This post started with something that happened to me ages ago (a hazard of not writing a blog post for almost a year). I was cooking and needed to refill my peppermill, but it had a ridiculous design and I managed to accidentally drop a heap of pepper into the sink, enough to fill the plughole.

I was scooping it up and throwing it straight in the bin¹ when it occurred to me that I was casually throwing out what might once have been a small fortune. ‘Aha’ I thought, ‘the perfect antecedent! Wait until I tell everyone about the time that I threw out enough pepper to buy a house in Northcote.’ So I thought I’d try to find out how much of a fortune it was. But unfortunately, sometimes history isn’t as impressive as you’d like. And while the price of pepper has varied wildly throughout history, as I quickly found out it has never been worth its weight in gold. But I definitely still learnt a few fun things along the way to figuring out the price of pepper.

The first thing I learnt was that the spice trade actually had very little to do with Europe. Europeans were only really an afterthought to what was essentially an Asian trade—the bulk of spices went East, not West. In fact, the Venetians, who would later come to dominate the European leg of the trade would make a 40% profit by moving spice about half the length of the Mediterranean. That’s not bad, considering the spices themselves had already been hauled all the way from India.

Even so, pepper has been known in Europe since at least Roman times, and they positively loved the stuff. There is only one surviving cookbook from the era,² and 80% of the recipes in it contain pepper.

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History complained about the Roman obsession with pepper, squandering gold on what he considered a needless frivolity. After all, he wondered, who was the first man to decide that he needed a reason other than hunger to eat? We often focus on the hedonistic heights of Rome, but we forget that its earlier virtues all related to self-control and severity.

Nevertheless, despite his disapproval, Pliny is kind enough to leave us the price of pepper at the time: four denarii per pound.³ Unfortunately, Ancient Rome was such a different place that trying to convert that to a modern price is pretty much meaningless. For example, during Pliny’s time, a Roman soldier earned 225 denarii per year, meaning a modern pound of pepper cost 1/40.8 of an annual Roman wage. As a very loose comparison, the current average wage for a modern Australian soldier is about $64,000 per annum, making a pound of pepper loosely equivalent to $1,568 in modern Australian dollars. I estimate I threw out about 35g of pepper, which would have been worth the Roman equivalent of about $120.

Unfortunately, prices weren’t very stable in ancient Rome, and roughly 200 years later inflation had firmly taken hold as successive Roman emperors debased the currency. Strangely enough, using the same amount of silver to make twice as many coins doesn’t result in twice as much money. However, to try and combat this staggering inflation the Roman emperor Diocletian attempted to enforce a law that fixed all prices. From all accounts, it didn’t go well. Nevertheless, for a brief time, the price of pepper was held at 800 denarii per Roman pound (that’s 20,000% interest, or an average of about 100% interest per year for 200 years). At that time, a Roman soldier earned about 1,350 denarii per annum, which represented quite a drop in purchasing power. Nevertheless, using a similar calculation to before, we get a price of $40,863 per modern pound.

However, after the Roman Empire falls, the idea of a professional soldier basically ceases to exist. So, if we want to compare with later periods, we have to change our frame of reference. Unfortunately, in doing so, the numbers shift dramatically. For instance, if we take the daily wage for a master carpenter—50 denarii—from Diocletian’s edict, a pound of pepper cost 22 days’ wages. Supposedly, the average carpenter in Australia earns about $30 an hour. Expanding that out gives us a modern equivalent price of $5,280 per modern pound. Now, I assume a Roman carpenter probably worked more than eight hours a day, and probably didn’t get super, but the divergence of the two figures isn’t exactly heartening. What we do learn from this though, is that while these prices were expensive, they weren’t prohibitively so. This makes sense; as if they were, pepper probably wouldn’t be in 80% of Apicius’s recipes.⁴

We don’t appear to have much information for some time after Diocletian, especially on prices. However, it is worth noting that when Alaric, King of the Visigoths, laid siege to Rome in the fifth century, his ransom for lifting the siege was “five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand scarlet fleeces and three thousand pounds of pepper“. So, it seems hunger wasn’t a good enough reason for the Visigoths to eat either.

Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, we seem to have little information on the price of spices for about the next five hundred years. However, from the late 12th century, new silver mines began to open in Europe, which had a profound effect on the economy—it began to monetise.

