What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?

Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, c. 1618, National Gallery of Scotland.

As the official portraitist for the Spanish monarchy at the height of its glory, Diego Velázquez painted queens, emperors, and gods. But one of his most famous paintings is a window into a much humbler world. A woman is frying eggs in hot oil, ready to scoop them out with a simple wooden spoon. Behind her, a servant boy carries a half-full jug of wine and a melon tied up in a loop of twine.

This painting is the type of thing historians love. A profoundly talented artist with a knack for realism, choosing the type of subject matter that is so normal that it rarely gets preserved (the same is true today—how many contemporary painters choose to depict taquerias or bagel shops?) Scholars suspect that Velazquez's own family members may have served as models in his early paintings. It's possible that the woman in this painting numbered among them, since she also appears in a religious painting he produced in the same year.

Diego Velázquez,  Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618, National Gallery, UK.

But this post is not about Velazquez. It's not even about art history. It's about food.

What can we learn about how people ate in the seventeenth century? And even if we can piece together historical recipes, can we ever really know what their food tasted like?

This might seem like a relatively unimportant question. For one thing, the senses of other people are always going to be, at some level, unknowable, because they are so deeply subjective. Not only can I not know what Velázquez's fried eggs tasted like three hundred years ago, I arguably can't know what my neighbor's taste like. And why does the question matter, anyway? A very clear case can be made for the importance of the history of medicine and disease, or the histories of slavery, global commerce, warfare, and social change.

By comparison, the taste of food doesn't seem to have the same stature. Fried eggs don't change the course of history.

But taste does change history.

One example, chosen at random: the Mexican chili peppers hiding in the bottom edges of both paintings.

The pepper family (genus Capsicum) is native to the Americas, and it was still a relatively new arrival in the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Europe when Velazquez was alive. As a non-elite person born in 1599, we can guess that his grandparents would not have been familiar with the taste of peppers and that his parents still thought of them as an exotic plant from across the seas. Even the name he, and we, apply to the plant was a foreign import: the word 'chili' is from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. So is 'avocado' (Nahuatl ahuacatl), 'tomato' (tomatl) and chocolate (chocolatl).

The taste for these foods was a significant factor in the series of global ecological movements between the Old and New Worlds that historians call the Columbian Exchange. Any time we eat kimchi, or kung pao chicken, or pasta with red sauce, we are eating foods that are direct results of the Columbian Exchange.

Someone really needs to make a better map of the Columbian Exchange. This one, from a public-domain resource for teachers from UT Austin, is one of the best I could find, but it doesn't come close to capturing the full range of exchanges.

But we're also eating modern foods. That's not to say that there aren't older correlates to these dishes—there undoubtedly are. But food has changed since the early modern period. Globalization of food crops has transformed the flavors of regional cuisines. Meanwhile, factory farming has led to a homogenization of some of the varietals available to us, while also creating a huge variety of new strains and hybrids.

One example: I didn't realize until recently that broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and collard greens are all technically the same species, Brassica oleracea. The substantial differences between these sub-species are all due to patient intervention by human farmers over millennia. Many of these changes are surprisingly recent. Early versions of cauliflower may have been mentioned by Pliny and medieval Muslim botanists, but as late as 1600, a French author was writing that cauli-fiori "as the Italians call it" was "still rather rare in France." Likewise, Brussels sprouts don't appear to have become widely cultivated until the Renaissance.

A woman with Brassica oleracea in Pieter Aertsen, Market Scene, 1569.

One example of the substantial changes produced by the artificial selection of premodern farmers actually made the news a couple years back. In 2015, there was a wave of reporting about early modern watermelons. The watermelon is native to Africa and has a substantial amount of range in terms of color and taste. Seventeenth-century still life paintings record a substantially different phase in the artificial selection of watermelons toward the bright red, seedless varietal familiar in Western grocery stores.

Giovanni Stanchi, Watermelons and other fruits in a landscape, c. 1645, Christie's.

