Mastic & Nutmeg
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible. This is probably the strangest of my Patreon pieces, but I’d been meaning to write something on this topic for years. So.
Content warning: brief reference to antisemitism.
As you’re probably tired of hearing by now, all the nutmeg and mace in medieval Afro-Eurasia came from trees that grew in the Banda Islands, a small archipelago of even smaller islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. There aren’t many surviving accounts of the Banda Islands from before 1512, when the first Portuguese expedition arrived in the region — just one description in Chinese and another, significantly more distorted and based on secondhand information, in Latin — and the Bandanese do not appear to have had a written tradition before that time. Banda is mentioned briefly in a range of other texts in other languages, including Old Javanese, Old Sundanese, Arabic, and Venetian, but we don’t get a real sense of the diminutive archipelago’s place in the world from any single text, least of all from a Bandanese perspective. Given the demonstrable impact nutmeg and mace had on medieval Afro-Eurasian life, this is a pity.
As we saw recently in my piece on cinnamon, quite a few luxury goods in the medieval world came from indeterminate locales. If we see a reference to cinnamon in a medieval text, we cannot say with any clarity where that cinnamon may have come from, and we can only guess based on context or use of a specific term in contrast to others (‘canelle’, ‘cassia’) which sort of cinnamon it may have been. Nutmeg isn’t like this: every reference to nutmeg or mace in a medieval text is an indirect reference to the Banda Islands, just as every reference to cloves is a trace of the lives and labour of people in what is now North Maluku, also in eastern Indonesia. This is why it is worthwhile to track down appearances of nutmeg and cloves in medieval texts; mentions of these spices are really veiled references to the activities of people living in places otherwise undocumented in the historical record until modern times.
Were any other medieval commodities like this, with such restricted origins that any reference to the commodity is tantament to a reference to its known place of origin and to the people who lived there? Yes; nutmeg and cloves aren’t unique in this regard. In this post, I’d like to look at another fascinating commodity, a tree product called mastic, that was spread about as widely around the medieval world as nutmeg. It’s interesting to see compare and contrast mastic’s place in the medieval world with that of nutmeg because mastic came from a much better-documented locale. The fact that mastic came solely from a single specific island was noted in the Middle Ages. The island was valued, even eulogised, both by the people who lived there and by outsiders who visited or ruled over it, because of its extraordinary and unique produce.
Here I’m going to give a brief overview of mastic — its uses, its names, its hemispheric reach in the Middle Ages — before discussing the fascinating place it came from. I’m going to focus here on an account of that place written by a fifteenth-century Italian humanist because the ideas it expresses about commodities and their roles in medieval Afro-Eurasia are just as applicable to the Banda Islands as to the home of mastic, and because those ideas are, if you ask me, still relevant to scholarship today.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and the ideas in it are still a little half-formed, but I hope you’ll bear with me and find something worthwhile in it. You may get a bit of jetlag as we hop around the world — China one moment, Iceland the next — but I expect you’re used to that by now. Let’s start with the substance.
Mastic
Mastic is an edible resin produced by a certain species of tree — a shrub, really — known to science as Pistacia lentiscus. Mastic has a softly sweet flavour redolent of mint, pine, and anise; I’d say it tastes a bit like good tobacco. It can be used as a spice, but it can be used to thicken and provide body to sauces and other foods as well. Blobs of the resin can also be chewed like chewing gum, and indeed the word ‘mastic’ comes from the Greek μαστίχη, ultimately from the verb μαστιχάω ‘I chew, I grind the teeth’ (cf. ‘masticate’).
This word was well travelled in the Middle Ages: μαστίχη was the source of the words for mastic in medieval Latin, French, English, Persian, and Arabic, and many others besides. A recognisably related form of the word can even be found in the 飲膳正要 (pinyin: Yǐnshàn zhèngyào ‘Dietary Principles’), a gastronomic treatise in Classical Chinese presented to the Emperor of China in 1330, during the Yuán (Mongol) dynasty. The text was written by one Hū Sīhuì (忽思慧), who was probably of either Turkic or Mongol descent, and it ‘exhibits a pronounced West Asian flavor’, according to the late Mongolist Thomas Allsen (2004:131). The 飲膳正要’s recipes and prescriptions mention a number of ingredients which appear to have been novel in a Chinese context at the time, among them saffron, sugar beets, pistachios, and something called 馬思答吉 (pinyin: mǎsīdájí) — Allsen erroneously transliterated the word as mu-ssu-ta-chi — which can only be mastic. The word probably came from the Persian word for ‘mastic’, مصطکی (mastaki), borrowed from Greek, both because the pronunciation maps neatly onto the Chinese transcription and because Persian influence in China was particularly strong during the Mongol/Yuán period, for perhaps obvious reasons.