Rulers began collecting taxes in coin, rather than goods and services. This allowed for taxation on a scale that hadn’t been seen since antiquity. Therefore, rulers were suddenly liberated from the land—by purchasing with coin, goods and services could come to them. They could therefore settle, putting an end to the touring courts of old. It’s not a coincidence that the return to large-scale taxation occurred at the same time as the return of big cities to Europe. Paris forms an excellent example of the centralisation taking place. At the start of the 13th century, it had a population of 20,000, but by the end of the century it had 200,000 inhabitants. And remember, this was in spite of the waves of plague that swept the city.

Nobles now had real disposable incomes. And money tends to burn a hole in one’s pocket, so demand for luxuries leapt through the roof. In particular, nobles demanded better food, especially meat. For instance, the Forme of Curry—a middle-ages cookbook—features a lot of spices. Interestingly, there’s no real evidence to support the idea of using spices to cover the taste of bad meat. For a start, if you can’t tell if meat is spoiled, you’re in for a bad time. But meat actually appears to have been eaten relatively fresh. In fact, rather than going on the meat itself, spices were generally used in sauces, which were the last thing to be added to a dish.

This also somewhat undermines the idea of spices as a way of preserving food. Added last, it’s hardly going to help preserve it! Furthermore, only a few spices have an substantial anti-microbial properties, and even then, much easier and more effective methods of preservation already existed. Finally, the use of spices began to wane before the invention of refrigeration, which is presents its own little mystery. It’s as if all of Europe got together and just decided they wanted blander food.

Either way, it was basically the Italians who stepped up to supply European royalty with the spices they demanded, in particular, the Venetians. Disappointingly, for all the Venetian trade is famous for its spices, they really didn’t form the bulk of cargo, either by volume or value, with the majority of trade being much less exciting commodities like wheat. Nevertheless, while not as much spice was traded as we imagined, it was incredibly profitable. Enough so that it sent Vasco da Gama from Portugal all the way to Calicut, India, where upon arrival he famously declared ‘We came to look for Christians and spices.’ (p. 1213) He seems to have soon forgotten about the Christians. In fact, later on, between 1500 and 1628, 28% of all ships leaving Portugal for India would be lost at sea. For these astonishing losses to still be profitable speaks volumes to the margins in spices.

Nevertheless, during the 13th and 14th centuries, the Venetians dominated the spice trade; and of the spices themselves, pepper was by far and away the most important. At the start of the 15th century Venetians were importing ¾ of all of Europe’s culinary spices, of which 2/3 were pepper. And while spices may not have formed the bulk of the Venetian trade, the quantities were still impressive.

By the end of the 15th century, the Venetians were importing 500tn of pepper, while the Genoese and Catalans were bringing in about 200tn each. And it had penetration. Pepper at least, could be found nearly everywhere, albeit in small quantities. There is a record of one John Hopton of Suffolk, in the middle of the 15th century, sending his steward to buy some pepper as if it were no big deal.

How common pepper had become was also reflected in its price. By this time, it cost just over two day’s wages of a master carpenter in London, Oxford and Antwerp, and appears to be a little cheaper in Navarre. Using our previous calculation, this actually brings us to a modern equivalent price of about $480 per pound, which, while still expensive, is suddenly looking much more affordable. What I chucked out then would have been roughly equivalent to $37. That’s a sum of money I wouldn’t be happy throwing away, but also something that is bordering on affordable. And indeed, pepper and other spices turn up regularly for the feasts of even relatively working-class guilds, such as the brewer’s guild.

Nevertheless, this would mark the high point of spices in European cuisine for some time. Through the 17th century the popularity of spices would wane, to the point where satires would mock those who put too much spice in their food. This of course, would have been to the consternation of the Dutch, who had just managed to establish a near monopoly on the trade. Eventually, spices in the West would face a resurgence in popularity, but prices (with the exception of saffron) would stay low, to the point where I’d throw out a handful of pepper, rather than try and fish it out of my sink.

Academic Sources

Alston, R 2012, “Roman Military Pay from Caesar to Diocletian”, The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 80, pp. 113-123.

Freedman, P 2005, “Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value”, Speculum, vol. 80, no. 4, pp. 1209-1227.

Harl, K 1996, Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, JHU Press, Baltimore.

Munro, J 1988, The Consumption of Spices and Their Costs in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Europe: Luxuries or Necessities?, accessed: 22 September 2017.

Spufford, P 2002, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe, Thames & Hudson, London.

Primary Sources

Apicius, Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome, accessed: 22 September 2017.

Diocletian, New English translation of the Price Edict of Diocletianus, ed. Antony Kropff, accessed 22 September 2017.

Pegge, S The Natural History, Ch. 14(7), Ed. John Bostock, accessed: 22 September 2017.

Zosimus, New History:Book the Fifth, accessed: 22 September 2017.