But focusing on unusual varietals and exotic imports can be misleading. Most people in the early modern world—not just in Europe, but everywhere—were illiterate farmers and pastoralists whose diet was hyper-minimalist by contemporary standards.

This is not to say that their food tasted bad, necessarily. But it was clearly very simple, and very starch-heavy. From China to Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, gruels and stews made out of staple grains or legumes were the daily fare. Italian farmers weren't eating eggplant parmesan or spaghetti with meatballs. They were typically eating either boiled beans or grains, day after day after day.

The Beaneater by Annibale Carracci, 1580-90.

The acute eyes of Bruegel the Elder captured one example of this universal food of the premodern peasantry. In Bruegel's The Harvesters, a team of peasants is taking a break for a mid-day meal which seems to consist entirely of bread and bowls of what I am guessing is a wheat-based gruel, something akin to Cream of Wheat. The jugs they're drinking out of probably contain small beer.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (detail), Antwerp, 1525-1530.

But paintings like these can only get us so far. A more promising approach, perhaps, would be to go directly to the textual sources and take a close look at early modern recipes. I spend a lot of time recording 'receipts' (an archaic form of the word recipe, but also a broader one, since it included drug prescriptions). Several actually look pretty tasty (like eighteenth-century "Maccarony cheese"), and I hope to cook a few one day, taking a page from my friend Marissa Nicosia's reconstructions of early modern food at Cooking the Archives.

But there are many others that I have no desire to make anytime soon. One example that stands out in my mind is this recipe for snail water from a circa 1700 English manuscript at Penn.

To make Snaill water, for a consumption, or anny weakness in old or young persons, and for the ricketts
take a quart of snails, wash them twince in stronge-stale-beere and dry them well in a cloth, then bruse them shels and all, put to them 3 quarts of red cows-milk 4 ounces, red rose leaves, Rosemary, sweet-marjoram, Ivery, of each a good handfull, distill altogether and sweeten your water with surrop of violets, and sugar candy lickerish sorrop, put in 6 penny-worth of naturall-ballsom, drink a quarter of a pint of this every night and morning. 

Snails, stale beer and ivory shavings certainly sounds like a challenging flavor combo to me, despite the addition of the fragrant herbs and sugar. But this is a medicine, not a food, and it wasn't intended to taste good. Another early modern manuscript owned by Penn (this one from 1655, and more inclined toward food recipes than drug recipes) contains a far more relatable dish:

To fricasie a chicken or rabbitt.
Take a chicking and scald it or Case it, and put it into a frying pan with halfe a pint of strong broth, a peace of buter with a little whole pepper and mace, and boyle them well upon the fire till yr  Chickin be tender then make a [illegible: looks like 'leare' or 'leane of uiriayce'?] and minced peaches* and ye yolkes of 2 eggs and a little drawne butter then put it into the frying pan keeping yr pan with shaking over the fyre till it bee thick, then dish it up strewing thereon a little minced parsley. 

* 11/19/17 update: a reader named Dev Gualtieri wrote to offer the suggestion that this word might be 'parsley' instead of 'peaches.' I think 'parsley' is a reasonable reading of the word, but hesitate to change it from 'peaches' because you can see at the bottom of the recipe that the author writes 'parsley' very differently there. I've added a link to the original manuscript page so the reader can judge.

Even this relatively simple recipe for pan-fried chicken has some surprises, however. One is the addition of mace, a fairly obscure spice that comes from the same plant as nutmeg (nutmeg's the actual seed, and mace is the covering). It's a highly potent spice that numbs the tastebuds and imparts a strong aroma to food. And it's combined here with stewed peaches and egg yolks—not a flavor combination that has survived into the cuisines of the modern era, so far as I know.

Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship's hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at some level impossible. Certainly, we can make some educated guesses. In the case of late medieval cooking, one scholar has looked at the transformations of recipes as they crossed cultural zones (such as the medieval Arabic sweet porridge called ma'muniya, which evolved into Anglo-Norman maumenee) and concluded that "as time went by, a dish tended to become sweeter, spicer, and more complicated." But so much has changed between the worlds of the past and the present when it comes to cultivars, modes of preparation and preservation, and, perhaps, an overall sense of what tastes good and bad. I often wonder what someone from the thirteenth or seventeenth century might make of a Snickers bar, for instance. I suspect they'd find it disgustingly cloying. But then again, maybe not.

Thinking about historical tastes reminds me of the French expression for words that seem to be analogous across two languages, but actually have totally different meanings: faux amis. (For instance, English-speakers in Spanish-speaking countries often say that they are embarazada—they intend to say they're 'embarrassed,' but they're actually saying they're 'pregnant.')

These early modern foods are culinary false friends. They seem like they'd be the same as our familiar correlates. But we can't be sure that they tasted the same.

Like so much in history, they're so close, yet just out of reach.


Further reading online:

The Recipes Project
Cooking the Archives
What did Byzantine food taste like?

Further reading in print:

 (Note: These are Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy one, a small percentage of the purchase goes to support this blog).  .

American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

"The most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw." 
-Spanish chronicler Andres Bernaldez on Christopher Columbus' first impression of Caribbean iguanas, 1513.

IN HIS BOOK Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt argues that "the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very center of virtually all of Columbus's writings about his discoveries, though the meaning of that sense shifts over the years." Greenblatt thinks that Columbus emphasized wonders and marvels "because marvels are inseparably bound up in rhetorical and pictorial tradition with voyages to the Indies. To affirm the 'marvelous' nature of the discoveries is, even without the lucrative shipments yet on board, to make good on the claim to have reached the fabled realms of gold and spices." Yet Greenblatt doesn't devote much space in his book to the flip side of the "marvelous": the monstrous.

As Iberian voyages of "discovery" segued into expeditions of conquest and settlement over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans increasingly visualized the New World as a land of bizarre torments, freakish monsters and outlandish civilizations in thrall to the devil.

Map of Brasil, Dieppe School, 1547. Click to see
much larger version.

Spanish interpretations of the religious practices they encountered in the lands of the Aztec Triple Alliance have attracted the majority of historians interested in how Europeans expressed fear, apprehension and disgust -- as well as wonder -- toward the Americas (see below for some recommendations). The pictures below show that monsters and the monstrous were also depicted in the context of Portuguese Brazil. I'm particularly interested in how the incredible biodiversity of Amazonia was initially interpreted by European observers who had seen nothing to rival it in their temperate homelands. Although comparisons to the Garden of Eden were frequent, these images also reveal a profound anxiety about the abundance of nature in the Neotropics. 

The Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry's vision of Brazil mingles outlandish sea creatures with
flying devils who torment the Tupí Indian villagers at lower right. Theodor de Bry, Americae 
tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592)

Birds of paradise feature in this detail from the 1547 Dieppe map of Brazil linked above.

Tupí Indians hunt leonine creatures, probably reflecting early accounts of jaguars. Another detail.

In the same pictorial field, villagers lounge while two tortoises amble by.

During the Dutch occupation of parts of Brazil in the 1640-60 period, a number of highly
skilled painters visited the new colony to record their impressions of its flora and fauna.
In this 1665 painting by Albert Eckhout, two dueling tortoises recall the pair in the detail
from the Dieppe map above.

Despite their skill in visual representation, however, Dutch artists were often at least as fanciful in their depictions of South American monsters as their French and Iberian peers. The engravings below, selected from the Dutch author Arnoldus Montanus' 1671 De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (The New and Unknown World), offer a positively bizarre take on American animals and peoples. 

The "draco" (dragon) in this one bears a passing resemblance to the "Jenny Hanivers" and
"Sea Monks" of early modern sailors' lore.

