Why Was Pepper Worth Its Weight in Gold? The Spice Trade That Moved Empires
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When the Visigoths besieged Rome in 408 AD, the ransom they demanded included 3,000 pounds of pepper, and the Romans paid. A millennium later a pound of it in London cost a labourer a week's wages, rents in the Middle Ages were fixed in peppercorns, and the phrase a peppercorn rent, meaning a nominal one, records how far the price has fallen since. The berry of a vine from the hills of southern India was, for most of recorded history, the most valuable commodity that could be carried in a sack, and the effort to reach it directly by sea redrew the map of the world.
The vine
Black pepper is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a climbing vine native to the Malabar coast of Kerala that grows on trees and produces hanging spikes of small green berries. Picked unripe and dried in the sun they shrivel and blacken into peppercorns; left to ripen, soaked and stripped of their skins, they become white pepper; picked green and preserved, green pepper. The heat comes from piperine, a compound that triggers the same nerve receptors as chilli's capsaicin, more mildly, and the aroma from volatile oils in the skin, which is why freshly ground pepper tastes of more than the pre-ground kind. Chilli, from the Americas, did not exist in the Old World until 1493, and until then pepper was the heat in every cuisine from Rome to China.
Why it cost so much
The price was distance and middlemen. Pepper grew in one region of India and nowhere else that Europeans could reach, and between Malabar and a table in Bruges it passed through a chain of hands each taking a margin:
- •Indian growers and the merchants of Calicut and Cochin
- •Arab and Gujarati shippers across the Arabian Sea to Aden or the Persian Gulf
- •Caravans up the Red Sea or across Persia to Alexandria, Damascus or Constantinople, paying tolls to every ruler on the way
- •Venetian and Genoese galleys, which held a near-monopoly on the last leg into Europe and grew rich on it
- •Wholesalers, grocers, the pepperers' guild of London, from which the Grocers' Company descends, each adding their share
What it was for
The old story that medieval cooks used pepper to disguise rotten meat is wrong; anyone who could afford pepper could afford fresh meat. Pepper was used as it is now, for flavour, and it was used because it was expensive, as a display of wealth at the table and a gift between rulers, and because medieval medicine held that it warmed the body and balanced the humours. It was also money. Pepper was stable, portable, divisible and universally wanted, so it served as currency and as a store of value, paid as tax, dowry and bribe; the Romans kept it in the treasury, and the customs officers of medieval England were paid partly in it. Only the very rich ate it daily, but the whole of Europe knew what it was worth.
Around Africa
The Portuguese spent the fifteenth century working down the coast of Africa for one main reason, to reach the source of pepper and cut out every middleman at once, and when Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut in 1498 and was asked what he had come for, his men answered, Christians and spices. Columbus had sailed west six years earlier looking for the same thing by the other route, and mistook the chilli he found for it, which is why chilli is called pepper in English to this day. Portugal's ships loaded pepper at Cochin and sold it in Lisbon at a fraction of the Venetian price, Venice's trade collapsed, and the Dutch and English East India Companies were founded in 1600 and 1602 to fight the Portuguese for the same cargo. The first fortune of the Dutch Republic was pepper, the first English trading post in Asia was a pepper station at Bantam in Java, and the first fortunes of Salem, Massachusetts, were made in the Sumatran pepper trade after 1790.
The fall
The price fell as the supply rose. Pepper vines were planted across Southeast Asia, Indonesia became the largest source, and by the eighteenth century the spice that had ransomed Rome was in every kitchen in Europe; the Dutch, who had once burned surplus nutmeg to keep prices up, could not corner a crop grown on ten thousand hillsides. Today Vietnam grows about a third of the world's supply, some 700,000 tonnes are traded a year, and a kilogram costs a few pounds. The trade's marks remain: on the map, in the ports of Cochin, Malacca, Batavia and Goa; in the wealth of Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam; in the companies that became the British and Dutch empires in Asia; and in the pepper mill on every restaurant table, grinding what a fifth-century Goth thought worth an army.
The takeaway
Pepper was worth its weight in gold because it grew only on India's Malabar coast, was wanted everywhere for flavour, medicine, display and as currency, and reached Europe through a chain of Indian, Arab and Venetian middlemen each taking a margin. The Portuguese sailed around Africa to reach its source directly in 1498, Columbus sailed west for the same reason and found chilli instead, the Dutch and English companies were founded to fight for it, and once it was planted across Asia the price collapsed to a peppercorn.