Calicut and the decline of Venice

The Silk Route (red) and traditional coastal spice route (blue) courtesy: Wikipedia

When Vasco Da Gama reached the shores of Calicut, the first to greet him was a Muslim merchant from Tunis with the cold welcome: May the Devil take you! What brought you here? The trader understood the implications of the new arrival and the threat that it posed to his livelihood. For, Vasco Da Gama had discovered an alternative route to reach Calicut, circumventing the usual route used by the Arabs and the European traders.

The route from Calicut to Venice till 1498

Much of recorded history of this period is still lusocentric, describing this event either in terms of what a great discovery the new route was or how the Portuguese empire was established starting with this expedition. The landing of Da Gama's fleet in Calicut was indeed a cataclysmic event in international trade, as the Tunisian had understood. But, how cataclysmic?

Portuguese route circumventing Arabs and Venetians
courtesy: Wikipedia

The spice trade till then had been in the hands of two major groups of traders - the Arabs and the Genoese-Venetian syndicates. Till around the 13th Century, bundles of spices would commence their long journey from Malabar coast and take the Silk Route, which was protected by the might of Genghis Khan to Aden and thence into the hands of waiting Venetian merchants. Once the Silk Route was closed, spices started travelling in Arab dhows and Chinese junks to Jeddah (which replaced Aden), where the local rulers levied a tax on the cargo. It then crossed the Red Sea and reached the city of Tuuz (near Mount Sinai) where again it was subjected to tax. Finally, the cargo of spices travelled by camel back to Cairo; this was a hazardous trip due to the threat of banditry. From Cairo, the cargo was sent down the Nile River to Rosetta, where a tax was again levied. There it would again be loaded on camels for a day's trip to Alexandria where galleys from Genoa and Venice would be waiting for the precious cargo. By the time these spices reached the retail markets of Europe, the price would be more than 1000 per cent of what had been paid at Calicut.


It was this lucrative trade that the Portuguese had destroyed by discovering the Cape route to Calicut. Spices could now be transported to Europe untouched by Arab or Venetian hands. The distance was longer than the Cairo route, but cost of transhipment and taxes could be saved. No wonder, the Venetians received the news of Da Gama's adventure with a sense of shocked disbelief.


The loss of the spice trade would be like the loss of milk and nourishment to an infant,  wrote Girolamo Priuli, a prominent spice trader in his journal in July 1501. He continued: When this news reached Venice, the whole city felt it greatly and remained stupified, and the wisest held it as the worst news which could ever arrive.


Within the next couple of years, economic depression engulfed many of the trade centres of Europe, with firms collapsing and banks failing. The crisis was felt most in Venice which was the largest buyer of Asian spices. The Venetian Senate passed a resolution on 15th January 1506 on the alarming fall in trade as a consequence of the Portuguese arrival in Calicut: Since, as everybody knows, this commerce has now been reduced to the worst possible condition, it is essential to take some action and to provide our citizens with every facility for sailing the seas. 


They immediately formed a 5-member committee to advise the city government on how to handle the large number of business failures and bankruptcies. Venice also appealed to the Sultan of Cairo to reduce the rates of taxation so that their imports could compete with the Portuguese supplies. But, instead of reducing the tax on spices, the Sultan sent an armada apparently to assist the Zamorin to fight the Portuguese at sea. It was this mighty armada which was trapped and destroyed by the 6th Portuguese Armada led by Lopo Soares on 31st December 1504 off the coast of Panthalayani in Calicut. Some 2000 Arab and Egyptians perished in the battle, while 23 Portuguese sailors lost their lives. Significantly, the Egyptian force was carrying some Venetian guns and even two Venetian engineers who manufactured the first cannons for the Zamorin. 


Afonso D'Albuquerque had correctly assessed the situation after his conquest of Malacca in 1511: I hold it as very certain that if we take this trade of Malacca away out of their hands, Cairo and Mecca are entirely ruined, and to Venice will no spiceries . . .[be] . . . conveyed except that which her merchants go and buy in Portugal.


Will Durant has described the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to be as spectacular as the invention of the aeroplane. It transformed the direction of foreign trade (as can be seen in the accompanying maps) and destroyed the monopoly of the Italian states. Though Calicut and Venice - the largest seller and the largest buyer of spices - did not have any direct trade links, the loss of Arab supremacy over spice trade in Asia led to the fall of Venetian monopoly on the retail distribution of spices in Europe. Globalisation, anyone?

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Baudelaire and the Girl from Malabar

Charles Baudelaire
Courtesy Wikipedia

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French Romantic poet who is considered as a pioneer among the French Symbolists of the 19th Century. His most famous work,  Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) was written when he was a young restless soul, not at peace with himself. One of the poems of this work (which was proscribed by the French authorities on grounds of  immorality) is a beautiful poem called A une Malabaraise (To a Girl from Malabar):

Malabar Girl 
copyright: imagesof asia.com

 Your feet are slim as your hands, and your hips/Are the heavy envy of the most beautiful white woman...

 Baudelaire speculates on her chores back home in Malabar (in the warm blue climate where your Gods bore you) : light the pipe of your master, to drive far from the bed raiding mosquitoes and to buy pineapples and bananas at the bazaar.

The poet ends by dissuading the girl from her wish to go with him : O, why,happy child, do you want to see our France!/That populous country slashed by suffering... seeking amongst our dirty fogs/The slender ghosts of distant coco-palms!

Who was this Malabar Girl and where did Baudelaire meet her?

Born in Paris, Baudelaire grew up as a spoilt and rebellious child resentful of the loss of his father when he was very small and the mother's second marriage to a young and dapper colonel. The stepfather wanted to discipline the young boy and sent him off to Calcutta in 1841. A shipwreck saw the young Baudelaire landing on the shores of Mauritius, instead of Bengal. There he meets the Girl from Malabar in an account from which it is difficult to sift facts from fiction. 

Here is the story:

The young fugitive who landed on the shores of Mauritius was in bad shape. He was an alcoholic and into drugs too. He had not written anything for a while and inspiration seemed to have dried up. He had even contemplated suicide, while on the ship tp Calcutta. 

It was then that he met young Dorothee in a sugarcane plantation near Trois Mammelles in Curepipe area of Mauritius. (Under the shadow of the Mammelles...) Dorothee whose family 'came from Calicut or Cochin' was a slave girl working as a household servant. Her mother was brought by the Portuguese from Malabar and sold to the French as a slave. Baudelaire fell for the charm of the chocolate skinned Dorothee and settled down with her in the mountains.

 It was Dorothee who inspired Baudelaire to write again, and poems started flowing from the 20-something young rebel and the world took notice. Thus Les Fleurs du Mal owes its inspiration to the Girl from Malabar and Baudelaire acknowledges it in his poem. But, as for taking her back to France, he demurs, raising various objections from harshness of the climate and hostility of the people! So much for his dalliance with the maid servant!

What is intriguing is how the Portuguese were exporting slaves from the Malabar coast, even though slavery was legally abolished in Malabar in 1792. There is ample evidence of the Portuguese and the Dutch indulging in slave trade from Bengal, the Coromandel coast and Malabar even as late as the 19th century. Dorothee does not appear to have been an indentured labourer, as her mother was a slave in Mauritius and the Great Experiment of importing large numbers of indentured plantation workers from India started only around 1849, while Baudelaire met her in c.1841. 

Malabar springs up in the most improbable places!

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