strongly seasoned with ginger, and mulled wine was so laden with spices that it tasted like liquid fire.

The West, however, needed spices and kindred Oriental products not for the kitchen alone. The women of Europe made an increasing demand for the sweet-scented products of Araby: wanton musk, fragrant ambergris, heavy-smelling attar of roses. They asked weavers and dyers to provide them with Chinese silks and Indian damasks, goldsmiths and jewellers to supply them with lustrous pearls from Ceylon and glittering diamonds from Hindustan. Paradoxically enough, the spread of the Catholic faith promoted the use of Oriental products, for not one of the myriad censers swung in the countless churches of Europe drew its supply from European soil, each of them being provided with the materials for its fragrant smoke by sea or by land from the Arabian Peninsula. No less did the apothecaries have to vaunt Indian or Levantine specifics, such as opium, camphor, and the costly gum-resin, experience having taught them that their customers would not believe any balsam or other drug to be truly efficacious unless upon the porcelain vessel which contained it there was to be read in blue letters the magic word "Arabian" or "Indian." The rarity, the exotic character, and doubtless the high price of any Oriental medicament sufficed to enhance its suggestive working in the West. Throughout the Middle Ages, the terms Arabian, Persian, and Indian were, to European ears, almost synonymous with select, exquisite, distinguished, precious, and expensive—much as was the attribute "French" during the eighteenth century, elsewhere than in France. No other article of commerce was so much coveted as were Oriental spices, until it seemed that the mysteriously foreign aroma of these products of the distant East must have intoxicated the European mind.

For the very reason that they were so fashionable, Indian goods were dear, and grew steadily dearer. It is difficult, nowadays, to calculate the febrile rise in their prices, for, as is well known, historical accounts of such matters are vague and fabulous. Perhaps the best idea of the crazy cost of spices can be formed by recalling that in the eleventh century of our era pepper, which today stands unguarded on every restaurant table and is scattered almost as freely as sand, was counted out corn by corn, and was certainly worth its weight in silver. A "pepper-corn rent" is now a nominal rent, but this was not always so. Many States and towns kept their accounts in pepper as if it had been silver or gold. With pepper you could buy land, pay dowries, purchase the freedom of the city. Many princes assessed their taxes in weights of pepper. When, in the Middle Ages, you wished to describe a man as a bloated Croesus, you spoke of him as a "pepper-sack."

Nor was pepper the only product of this sort. Ginger and cinnamon and camphor were weighed upon apothecaries scales, the windows being carefully closed during the operation lest a draught should blow away the minutest fragment of the costly dust. But however absurd this over-valuation of spices may seem to a modern mind, it becomes comprehensible enough when we recall the difficulties and the risks of transport. In those days the East lay at an immeasurable distance from the West. The trade routes by land were perpetually threatened by robbers, and pirates abounded at sea. Great were the difficulties of travel, immense the risks to which caravans and ships were exposed.

What an Odyssey every pepper-corn, every dried blossom, had to traverse from the green plant in the Malay Archipelago to reach its last strand on the counter of a European shopkeeper. In the place of origin, not one of these spices was a rarity. On the other side of the earth, the cinnamon-laurel grew in Ceylon, the clove in Amboina, the nutmeg in Banda, the pepper plant in Malabar—as lavishly there as do thistles in our own land. In Malaysia, a hundredweight of one of these products was worth no more than a teaspoonful here in the West. But trade goods passed from hand to hand; the owner of each pair of hands demanded his recompense; and the goods we are now considering had to pass through many hands before they reached those of the last purchaser, the consumer, across deserts and seas. The first hand in the series was, as a rule, the most poorly recompensed—that of the Malayan slave who plucked the fresh blossoms, carrying them to market upon his brown-skinned back and receiving little more than his own sweat for his reward. It was his master who reaped the profit, the master from whom a Mohammedan merchant bought the load, paddling it in his lightly built prahu beneath the tropical sun from the Spice Islands to Malacca, not far from the modern Singapore. Here sat the first of the blood-sucking spiders, the lord of the harbour, the Sultan, demanding tribute from every dealer who wanted to tranship his goods.