Spices That Changed History

Spice Trade: For thousands of years pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and other spices were among the most valuable goods on Earth, and the race to control them launched the Age of Exploration, built empires, created the first global corporations and triggered wars and massacres.

Ramesses II: When the pharaoh was mummified in 1213 BC, embalmers placed black peppercorns in his nostrils, proof that Indian pepper had reached Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

Hatshepsut: Around 1470 BC the Egyptian queen sent a celebrated expedition to the Land of Punt for incense, myrrh and exotic goods, recorded in carvings at her temple.

Herodotus: The Greek historian passed on the tale that cinnamon was gathered from nests of giant birds, a story likely spread by Arab middlemen to keep the true source in South Asia a secret.

Muziris: This lost port on India's southwest coast was so central to Roman pepper trade that a surviving papyrus records a single shipload worth enough to buy a large estate in Egypt.

Pliny the Elder: He complained that India, China and Arabia drained 100 million sesterces a year from the Roman Empire for luxuries including pepper.

Apicius: This ancient Roman cookbook calls for pepper in the large majority of its recipes, even sweets, showing how Rome's elite used spice to flaunt wealth.

Alaric I: When the Visigoth king besieged Rome in 408 AD, his ransom demands included 3,000 pounds of pepper alongside gold and silver.

Peppercorn Rent: In medieval England pepper was valuable enough to pay rent and dowries, and the legal term for a symbolic rent survives in property law today.

Venice: For centuries Venetian merchants bought spices in Alexandria and resold them across Europe at huge markups, and their near monopoly pushed rivals like Portugal to find a sea route around Africa.

Saffron War: In 1374 nobles hijacked about 800 pounds of saffron headed to Basel, sparking a 14 week war over a spice worth more than its weight in gold.

Christopher Columbus: Searching for a western route to the spices of Asia, he instead found chili peppers and mislabeled them 'pimientos' after black pepper, a confusion baked into the word pepper ever since.

Vasco da Gama: When he reached Calicut in 1498, he opened a sea route to India, and the pepper and spices from the voyage reportedly paid for the expedition many times over.

Portuguese Goa: Within decades of the Portuguese bringing chili peppers from the Americas to India, the plant had spread so thoroughly that India is now the world's largest chili producer.

Ferdinand Magellan: Of about 270 men who set out on his 1519 voyage, only 18 returned on one ship, but its cargo of cloves was valuable enough to cover the cost of the entire expedition.

Ceylon: Portugal, the Dutch and Britain fought for control of this island for three centuries largely because it grew the world's finest cinnamon.

Dutch East India Company: Founded in 1602 as the world's first publicly traded company, it controlled the spice trade so tightly that it burned surplus nutmeg and cloves to keep prices high.

Banda Islands: In 1621 the Dutch under Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered these tiny islands, then the world's only source of nutmeg, killing or driving out most of the population of roughly 15,000.

Run Island: Under the 1667 Treaty of Breda, the English let the Dutch keep this speck of nutmeg producing land, while the English kept a little island called Manhattan.

Pierre Poivre: The French administrator, whose surname means pepper, smuggled clove and nutmeg seedlings to Mauritius in the 1700s and helped break the Dutch spice monopoly.

Zanzibar: In the 1800s Sultan Said moved his capital to this island and built a clove plantation empire that made it the world's leading clove producer.

Salem: In the early 1800s this Massachusetts port grew rich importing pepper from Sumatra, turning local captains into some of America's first millionaires.

Edmond Albius: In 1841 this 12 year old enslaved boy on the island of Réunion invented a quick hand pollination method for vanilla that is still used to grow nearly all of the world's vanilla.

Grenada: Nicknamed the Island of Spice, it features a nutmeg on its national flag.

Star Anise: During the 2005 bird flu scare, this spice was the main source of shikimic acid, the starting compound for the antiviral Tamiflu, triggering a worldwide shortage.