Episode 2: It All Started With Pepper (II)
February 10, 2025
In our last episode, we discussed how Europeans relied on spices from Asia for dining and ceremonial purposes.
In addition to this, Europeans at the time had very poor personal hygiene habits. Many people went years without bathing. For example, Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, is said to have bathed only once in his 64 years of life.
You might wonder how we get to know how often the King bathed. That’s because he had a dutiful royal physician who meticulously recorded the king’s hygiene habits.
Actually, It wasn’t just Louis XIV. Many other famous figures had similar habits. For instance, Henry V’s mother never bathed in her entire life. Queen Isabelle of Spain, who funded Columbus’s voyage, proudly claimed that she bathed only twice in her whole life: once at birth and once on her wedding night.
Furthermore, many clergymen, such as St. Ibrahim and St. Simon, believed in keeping the body in its natural state and refused to bathe.
An expression was coined by later generations to describe European bathing habits at the time: “Europe went a thousand years with bathing”. While it’s clearly an exaggeration, it does reflect the fact that bathing was rare.
Some may ask, why didn’t medieval Europeans like to bathe?
There are two main reasons for this. The first is the Black Death pandemic, which began in the 13th century. Many doctors in Europe suspected bathhouses as the place where the disease spread. They further declared water to be the culprit, warning people not to bathe because it was dangerous and would increase their risk of infection.
The second reason was that many Catholic clergy advocated that remaining in one’s original, uncleaned, and dirty state would bring one closer to God. When not bathing was believed to be both healthier and holier, it’s no surprise that people stopped bathing as much as possible.
Other than not taking baths, Europeans, even the nobility, had the habit of relieving themselves wherever and whenever they needed. This practice lasted until the 19th century. If you’ve been to Paris, you’ve probably visited the Palace of Versailles, but you might not know about a significant flaw in its early design: the lack of public restrooms. At its peak, the Palace of Versailles housed tens of thousands of people, but according to a book written by William-Ritchey Newton, there were only 29 public latrines. As a result, people relieved themselves wherever it was convenient, especially the servants, who couldn’t possibly compete with the nobles for access to the toilets.
A consequence of having too few toilets was that anywhere could become a toilet. Moreover, the 20+ toilets were often not cleaned in time or properly. As a result, the palace often reeked of a strong odor, and the royal family had to move to other residences, such as Fontainebleau or Chateau de Marly, to escape from it.
In short, due to terrible personal hygiene habits and a lack of public sanitary facilities, it’s perfectly understandable the nobles needed strong spices to mask unpleasant odors.
As for how to use spice to keep air fresh and to improve the surrounding environment, feel free to research about it if interested.
The last reason for the high demand for spices was competition in opulence. Nowadays, the most direct way to show off wealth is to purchase and own extravagant goods. If someone claimed he had burned 100 Hermes scarves and smashed two Teslas just for fun, you’d assume he was filthy rich.
That was the mindset in Europe at the time as well. Nobles would use large quantities of spices when hosting guests, a way to display wealth and social prestige. This practice even gave rise to a famous idiom from the Medieval period: “he has no pepper”– referring to someone with no status or position in society
二
Now that we understand why spices were in such high demand in Medieval Europe, let’s explore why they were so rare. Medieval Europe, like the Ming dynasty, didn’t produce spices, nor did European farmers figure out how to cultivate them. As a result, these precious plants could only be imported from Southeast Asia.
Theoretically, importing shouldn’t have been an issue – there was the world-renowned Silk Road and two sea routes from Europe to Southeast Asia. However, towards the end of the 11th century, with the rise of the Ottoman-Turkish empire, all three routes fell into the hands of Muslims. The trade routes, for merchants in Europe, were effectively cut off .
Since then, the process of trading Asian commodities to Europe worked pretty much as follows: The Arabs imported pepper from India, shipped it to Egypt, and sold it to Italian wholesalers, who then transported it to Venice. There, it was sold to distributors from across Europe. A few more changes of hands had to happen before the pepper could finally reach the hands of consumers.
The intrinsic nature of merchants was to pursue profit. Along the way, every time pepper changed hands, merchants naturally and justifiably added their profit to the price. Layer by layer, it’s no wonder that, in the end, the price skyrocketed.
The hefty price tag, combined with the huge demand in Europe, drove the proliferation of another “profession”: robbery. In addition to having to trek long distances and make large investments, merchants also had to face the risk of getting robbed and losing all their investments -and, in the worst case, their lives. All factors considered, fewer and fewer people were willing to do business in this area.
With fewer and fewer merchants in this business, they became more and more demanding: not only did they refuse to accept loan payments, but they often demanded hard currency like gold. This made things even tougher for the Europeans as there was very limited gold production in Europe: only a small amount of gold could be mined in the Austrian mountains. It simply wasn’t enough to support the trade volume in Europe.
三
Just like that, in the early 15th century, Europeans, from commoners to royals, spent many sleepless nights tossing and turning over little pepper.
Could there be a solution to this problem?
Well, there surely was and it didn’t take a genius to figure out two possibilities:
One solution was to break the siege of the Ottoman Empire to go directly to Asia and import pepper. This, however, required strong military and economic power. If Europeans could have overpowered the Ottomans, they would have done it long ago and wouldn’t have been troubled by the pepper problem. The reality was that Europeans were weak in comparison to the Ottomans at the time, and it was a prayer answered that the Ottomans didn’t march against them. Hence, this solution, unfortunately, could only remain a dream.
The second solution sounded simple as well: Find another trade route to Asia. Plenty of people had probably thought of this idea only to back off from it. The reality was clear, the trade route had to be suitable for transporting large amounts of cargo and also had to be safe.
Being safe meant having to avoid the Ottomans. With very limited knowledge of world geography at the time, and with the Middle East and North Africa under Ottoman control, it seemed impossible to bypass them.
Well, if everyone thought this way, our story would end here because the U.S. would not have existed. It can be said that while 99.99% of Europeans thought it was impossible to bypass and find another route, 0.01% still believed it was feasible or, at least, worth a try.
Towards the second half of the 15th century, some Europeans finally started to take action. These doers, who didn’t limit themselves to empty talk but turned ideas into real action, were true heroes who changed the course of history. Among them, most failed but some managed to make it to the end and achieved great success. These individuals wrote one of the most important chapters of history for Europe, and we may even say for mankind: the Age of Discovery.
Who were the ones that thought outside the box and took action? Why did the Europeans wait until almost the 16th century to start looking for new routes? What did they do during that time?
This will be continued in our next episode.