Mastic was a popular substance across medieval Afro-Eurasia — certainly much more popular then than it is now. The thirteenth-century Syrian fraud-debunker al-Jawbarī claims that mastic (مصطکی, Arabic pronunciation: muṣṭakā) was one of many luxury items faked by con-artists in Egypt and Syria in his day, and specifically that the main purveyors of such faked goods were Jews, ‘the most hateful and malignant [sect] of all creation’. He says:
‘They produce fake versions and imitations of all the apothecary’s products, sell these to Muslims, and don’t give a damn. They make fake versions of, for example, myrobalan, pepper, saffron, musk, agar[wood], camphor, mastic, and everything else related to the apothecary’s trade’ (al-Jawbarī 2020:93 — translation by Humphrey Davies).
There are quite a few references to mastic in European texts as well, as you might expect. We’ve come across at least one such text on the Medieval Indonesia blog, in a fourteenth-century Spanish falconry manual by Pedro López de Ayala; one of the recipes for falcon medicines calls for mastic alongside a range of other expensive ingredients (Figure 1):
There are many more references to mastic in texts from across the medieval world — far too many to look at here. The stuff is even mentioned in the Ni’nāmah Naṣir al-Dīn Shāhī, a late fifteenth-century Persian cookbook from the Malwa Sultanate in Central India (London, British Library, IO Islamic 149). Suffice it to say, in any case, that mastic was a reasonably common and well-known luxury commodity across medieval Afro-Eurasia.
The Island of Chios
Time for a new iteration of my usual spiel: All of the mastic in the medieval world came from trees that grew on the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea (Figure 2).
The mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus, actually grows around the Mediterranean, but only one variety of this tree, P. lentiscus var. Chia, one unique to Chios, produces true mastic in large quantities. The mastic known to people across medieval Afro-Eurasia thus came from Chios and Chios alone.
(I’ve never been to Chios but I have seen it. I went to a wedding a few years ago in the charming Aegean town of Çeşme, on the peninsula that faces Chios in what is now Turkey (Figure 3). Mastic is still popular there. The Turkish name for the substance is damla sakız, literally ‘gum drop’, and if you’re ever in Turkey you should keep your eyes open for damla sakızlı Türk kahvesi. A flavour worth travelling for.)
In any case, this means that Chios is something of a Mediterranean analogue of the Banda Islands, although it probably isn’t a good idea to stretch that analogy too far. Chios is much better documented over a far greater period of time. The people who lived there had demonstrable links with people in much of the rest of western Afro-Eurasia. Chios was governed by several outside powers in the Middle Ages, including the Byzantine Empire, a Seljuk warlord, the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Venetian Republic, Genoa, and the Ottoman Empire; the Banda Islands were never ruled by non-Bandanese until the Dutch exterminated the Bandanese and took over completely in 1621. Chios (842 square kilometres, or 325 square miles) is also significantly larger than the Banda Islands in their totality (172 square kilometres, or 66 square miles).
Still, the fact that traces of Chios and Banda and their peoples can be seen in medieval texts from across an entire hemisphere makes them kindred spirits to some degree. It is a remarkable phenomenon that denizens of these small islands, one in temperate Greece and the others in equatorial Indo-Malaysia, produced flavours and medicines appreciated half the world over by people whose lives were entirely unlike their own. (The islands are united in a more gruesome way as well: both Chios and Banda were sites of notorious massacres in modern times. I don’t think this is unrelated to the fact that both were involved in the trade in valuable commodities.)
Cyriac of Ancona
The island of Chios was visited on a number of occasions by the fifteenth-century Italian traveller Cyriac of Ancona (aka Cyriacus, aka Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli), who extolled the island’s virtues in prose and poetry. Cyriac’s writings on Chios are interesting and worthy of attention here because they show a similar concern with Chios’s place in the world, and mastic’s role in it, that I feel about the Banda Islands and the nutmeg they produced.
Cyriac (1391–1455?) grew up in Ancona, a republic on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and he travelled widely through Greece, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire in the time of Mehmed II. (He even corresponded with Mehmed himself.) He is often considered the ‘Father of Classical Archaeology’ because of his copious writings — comprising letters to friends, diary entries, some poetry — on Greco-Roman history and epigraphy and because of the silverpoint and pen-and-ink illustrations he made of things seen on his travels, including notably a pre-conquest Hagia Sophia (for which see Smith 1987) and the Parthenon (Figure 4).
Now, Cyriac of Ancona was what I would advisedly call a ‘huge dork’. If he were alive today he’d be American but he’d use Commonwealth spelling. He would write (and say) ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’. He wasn’t classically educated but he seldom referred to anything using then-common names; Cyriac preferred to frame everything in Greco-Roman terms: England is ‘Britannia’, France ‘Gallia’, and so on. His handwriting was florid (you can see some examples in Figure 5), as was the way he expressed himself in words.
Cyriac wasn’t the first person to take an interest in Greco-Roman things, and some of his truly classically educated contemporaries, like Poggio Bracciolini, thought him a dilettant. Unlike many others, however, Cyriac actually travelled to the places he was interested in, not merely looking for manuscripts (like Poggio) but for inscriptions and artworks too, using his business interests in the east as a ploy to indulge his hobbies. As I mentioned above, he travelled to Chios a number of times for both business and leisure.