Europeans were also fascinated and fearful of the "monstrous" forms of indigenous Brazilians themselves. Although most accounts remarked upon the good health, longevity and physique of Tupí Indians and other indigenous societies in Brazil (probably a reflection more of the poor health and diet of the European mariners than anything else), others focused on their tendency toward body-modification. The most entertaining and strange European take on piercing and tattooing I have been able to find is John Bulwer's fantastically titled Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations, fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature. With a Vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature, and an Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant. (London: J. Hardesty, 1650). (I wrote about this a bit in an earlier post). Below he describes how "the Brasileans... are pricked within the flesh" with paint.

Bulwer's title page takes this a step further, showing an Amerindian figure sporting some truly remarkable tattoos! The European woman with facial tattoos to the figure's left highlights Bulwer's concern that this "barbarous" custom would become fashionable with his own countrymen (he was right, but it would take another three hundred years or so to really catch on, and the whole "face on a butt" tattoo fad seems to still lie in the future).

Readers wanting to learn more about the role of the devil and the monstrous in European interpretations of Amerindian societies might want to start with Fernando Cervantes' The Devil in the New World and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors. Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, quoted above, is a great study of how the fantastical and marvelous figured into colonization, while Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, revises and critiques his claims in various interesting ways. Those interested in New World nature and particularly animals should check out A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America Miguel de Asua and Roger French, a fun, learned and highly-entertaining book (from which I stole the quote on iguanas that opens this post). 

Auto-da-Fé, 1495

After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking... 

Eight days after they were dressed in san-benitos and their heads ornamented with paper mitres. The mitre and san-benito belonging to Candide were painted with reversed flames and with devils that had neither tails nor claws; but Pangloss’s devils had claws and tails and the flames were upright. They marched in procession thus habited and heard a very pathetic sermon, followed by fine church music. Candide was whipped in cadence while they were singing; the Biscayner, and the two men who had refused to eat bacon, were burnt; and Pangloss was hanged, though that was not the custom. 

-Voltaire, Candide, Chapter Six.

Goya,  The Tribunal of the Inquisition (1812, detail)

The Portuguese auto da fé (or auto de fe in Spanish) was not meant strictly as a punishment - it was an "act of faith" intended to atone for the imagined sins of those prosecuted in the courts of the Inquisition via a series of religious rituals. This included a public procession, prayers, a formal reading of the legal charges leveled against the accused, and various forms of 'atonement' ranging from a mere public shaming to banishment or death. As the detail above shows, Voltaire's description, though bitterly sardonic in intent, was pretty accurate in its visual details: the penitents here are shown wearing the same tunic-like garments known as san benitos and pointed paper 'mitres' as Voltaire's hero Candide.

Pedro Berruguete, self-portrait c. 1490.
Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

What is remarkable about this is that Voltaire wrote Candide in 1759, and the painting above is from circa 1495! The remarkable longevity of the Inquisition may, I think, have something to do with the public and ritualized nature of these rites. One reoccurring feature of the early modern world, after all, is that everyone -- from children to the aged, peasants to lords -- seemed to adore watching the brutal punishment of sinners and criminals. (The continuity and apparent universality of this popular affection for public execution is just one of the many unappetizing insights into human nature afforded by the study of history).

The full painting from which I've picked out the detail above is by the Spanish painter and sculptor Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504). I had never heard of him until I came across this work on Wikipedia, but I'm quite taken by the mixture of brilliantly observed pictorial detail (the shadows are particularly beautiful) and sensitive psychological insight on display here. The complete painting is below (click to see the original image size), along with a few more details that struck me.

Pedro Berruguete, Saint Dominic presiding over an Auto-da-fe, circa 1496, Prado Museum, Madrid.

Some details:

Faces in the crowd.

Phallic overtones.

Praying or asleep?

