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Visiting a restaurant in the Western world or even a home often means finding salt and black pepper as common condiments on the table used to give taste to our dishes. Salt has been native to many regions and is commonly found; however, black pepper was a far more limited plant (<i>Piper nigrum</i>) that natively grew in South and Southeast Asia. The spread of this pepper is intertwined with ancient trade expansion that once connected the length of the Old World. In more recent times, this pepper became a fixed a daily condiment.

[[File:Calicut 1572.jpeg|thumbnail|350px|left|Figure 2. Painting from 1572 showing the harbor at Calicut in Malabar, a key export city in the spice trade since late Antiquity.]]

The role of Arabian and Middle Eastern traders continued through the early Medieval period. After the disruptions of the fall of Rome, pepper only began to make a comeback in Europe by the later parts of the Medieval period. King Ethelred exacted pepper as a tax to allow European traders in Anglo-Saxon London. Arab traders controlled shipping in the Indian Ocean and trade across the Middle East, giving them a lot of power in trade activities in the Silk Road.

By the late Medieval Period, Italian traders from Genoa and Venice increasingly controlled much of the trade in pepper in Europe, where the price of black pepper in Europe remained very high. This likely meant that it was not as commonly consumed as it may have been even in the Roman period. Despite the high price for black pepper, it was still one of the most important products in the Silk Road. In fact, it became the chief spice trade in the Silk Road. To keep prices artificially high, traders even made stories such as black pepper being guarded by poisonous serpents, indicating that it was difficult to get. The black color was suggested to be a result from the fires that traders had to make to scare the serpents away.<ref>For more on Medieval traders in spices and black pepper, see: Woolgar, C. M, T Waldron, and D Serjeantson. 2009. <i>Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition.</i> Oxford: Oxford University Press, pg. 16.</ref>

==Summary==

The history and spread of black pepper has been based on the history of trade and access to south Asia, from ancient to Medieval and more modern periods. Europe and China both had developed a taste for black pepper by the late 1st millennium BCE. It became a spice that became common to many cuisines in the Old World. In the Roman period, black pepper was a much sought after product by the Romans from India. The taste for pepper remained in Europe after the Roman period, but for much of the Medieval period, the control of trade routes by various middlemen restricted its consumption by only elite or upper classes. The Dutch and later British East Indian Company began to have more direct control in India, leading to a substantial increase in trade of black pepper that also lowered prices and made it a common condiment or spice. Today, the trade in black pepper is once again controlled regions that produce it rather than foreign states.

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