SPICES, a popular name for such plant components, having essential oils" of aromatic odor and pungent flavor, as are used direct and blended in for seasoning food; in fresh food nearly always ground, in preserves and pickles always whole. Their companions spread on, as mustard or used only in extracts, as vanilla, are not so reckoned, but as condiments, flavor ings, etc. They represent most parts of the plant beyond the wood; cinnamon and cassia are the bark; ginger the root; cloves the bud; allspice (pimento) and pepper, caraway and coriander, the fruit; nutmeg the kernel, mace its wrapper; cumin and dill the seed. All are tropic save tfie allied group of caraway, coriander and dill, now naturalized in temperate climes — and significantly, not often thought of as °spice"; and all foreign but these and some ginger.
The Spice Trade in The su preme importance of this in revolutionizing and generating modern civilization has never been set forth, because it is not recognized as the leading factor in the old Eastern commerce. Yet not only did it lead directly to the discovery of America and the sea route to the far East, but for centuries it was a chief. agent in pro voking world wars, determining the rise and fall of states, creating' the present status of Europe and the Eastern Question, and even twice remade the world's religious history, first by making Mohammedanism a world power and long after by conditioning the time and early fortunes of the Reformation. The rela tion of spices to earlier European food which caused this importance was something hardly conceivable at present. All could now be dis pensed with at little loss beyond some pleasure; while till recent times they, were an exigent need for comfort, health, and with the delicate even life. The winter food of most mediaeval English, for instance, was little but meal and salt junk— bacon from lean pigs, beef from scrawny cattle, insufficiently kept by dear and unpurified salt, and so half rotten by spring; washed down by ale without hops. Besides the results in scurvy and endless skin diseases the source of the old tradition of sulphur and molasses with which women were wont to cleanse children's blood in spring— the meals were not only monotonous and pleasureless but hard for the sick and queasy to force down and bad for them if they did so. Hence in the Middle Ages, perhaps the first call beyond bare nominal aliment was something to make unpalatable food palatable, to tempt invalid appetites and save drooping lives as well as to make eating a satisfaction, and spice became the foremost dream of luxury thkt was a neces sity. The trade to the East, for it was not the
only element of that trade, but it was the most vital, the only one that was literally in some measure of life and death, even though the sugar, currants, raisins, almonds, etc., of South Europe and the Levant were also alleviations.
Perfumes, dyewoods, jewels, were agreeable accessories; even drugs could be more or less matched in service: but absence of spices took much of the savor and some of the fibre out of life.
A 'few of the larger manifestations of the trade will show that the above review is not a fantasy. It is true that the agency of Eastern commerce in causing the Crusades is much over stated, from the modern economic and rational istic dislike of allowing the old weight to re ligious feeling. But long before their time, it had assured their coming by creating their foe and need. From the earliest epochs, Arabia had gone through cycles of development cor responding to the routes of trade from the East to Europe. In times of West-Asian peace or the mastery of strong states, this normally went overland, leaving Arabia unfertilized by it, barbarous and disintegrated; when interrupted by war or anarchy, it went around Arabia by the Red Sea and across Suez, creating or re developing Arabian coast,cities, spreading new needs and consequent political order among the tribes and raising their intellectual status. The Roman-Persian wars of the 6th century thus deflected Eastern trade and made Moham med's career possd)lc. Later, the trade en riched the Italian cities as the distributors of its goods to central and northern Europe, and the rivalry of Venice and Genoa for Levantine and Black Sca monopoly of the commerce led, first to the Venetian use of the Fourth Crusade to destroy the Byzantine Empire, letting in the Turks on Europe, and then to feuds which neutralized Europe's naval strength against them. What the search for a sea route to In dia did. for the world is familiar. Here, again, the long PortugueSe strulfgle down the West African coast was primanly not for trade, but to talc the Moorish dominion in the rear, unite with Preston k.lin and crush the Moors in the interest of Christianity ; but the riches of the spice- trade were to be the means to-finance this. As to Spain's share in the search, these riches were the !direct object. In both cases gold bullion wa • the special aim; but craving for spiels was its most efficient in struinen#.