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Spices were once so precious they launched the Age of Exploration

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Pepper bought in India for a few grams of silver sold in Europe for thirty times as much.

Verified · Royal Museums Greenwich

In the Middle Ages, spices were luxury and wealth in concentrated form. Pepper, the most important of all, made a journey of staggering markups: a kilo costing 1 or 2 grams of silver at its source in India fetched 10 to 14 grams in Alexandria, 14 to 18 in Venice, and 20 to 30 by the time it reached European tables - controlled at every step by Eastern and Arab middlemen.

Cloves, nutmeg and mace came from a tiny cluster of Indonesian islands - the Maluku Islands, or “Spice Islands.” Distance, scarcity and a stranglehold on supply made these flavourings status symbols worth more, by weight, than many precious goods.

The lure of cutting out the middlemen reshaped history. European powers “began to build ships and venture abroad in search of new ways to reach the spice-producing regions,” launching the famed voyages of Columbus (1492) and Magellan (1519).

30x
pepper markup, source to European table
Maluku Is.
only source of cloves & nutmeg
1492
Columbus sails seeking a spice route

Sources & references

2 references

Well-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.

1 Royal Museums Greenwich institution “By the time the spices arrived in Venice they were often worth 1000% more than the original price paid in the Spice Islands; prices were very high because they had to be shipped expensively overland through the hands of many traders.” rmg.co.uk ↗
2 World History Encyclopedia history reference “A kilo of pepper costing 1 or 2 grammes of silver at the production point was 14 to 18 in Venice and 20 to 30 in the consumer countries of Europe; cloves, nutmeg and mace came from the Maluku Islands, nicknamed the Spice Islands.” worldhistory.org ↗
✓ Last reviewed Jun 6, 2026

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