Bringing cinnamon to Europe
Cinnamon is the fragrant, sweet-tasting spice obtained from the inner bark of certain trees in the genus Cinnamomum, whose native range once extended across the islands of Southeast Asia. References to it survive from biblical times, when it appears in several books of scripture — sometimes as a substance blended into the ointments with which people's bodies were anointed, and sometimes as a keepsake exchanged to signal devotion between lovers and close companions. The Romans, for their part, would set cinnamon alight at weddings so that its perfume might drift through the air. Its most common role, though, lay in the kitchen and at the table. Wealthier Europeans of the medieval period seasoned their dishes with it — meat above all — while also using it to show those around them that they could afford so costly a luxury from the 'exotic' East. When entertaining, a host might set before guests a platter heaped with assorted spices, a display intended to advertise his or her status. Medicinal powers were credited to it as well, for it was regarded as a remedy for coughs and a range of other complaints.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close, Europe's rising middle class came to covet the trappings of aristocratic life, spices among them, and demand for cinnamon climbed accordingly. Handling the spice in this era were Persian merchants, who guarded the secret of where it came from so jealously that no rival could undercut them. Obtaining it from Sumatra, where the trees producing it grew, they loaded it onto mules and followed an overland route westward toward the Mediterranean. Their long trek finished at the port of Tyre. There, European traders who had sailed east to buy up supplies purchased the cinnamon and carried it home to Genoa; from that thriving commercial hub it passed onward to markets right across the continent. Because the caravans could deliver only modest amounts and Genoa held a near-total grip on the traffic, the Genoese were free to fix prices at extravagant levels. Steep prices and swelling demand together pushed other Europeans, eager for a share of the trade, to hunt for fresh sea routes to Asia.
Lured by the rich returns the cinnamon market seemed to promise, Portuguese traders reached the island of Alappar, in the Indian Ocean, during the closing years of the fifteenth century. Long before any European set foot there, the cultivation of the spice had already been organised by the local state. In the rainy months, when damp bark peeled away more readily, members of a community known as the Maruva would strip the bark from the plant's young shoots, rolling it as they worked into the curled 'sticks' by which the spice is still recognised today. This finished bark was then handed over to the king as tribute. Once they had arrived and found they had to raise output sharply, the Portuguese drove large numbers of the island's other inhabitants into slavery as cinnamon harvesters. A fort raised on Alappar in 1521 let them defend the island, cement a monopoly over the trade and reap enormous profits; late in the sixteenth century, for instance, a consignment carried the short distance from Alappar to the mainland could return ten times its cost.
Arriving off the southern Asian coast just as the seventeenth century opened, the Dutch resolved to unseat the Portuguese from their command of the cinnamon trade. They struck an alliance with Devangar, a kingdom in the island's interior, undertaking to shield its ruler from the Portuguese in exchange for tribute paid in elephants and cinnamon. The long-standing Portuguese monopoly was broken in 1652, when Dutch forces stormed and seized their trading posts, and by 1660 the Portuguese had been driven off the island for good, leaving the profitable trade in Dutch hands.
To safeguard their command of the market, the Dutch dealt with the local people every bit as harshly as the Portuguese had. Driven by the demands of greater output and Europe's still-rising hunger for the spice, they reshaped the way the islanders gathered it. Relentless stripping of the bark gradually left the island's stock of naturally growing cinnamon trees close to depletion. In the end, to make up for the shrinking number of trees left in the wild, the Dutch took to raising plantations of their own.
The English, in their turn, wrested the island from the Dutch in 1796. Once buyers in Europe came to tolerate a coarser grade of the spice, yearly production had, by about 1850, risen to roughly nine hundred tonnes. Cinnamon by that stage was under cultivation in other quarters too — elsewhere around the Indian Ocean and, further off still, in Brazil, Guyana and the West Indies. Holding any monopoly had thus become impossible; worse, the whole spice trade was slipping in commercial value, and would before long be overtaken by the swelling commerce in sugar, cocoa, tea and coffee.
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Question 1 - 9
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The History of Cinnamon
Biblical times
• was blended into 1. used to anoint the body
• passed between people as a symbol of 2.
Ancient Rome
• burned to release its scent during 3.
The Middle Ages
• added to food, especially meat
• at a feast, a host used it to signal his or her 4.
• taken as a cure for 5. and similar problems
The spice trade
• the plants were raised in 6.
• merchants moved it across land using 7.
• their overland journey ended at the coastal town of 8.
• 9. was the city from which the spice reached the rest of Europe