Portugal and the European spice trade, 1480-1580

Abstract

This thesis grows out of the Portuguese inruption on to the Eurasian spice trade at the very beginning of the sixteenth century with the inauguration of a dramatic oceanic route to the traditional areas of spice cultivation in the East, that is the Indian Malabar coast, Ceylon and the Moluccas in the Indonesian archipelago (Insulindia). If spices had never disappeared from European markets, it was the first direct and sustained commercial contact Europeans enjoyed with the Indian Ocean since the demise of the Red Sea fleets based at Myos-Hormos the Roman Emperor Augustus had used to exploit the luxury trades of the Indies from the latter half of the first century B.C. and that Pliny had once valued at 100 million sesterces a year; the few adventurous Venetian merchants that got so far during the pax mongolica of the fourteenth century brought back little in terms of marketable commodities but helped to keep alive the dim awareness of a bountiful land of milk and honey in the European collective memory.