1434 by Gavin Menzies Read Free Book Online Page A

with gold, silk, and ceramics could rest in simple, clean surroundings, a stone’s throw from the cool mosque. In Zheng He’s time, there were eleven caravanserais in Cairo, twenty-three markets for international trade, fifty smaller markets (souks) for local trade, and eleven race courses.
    Al-Madkrizi gave a vivid account of life in the caravanserais in the 1420s. Every sort of spice was for sale, along with all manner of silks and more mundane goods—fruits, nuts, and jams galore. Merchants carried with them their chests of gold and silver, all their worldly wealth. Theft was common. The punishment (still enforced in Saudi Arabia) was severing of the right hand.
    In the late Middle Ages, Cairo was the world’s leading emporium for three of the most important commodities of international trade—gold, spice, and perfume. Cairo had become bullion capital of the world as a result of Islam’s expansion. Arab caliphs, needing ever more gold to lubricate trade, initially adopted Byzantine coins, overstamping them withthe caliph’s head. After Arab armies overran North Africa, they captured the gold trade from Mali and Guinea, which had by far the largest gold seams.
    Arabs’ domination of the gold trade led to the gold dinar becoming the currency of Mediterranean trade. The rulers of Castile, Aragon, and León copied Almoravid dinars, which they called morbetinos.
    Cairo’s spice bazaar, the Khan el-Khalili, faces the Al-Azhar Mosque. It was built by a wealthy Mamluk of that name in 1382 and still teems with business six hundred years later. The most prestigious part of the bazaar, nearest the mosque, is where the fabled incense is found. Brought from the wadis of southern Arabia, these concentrated essences are sold by the ounce, diluted with alcohol one part to nine for perfume, one to twenty for eau de toilette, one to thirty for eau de cologne. Cairo’s shops still maintain the medieval tradition of selling perfumes in large bottles alongside herbs and spices, and Egypt remains a source for many of the essences used by French couture houses.
    In the Middle Ages perfume and spice were equally valuable. The spice trade with the East, transacted through Cairo, was the cornerstone of Venetian wealth.
    Europeans devoured spices, the better to make palatable their salted meat and dried fish. In addition to enlivening food, spices were extensively used by apothecaries. Purges were accomplished by cassia or rhubarb; theriac, made of an assortment of herbs and spices, was a panacea for ills ranging from constipation to fever and even the plague. Ginger jams were said to encourage the flow of urine. Cinnamon assisted menstruation and was valuable for windy colic; nutmeg relieved coughs and asthma. As Iris Origo points out in The Merchant of Predo, there was hardly an Eastern spice, however rare or expensive, that did not reach the cooking pots or medicine chests of Italian bankers and merchants.
    Walking outward from the spice market today, one encounters the brass and copperware shops, stacked with Arab coffeepots, water jugs, tabletops, coal scuttles, and trays. Tiny pieces of mother-of-pearl, bone, and ebony are inlaid in intricate mosaic patterns on wooden boxes.Although amber prayer beads are used to count the mercies of Allah, much as Catholics use rosaries, amber appears less valuable in the marketplace than copper.
    Farther out, there are leather and clothing stalls. Egyptian men, like their medieval predecessors, wear galabayas, collarless tunics resembling large, floppy nightshirts. (Caftans are the more colorful version, embroidered at the front and on the hems.) Women seek dowry dresses made by desert Bedouin. The market encompasses a world. Remarkably, almost everything sold here today was available to Zheng He’s sailors and Chinese merchants as they passed through Cairo in 1433. It is an easy passage downstream from Cairo with the current. Just north of Cairo the Nile divides,