ABSTRACT
AT the end of the fifteenth century Venetian merchants weresupplying western Europe from the Levant with about il/2 million Ibs. of pepper annually. This trade was disrupted
Initially by the Portuguese discovery of the Cape route to India, but it recovered quickly. Between 1503-6, when some 2 million Ibs. of pepper were being shipped annually around the Cape to Lisbon and Antwerp, Venetian spice imports dropped by more than two-thirds, pepper in particular becoming a minor trade commodity.1 By the fourth decade of the sixteenth century, however, the quantity of spices which was coming up by the old trade routes along the Persian Gulf via Baghdad and the Syrian ports, or by way of the Red Sea, Cairo and Alexandria, was again attaining impressive proportions in relation to Portuguese spice imports;2
and by the 1560$ the Venetians were collecting more than 11/4 million Ibs. of pepper annually from Alexandria, where the total importation was said to have been more than 2% million lbs.3 So flourishing had the Levantine trade become that the Fuggers, who previously operated on the Lisbon pepper market,
commenced purchasing supplies from Alexandria.4 Spice imports into Portugal at this period apparently declined, but at the end of the century more than ^l/L million Ibs. of pepper were reaching the Iberian ports every year.5
