Indonesian Commodities in a Fourteenth-Century Spanish Falconry Manual
Pedro López de Ayala’s Libro de la caza de las aves (1386)
Pedro (or Pero) López de Ayala (1332–1407) was a Castilian poet, soldier, and knight of the Royal Band of Castile. In around 1386 he wrote a book on falconry in Castilian entitled Libro de la caza de las aves ‘Book on Hunting with Birds’. As with other medieval falconry manuals (Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus, for instance), Libro de la caza de las aves often seems to be more a work of ornithology than of hunting per se, and a number of bird-related topics are treated in some detail, including cures for falcon sicknesses. Given the widespread use of (what would now be considered) spices and perfumes in medieval European medicine, it shouldn’t be surprising that the book recommends the application of several Indo-Malaysian commodities in the treatment of various avian afflictions, among them cloves and nutmeg from Maluku and Banda.
I have put a tentative diplomatic transcription and translation of one of the prescriptions here. The text — a remedy for problems with a falcon’s digestive tract — is taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript now in Rome (Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Ott. lat. 3324, ff.59v-61r — images 66 and 67 in the digitised version [Figure 1]). In some manuscripts this recipe is to be found in chapter 32; here it is chapter 33. There are otherwise few differences between this text and those of other manuscripts of this work (see also Figure 2 below). Don Pedro’s recipe is a pretty cosmopolitan mix: there’s some mastic from Chios and frankincense from South Arabia (or northeastern Africa) alongside the eastern Indonesian ingredients, and you will note that the prescription also calls for coconut — not the hard shell but presumably the dried flesh (copra).
Bear in mind as you read this that I’m not an expert on medieval Spanish and that there are some fairly obscure sentences in the text (at least for me) — do let me know if you have any comments at all on the reading and the translation. It is nonetheless an interesting little text and I want to show it to you regardless.
With regard to the abbreviations: I’m using a tilde to represent missing nasals (e.g. the <corazõ> for corazon in line 23) because Medium formatting doesn’t seem to like anything else. The <t’> in <t’pas> represents <tri> — so, tripas ‘guts, tripe’, and <q̃> is the word que ‘that, which’.
(f.60v)
[…] toma la nueç dindia e la nueç mo- (15th line from the top)
scada et la mirra los clauos de girofre canella
flor de canella e maçís e almastica ensienço e
çucre blanco e pisa e muele cada hano por ssí.
destas cosas sob͠r dichas e desque fuere biẽ mo-
lido e mesclado todo en vno e el açucar blanco (20)
ssea lo postremero e se an de todas estas cosas
tanto d͠l vno como d͠l otro por peso. Et toma de
estos poluos e da le de comer en͠l corazõ de vna
galljna e ssea dada tanta quãtia al falcõ como
dos granos de garuanços e cada dia Ruçiale el (25)
Rostro e la cabeça cõ buẽ vino blanco Et far-
talo de ssol e en quãto assi fuer doliente nõ le
ꝓues el agua. Saluo desque vier͠s que es biẽ
esforçado e guardate q̃ en todo este tiempo nõ
le fugas purga nj͠guna q̃ sea saluo gou͠nar- (30)
(f.61r)
le por la gujsa q̃ suso dicha he e acabo de diez e
ocho dias dale vna aljana de cabra caliente /o
de carne .d͠la pospierna de vna liebre q̃ ssea
caliente .et esto fa ꝑa Remondar las t’pas e
el bucho d͠la orrura d͠la Sangre d͠los palomj͠os (5)
que comjo e assi guaresçra /.
Translation
‘[…] Take coconut [1], nutmeg, myrrh, cloves, cinnamon, cinnamon flower, mace, mastic, frankincense, and white sugar. Pound and grind each of these on its own. When the aforesaid things are well ground and mixed all in one, the sugar being the last, and of each as much as of the others by weight, take the [resulting] powder and put it inside a chicken’s heart for [the falcon] to eat. Give the falcon as much as two chickpeas’ worth and each day sprinkle his face and head with fine white wine. Give him plenty of sun and, [even?] if he becomes upset, don’t give him a drop of water until you see that he is already on the mend. [2] Beware of testing him during this time and keep to the aforesaid method. After eighteen days give him a hot tender piece of cooked goat [3] or meat from the back of a hare. This is to clean the mess of blood from the squabs he has eaten from his tripe and belly. And in this way he will be cured.’
NOTES
[1] The word for ‘coconut’ here is nuez d(e) India ‘Indian nut’. This formula is found in most of the languages of medieval Europe (as in Latin nux indica), and seems to be a calque ultimately based on the Persian gawz-i hindī (گوز هندی) ‘(wal)nut of India’ — compare Arabic jawz al-hind (جَوْز الْهِنْد) and Turkish Hindistan cevizi.
[2] This part is a little obscure to me — I’m not certain of the interpretation. But it’s something along these lines. If you know better, do let me know!
[3] The word for this, aljana or alina, is apparently from Arabic (اللينة) — ‘the softness’ of a goat.
The people of medieval Afro-Eurasia were linked in extraordinary and impossible-to-predict ways: A clove harvested under the equatorial sun of North Maluku and transported nearly halfway around the world in a succession of different ships could apparently end up being ground up and shat out by a Spanish knight’s sick bird. This also tells us, of course, that people in medieval Europe wanted Indonesian spices for more than simply flavouring rotten meat (a common myth), and that these things were instead valued because of a genuine belief in their medicinal properties.
I’m keen to stress here, however, another part of the theory behind examining these brief references to spices in medieval texts, and it is this: Eastern Indonesia and New Guinea are poorly represented in surviving manuscripts. There is little evidence of a literary tradition in Nusa Tenggara Timur and Maluku much before 1500 CE; certainly no texts have survived from these places from before 1521, when a letter was sent from the Sultan of Ternate to the King of Portugal (although some of the material in the Hikayat Tanah Hitu may possibly be a few decades older than that). Archaeological evidence, comparative ethnography, and the brief descriptions of these islands in medieval accounts (like those of Wāng Dàyuān (汪大淵) and Niccolò de’ Conti) are all we have to go on in terms of reconstructing the ways of life of eastern Indonesian people at this time.
The commodities they harvested, however, had a real impact on the world, and mentions of cloves and nutmeg in medieval manuscripts constitute indirect but significant references to the people of these islands themselves, and to their labour. In the absence of texts preserving their individual voices, these references help to put the people of Banda and Maluku back into history.
I wrote this piece on the 7th of November, 2019, but it is based on research I did earlier in 2019 while recuperating after surgery. My notes suggest that the following people were particularly helpful with the Spanish stuff I was working on at the time: Alicia Miguélez, Óscar Perea Rodríguez, and Raúl Villagrasa-Elías.
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