There is a huge literature on the Iberian Inquisitions which I am far from an expert in, but I can heartily recommend Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1999) for those seeking a fresh approach to the subject. This book was one of the more mind-bending revisions I encountered as an undergraduate new to early modern history -- in essence, Kamen argues that the prosecutors of the Iberian Inquisition were actually in some respects more humane, skeptical and sensitive to the plight of the accused than the secular courts of the era. It is an interesting argument (which I'm sure I have butchered here with my half-remembered recollections) that Kamen backs up with a vast amount of archival evidence.

Jahangir's Turkey: Early Modern Globalization and Exotic Animals [Updated Nov. 2017]

The above image is one of my favorite examples of the cross-pollinations that early modern globalization brought about. It is a detail from a lavish watercolor painting created in 1618 by Bichitr for the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627). Here we find the strange juxtaposition of King James of England alongside a self-portrait of the artist, Bichitr. He is holding a small panel that seems to also depict Bichitr as he bows deeply while surrounded by an elephant and fine horses, probably animals from Jahangir's imperial menagerie.

At left is an official royal portrait of King James that probably served as the basis for Bichitr's more colorful depiction (you can click the image to see a high-res version). I suspect that a copy of this painting was presented to the Mughal court during the 1615-1619 embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, one of the early English emissaries sent to establish trade relations in India, as an attempt to demonstrate the grandeur of the English state.

The Mughals, however, were decidedly unimpressed. This is amply illustrated by Bichitr's full painting (see below) which depicts Jahangir turning away from both James and the Shah of Persia in order to converse with a humble Sufi holy man.

What I find most interesting about this work, however, is the painting of animals that Bichitr is holding. Why are they there?

Another work, by the celebrated Mughal court painter Ustad Mansur, offers an even more intriguing depiction of an animal from Jahangir's court. Jahangir described this creature in the official chronicle of his reign, the Jahangirnama, as an "extremely strange" wonder. The turkey was offered as a mate to a peacock and the bird's exotic looks and behavior became an object of debate among Jahangir's advisors, who couldn't guess where it had come from.

Ustad Mansur. India, Mughul period, 1612 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

As you likely have guessed, this is none other than a turkey. A domestic turkey, or Meleagris gallopavo, to be exact – a bird domesticated in Pre-Columbian Mexico and widely distributed throughout the indigenous cultures of North America. Now this iconic New World fowl was sitting in the throne room of one of the most powerful emperors in Asia.

To lock gazes with the turkey as it peers out at us from a Mughal watercolor is to confront a mystery.

By what route did this “true original Native of America,” as Benjamin Franklin called it, happen to arrive in the most powerful imperial court in Asia? In fact, this encounter was not as strange as it may at first seem. Emperor Jahangir (when not on an opium or alcohol binge) was a keenly observant man with an intense interest in nature. He kept an extensive menagerie of exotic creatures and delighted in recording their behaviors in his journal.

It was at Jahangir’s bidding that Mansur produced over one hundred natural history paintings that rival the work of any painter of the European Renaissance.  Two years earlier Mansur had painted a Mauritian dodo that is still cited by biologists as the most accurate surviving representation of the bird. In other words, Jahangir was exactly who a canny merchant or courtier would go to if they came across a highly unusual-looking bird.

From Wikipedia: "Two live [dodo] specimens were brought to India in the 1600s according to Peter Mundy, and the specimen depicted might have been one of these. Other birds depicted are Loriculus galgulus (upper left) Tragopan melanocephalus (upper right), Anser indicus (lower left) Pterocles indicus (lower right)." Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

By the beginning of Jahangir’s reign (1605-1627), Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ocean-going vessels were plying the spoils of American nature throughout all the major emporia of the Old World, from Senegal to Japan. Although Jahangir regarded the Portuguese and other Europeans as a negligible presence in his domain, he was well aware that the people he called ‘Franks’ had access to trade networks that were closed off to his own subjects. Indeed, Jahangir’s sole reference to the Portuguese colony at Goa in his self-authored chronicle of his reign, the Jahangirnama, was to note that his turkey had been obtained along with several other exotic beasts by a servant sent to the “vice-rei” at “the port of Goa… to purchase any rarities he could get hold of there for the royal treasury.”