Cyriac in Chios
It is worth looking at Cyriac’s writings on Chios because they display what is in effect a commodity historian’s attitude towards the island and its produce. Cyriac’s description of mastic is to some extent how I feel about nutmeg and cloves and their places of origin. (I did not say that I was not a huge dork myself; I write my to-do lists in early secretary hand and own a silverpoint pencil.)
The text I’m interested here is the 29th letter in the I Tatti Renaissance Library edition of Cyriac’s later works, edited and translated by Cyriac scholar Edward Bodner (Cyriac of Ancona 2003:212–215). The letter is about Cyriac’s trip to Chios in the winter of 1445–6. It is not a long text — I’ve attached a PDF of the original Latin and complete English text of the letter and poem below — and most of it concerns the mastic trade. Here’s the essential excerpt:
‘[…] When, as a local resident pointed them out, I finally saw drops of glittering mastic in large numbers rather nearby on every side among the tearful but joyous trunks and had the pleasure of gathering some in my hand, I marveled at the singular gift of the place and its fated bough, the revered benefaction of all-begetting nature, and at the fact that Chios is the only island in the world that makes the whole world redolent with its liquid, and I thought I should acclaim and extol it with special praise as eminent among all the islands.
‘For I recalled that I had often see numerous boxes filled with this highly esteemed gum being loaded onto the great ships in your broad and tranquil port of Chios and I knew that the world was being filled with the scent of this island’s gift, this wholesome exhalation, since in the course of the years, through the agency of Genoese and foreign ships, these fragrances are carried, some through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus to Thrace and eastern Europe, others through the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the River Don, to comfort the Sarmatians, Scythians, and Hycanians beneath their cold sky; or elsewhere through Asia, to allure the Colchians, the Albanians, the Georgians, the Cappadocians, and Cilicians, and thence the Persians, Parthians and Arabs and Bactrians and Medes and Babylonians. Others are carried over the immense Ionian and Libyan Seas to Egypt and Syria, thence to be transported to the Ethiopians, Garamantians, and Indians. And we know that others are brought via Illyria to Italy, while still others have been transported across the entire Mediterranean Sea, to Ocean and the western lands, to revivify Cadiz, the Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, Britons, Irish and Scotch, and far-off Thule.’
Spices & Humanism
The emphasis in Cyriac’s letter on the people linked by mastic is characteristic of the humanist movement of which Cyriac was a part. This is essentially the same humanism that motivates the humanities today, including naturally my own scholarship. Cyriac’s words are a touch more OTT than words I would use, but you’ll find the same (dorkish) humanistic spirit in my many writings on eastern Indonesian spices; it is an undeniably remarkable thing that the same product from the same place could unite as many people in as many different places in shared appreciation of its flavour and utility.
If anything, Cyriac’s underestimated mastic’s reach. As we saw above, mastic was known in medieval China under a word related to the one Cyriac used. (Cyriac would probably have known China under the name ‘Serica’.) He wasn’t necessarily exaggerating in saying that mastic made it all the way to ‘far-off Thule’ (i.e. Iceland, or possibly Norway) either; mastic is mentioned in the Old Icelandic text we looked at last week, one written only a few decades after Cyriac’s letter (Figure 6).
As far as I know, nobody in the Middle Ages took the time to extol the Banda Islands ‘with special praise as eminent among all the islands’ the way Cyriac of Ancona did for Chios. Banda wasn’t eulogised in anything like the same way, I suppose, until these lines were written by Luís Vaz de Camões in his Lusiads (X:133 — my translation):
‘Olha de Bandas as ilhas, que se esmaltam
Da vária cor que pinta o roxo fruto;
As aves variadas, que ali saltam,
Da verde noz tomando seu tributo’‘See the islands of Banda, enamelled
With the diverse colours that the dark red fruit paints;
The varied birds which there leap,
Taking unripe nuts as their tribute’
Even this doesn’t match Cyriac’s flamboyant detail and concern with Chios’s links with the outside world. Presumably, Banda was an important place in local oral tradition, and there must have been some great poetry from and about the islands long before the colonial period and the genocide. This has not survived, though, and we’re left with a few traces of the islanders’ lives: references to Banda, references to nutmeg, some later descriptions.
I suppose that my own writings on Banda and nutmeg are an attempt to make up for this — to increase our collective awareness of the Banda Islands and their place in the medieval world, to show that things appreciated far and wide often come from the labour of people whose lives are extremely different from our own.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Allsen, Thomas T. 2004 [2001]. Culture and conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cyriac of Ancona. 2003. Later travels. Edward W. Bodnar (ed and trans). Cambridge, MA: The I Tatti Renaissance Library.
al-Jawbarī, Jamāl al-Dīn ʻAbd al-Raḥīm. 2020. The book of charlatans. Manuela Dengler (ed), Humphrey Davies (trans). The Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press.
Smith, Christine. 1987. Cyriacus of Ancona’s seven drawings of Hagia Sophia. The art bulletin. 69(1):16–32.
