Batavia c. 1656
Venice c. 1500
![Spice Timeline
c. 1700 BCE — Estimated date of cloves found in an archeological
dig in Syria.
1224 BCE — Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II embalmed with peppercorns up
his nose.
c. 1000 BCE — Queen of Sheeba visits King Solomon bearing spices as a
house gift (?).
476 — Rome falls to the Barbarians.
550 — Byzantine merchants reported in Ceylon buying spice.
946 — Poisoned pepper sauce reported on the table of King Louis IV
of France.
1095 — First Crusade proclaimed by Pope Urban II to “liberate”
Jerusalem from Muslim rule.
1204 — sack of the Christian Orthodox city of Constantinople by
Venetian and Frankish troops in the course of the
Fourth Crusade.
1298 — Marco Polo claims that for every Italian spice galley in
Alexandria, a hundred dock at the Chinese port of Zaiton
(Quanzhou).
1348 — The Black Death sweeps Europe following the same routes
as the spice trade.
1488 — Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape
of Good Hope.
1492 — Genoese mariner Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus),
financed by the Castilian queen Isabel, reaches the Caribbean,
insists that he has arrived in the East Indies. He does find chilies
though noting “The pepper which the local Indians used as a spice
is more abundant and more valuable than either black or
melegueta pepper.”.
late 1490s — Chilies introduced into Europe by Spanish.

1498 — Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut, trades in his silverware
for spices—see map.
1500 — Portuguese fleet led by Cabral “discovers” Brazil. Returns
to Lisbon (1501) with a paltry 2000 quintals (roughly
120,000 kg) of spice.
1501 — Venetian spice trader Girolamo Priuli writes in his journal:
“[to Venice, the loss of the spice trade] would be like the loss
of milk and nourishment to an infant.” 
1503 — Returning from his second trip, Vasco da Gama
and his men arrive in Lisbon with some 26,000
quintals of pepper and 6-7,000 quintals of other
spices, chiefly cinnamon (about 1,800,000 kg in all).
1510 — Goa seized by the Portuguese.
early 1500s — Chilies introduced into India by Portuguese.
1511 — Portuguese Captain António de Abreu, leads the
first European expedition to reach the Banda
Islands, home to nutmeg and mace.
1568 — Spain invades the Netherlands, beginning of
“Eighty Years War.”
1580 — Portugal is absorbed into the Spanish Empire.
1597 — First Dutch expedition returns to Holland after
having reached Bantam in what is now Indonesia.
1600 — English East India Company chartered by Queen
Elizabeth I.
1602 — Dutch East India Company (VOC) chartered.
1609 — Island of Neira (in the Banda archipelago) is
seized by the Dutch East India Company and the
Dutch government“ to be kept by us forever,”
making it the Netherlands’ first official East
Indian colony.
1618 — Thirty Years War begins in Central Europe.
1619 — Founding of Batavia in Java as headquarters of
the Dutch East Indies.
1621 — The inhabitants of the nutmeg producing Banda islands are
massacred by the troops of the Dutch East India Company (VOC)
under the leadership of Jan Pieterszoon Coen.
c, 1670 — European pepper imports reach 7,000,000 kg, the
highest they would be until the 19th century.
Following the 1670s imports fall by almost half .
1625 — The Dutch destroy some sixty-five thousand clove
trees in Ceram’s Hoamoal Peninsula (today’s Indonesia)
to maintain their monopoly.
1640 — Portugal regains independence from Spain.
1648 — End Thirty Years War.
1656 — Ceylon (Sri Lanka) is conquered by Dutch.
c. 1750 — Pierre Poivre steals nutmeg and clove seedlings from
Dutch Indonesia and plants them on the French Indian Ocean
colonies of Mauritius and Réunion.
1795 — Jonathan Carnes sails from Salem, Massachusetts for the East
Indies, bringing Americans into the spice trade. Connecticut
comes to be known as the “nutmeg” state, though it is unclear
whether this is due to her sailors taking part in the spice trade
or to the reputation of it’s woodworkers in fashioning counterfeit
nutmegs out of wood
1799 — Dutch East India Company disbanded.
1803-15 — Napoleonic wars.
1843 — The Caribbean British colony of Granada starts
producing nutmeg—today it is the world’s premier
producer.
1939-45 — World War II.
1950 — Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) gains
independence.
1961 — Portugal’s last Indian colony, Goa, is annexed by
India.](Spice%20Timeline_files/shapeimage_4.png)
