Spices are very important in the history of food, trade and medicine. Pepper was so essential in Roman times that much of the gold extracted from Roman Spain ended up in India; pepper was valued as highly as its weight in gold. When Europeans reached the Malabar Coast of India, they found India very much richer than they had been led to believe. Merchants trying to break the Arab pepper monopoly by reaching the Spice Islands from the west instead of overland, financed Christopher Columbus, which led to the discovery of the New World. Other spices have all been important at different times, and have all been recommended by apothecaries, physicians and medicine men in the last millennium to alleviate every kind of condition. Spices are still exceptionally expensive, in comparison to other plants that have become gradually less expensive since 1500. Only vanilla has been successfully synthesised. The definition of a spice is somewhat vague. Here we distinguish spices and herbs spices are usually of tropicalsubtropical origin, and include seeds, roots and bark; herbs are the fresh or dried green parts of herbaceous plants, usually temperate in origin. The spices covered in detail here are cardamom, ginger, turmeric, vanilla and pepper.

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