Forgot my username / password

< Back to Results

Pepper Rides the Monsoon

By Annamma Spudich

Black pepper, the most commonly used spice in the world today, was not so readily available in the distant past. For several hundred years, it was actually the most sought-after commodity in world trade.

Like other rare spices, pepper is the natural product of a limited area in Asia—the southwest corner of India known as the Malabar Coast (present-day state of Kerala), where it was called “Malabar pepper.” The fruit of a perennial vine indigenous to the mountains of Kerala, pepper is harvested as unripe berries for green peppercorns, or as ripe red berries that are then dried to produce black pepper. Black pepper has two main chemical components, volatile oils and the pungent alkaloids called piperine and piperazine. These components account both for pepper’s flavor and for the characteristics that allow it to act as a medicine and as a food preservative.

Archaeological evidence shows that pepper was being used at least as early as 2000 b.c. The ancient Chinese valued it as a treatment for malaria, cholera, and dysentery. Excavations in India’s Indus Valley offer evidence of the use of pepper and other herbs and spices by 1000 b.c.

Naturally, as pepper consumption increased, so, too, did the cost of the spice. During the first century a.d., Greek and Roman merchants came to India to buy pepper. Caches of gold and silver Roman coins discovered at excavation sites in south India and references in writings, such as those of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23–79), bear witness to the vast sums of money Europeans spent for pepper. According to Pliny, pepper sold in Rome for 100 times its original cost.

Transporting pepper from the southwest corner of India to Europe was an important part of the east-west spice trade. Again, archaeological and literary evidence are both important to understanding the routes. They show that the spice traveled across the seas on sailing ships and overland by horse and camel caravans. A major change in the east-west trade routes came in the first century a.d. Ancient sources credit a Greek mariner named Hippalus (probably during the first century a.d.) as the first westerner to learn how ships could use the southwest and northeast monsoon winds to their advantage.

Easterners had been taking advantage of these winds for thousands of years to navigate the Indian...