The Changing Pattern of Europe's Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400-1700

More recently N. Steensgaard has advanced the view that the trade with the Levant enjoyed a major revival which endured through the last three decades of the sixteenth century and the first two decades of the seventeenth. According to Steensgaard, about 50% of pepper imports and 60% of spice imports came through the Levant in the 1570s and 1580s, rising to 75% and 80% in the 1590s.2 In his view * the Portuguese carracks did not obtain any great economic significance as a connecting link between Europe and Asia '.3