The Landshuter Hochzeit (1475)
In 1475 Duke Georg of Bayern-Landshut married Hedwig (Polish: Jadwiga), daughter of Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, at an extraordinarily extravagant and well-documented ceremony at Landshut in Lower Bavaria. The names of the guests — and other fascinating details of this huge event — have been preserved in a number of contemporary manuscripts, several of which are now kept in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The town of Landshut commemorates the wedding by reenacting it every four years, and has done so since the early twentieth century. The next reenactment is scheduled for 2021.
Why is this of interest to historians of Indonesia? Well, among the victuals provided to the Landshut wedding guests in 1475 were enormous quantities of Indonesian spices.
Figure 1 above is taken from Cgm 331, one of the now-digitised manuscripts in Munich recounting the events of the Landshuter Hochzeit. It says that 105 pounds (ain Zentner v lb) of cloves (Nägell, originally meaning ‘nail’) and 85 pounds of mace (muschatplüee, literally ‘muscat flowers’) were bought for the wedding, costing 120 Rhenisch guilders in total. Apparently the dowry alone was around 32,000 guilders, so this really isn’t so much money. The amounts here are huge, though, at least in culinary terms; a couple of cloves can easily overpower a dish, and when dry they weigh very little. Thousands and thousands of cloves were consumed just at this one wedding (1), and the dishes they flavoured were presumably eaten by all the guests — who came from all classes of society. This is not simply a case of consumption of foreign luxuries by elites.
Bavaria is about 12,400 kilometres as the crow flies from the eastern Indonesian islands that were the sole sources of these spices: the tiny Banda Islands south of Seram, which produced all the nutmeg and mace in the medieval world (2), and the small and mostly volcanic islands (the ‘Moluccas’, aka Maluku) just west of Halmahera, where cloves were harvested (Fig. 2). We know these spices came from these places because they didn’t grow anywhere else.
Cloves and mace probably came to Landshut through a long relay, having been transshipped several times at various ports around the Indian Ocean. From Banda/Maluku they would first go west to Java, a journey that took around two weeks — most frequently in the hulls of local vessels, although Javanese and Malay junks were probably involved by the fifteenth century as well. From Java they would head northwest up the Malacca Strait and onto the Indian Ocean proper, and from there any number of stops were possible (Melaka, Pasai, Calicut, Khambhat, Aden, Jiddah) en route to Cairo, where a short overland journey would take them to Alexandria. At Alexandria European merchants could purchase them directly. The entire journey probably took less than eighteen months.
Landshut was a wealthy city in the 1470s — rich enough that its town clerk (Stadtschreiber), Alexander Mornauer, could afford to be painted by an unidentified artist of some talent (Fig. 3). It isn’t particularly surprising that exotic luxuries could be found there. But these references to eastern Indonesian spices are a reminder of how vast and varied the medieval world actually was.
By the 1470s, in large part due to the trade in spices, it is likely that Islam had arrived in both North Maluku and Banda, although most people were probably only nominal converts to the new religion. Early accounts of Banda tell us that the native Bandanese lived in one of two village confederations that were in an almost constant state of war, and that they were headhunters, taking the heads of their enemies in battle and storing them in the village from which they came — a common state of affairs in pre-twentieth-century eastern Indonesia. And when the Portuguese arrived in North Maluku, they found a clove trade dominated by two rival Islamic sultanates based on two tiny volcanic cones just to the west of Halmahera known as Ternate and Tidore. (See Figure 4 for a zoomed-out map.) At least a few of the people in Ternate and Tidore were literate in Malay in Jawi (Perso-Arabic) script by the end of the fifteenth century, but the local people (including the Sultans) spoke languages of the non-Austronesian North Halmahera family.
It is hard to imagine a starker contrast than that between Landshut and Banda in 1475. They were nonetheless parts of the same interconnected medieval world: The people of Banda and Maluku derived prestige and luxury goods (like Chinese porcelain) from selling the produce of their trees in the ports of Java and to foreign visitors to their tiny archipelagos, a trade made profitable in part by the relatively high prices charged in Europe. Bavarian and Polish nobility used the dried flowers and seeds of equatorial trees (grown closer to Australia and New Guinea than to anywhere they might recognise) as status symbols and to give the foods they ate an appropriately regal taste. And this commerce enriched and empowered Muslim traders on the Indian Ocean, encouraging the conversion of local Indo-Malaysian elites to Islam in the few decades before the arrival of the Portuguese conquistadores in 1509.
NOTES
(1) In a bumper year a clove tree will produce about 75 pounds (~34kg) of dried flowers (cloves) — see R. A. Donkin’s Between East and West (2003, 6) for figures and sources. The amount at the Landshuter Hochzeit considerably exceeded the annual yield of one tree in a good year.
(2) Mace and nutmeg come from the same tree, the nutmeg tree (Myristica fragrans). Nutmeg is the seed and mace is the aril that surrounds it. True nutmeg only came from Banda, although another sort of nutmeg (M. argentea) can be found growing wild on the coast of New Guinea adjacent to the archipelago.
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