To Jahangir, the Portuguese were simply go-betweens. It was the American animal – and not the European merchant – that interested Jahangir and his court.   Nor was Jahangir the only Asian potentate to be fascinated by the exotic beasts carried by the Portuguese. I've written previously, for instance, about this fascinating Japanese nanban screen from the 16th century that depicts Portuguese creole traders selling animals from faraway lands in a Japanese market:

A detail showing a richly attired Portuguese trader with a shrewd-looking Indian or African monkey.

Jahangir's turkey was, ultimately, a harbinger of great changes. It had been carried to Jahangir's court in Agra by an underling Jahangir sent to purchase 'rarities' from the Portuguese. Although the Mughals were still secure in their power in this period, with Europeans serving as little more than petty traders in the periphery, times would change. By the reign of Jahangir's grandson Aurgangzeb (1658-1707), the British, French and Dutch had made serious territorial gains and were beginning to dominate trade in the Indian Ocean.

Many global trade networks in the early modern period tended to be based around exotica likes gems, drugs and animals, but these trades had very real effects. The appearance of strange objects from unknown lands (from tobacco to turkeys) was often the first harbinger of the epochal changes that brought the colonial powers of Europe into conflict with the vast 'gunpowder empires' of Asia.

The balance of world power was shifting. In its own humble way, Jahangir's turkey had something to do with it.

Further reading:
The history of animals is still a relatively new field, so I don't believe much has been written specifically on exotic creatures and early European empires. Three exceptions I can think of are Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots and The Emperor's Giraffe. Virginia DeJohn Anderson's Creatures of Empire is a very interesting and provocative study of the role of the more prosaic (but perhaps most important) domesticated animals in the service of British imperial expansion. Finally, the British Library's Asian and African Studies blog is a great place to start for those interested in the material cultures of premodern Asia.

Sources: 
Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, (Oxford University Press, 1999), Wheeler Thackston, ed. and trans., 133-4. Som Prakash Verma, Ustad Mansur: Mughal Painter of Flora and Fauna (Abhinav Publications, 1999).

Lisbon before the Great Earthquake

"Come, ye philosophers, who cry, 'All’s well,'
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race...

...Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?"

- Voltaire, On the Lisbon Disaster (1755)

The Great Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami of 1755 sent reverberations throughout European society. Leveling around 85% of the city's infastructure, it essentially destroyed the medieval and Renaissance architecture of one of Europe's greatest capitols and claimed up to 30,000 lives. The great French philosophe Voltaire not only wrote a mournful poem on the subject, of which an extract is quoted above -- he also took the tragedy as inspiration for his darkly comic masterpiece Candide (1759), a picaresque fable that mocks the notion, championed by Leibniz among others, that we disaster-plagued mortals inhabit 'the best of all possible worlds.'

I love early modern urban spaces and study 17th century Portuguese history, so I regret the fact that the Lisbon earthquake occurred on an almost weekly basis -- so many ancient buildings, forgotten paintings, and priceless manuscripts consumed by fire and the Atlantic. So I was very happy to find these snippets of Lisbon's urban life from the atlas Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, "The Cities of the World" (ed. Georg Braun, Cologne: 1572-1617), which show a bustling urban center of late-medieval type that bears little resemblance to the post-Pombaline Lisbon of today.

This detail centers on Ribeira Palace, the ancient Royal seat of the Portuguese monarchs destroyed in the earthquake (the long building with tower running perpendicular to the river). This building played a key role in Portuguese and, indeed, global history, since it was the meeting place of the Casa da Índia: the organization that directed Portuguese trade and empire in the Indian Ocean during the Iberian golden age of the sixteenth century. In a very real sense, this building was one of the hubs of the early modern global economy. Fittingly, a shipyard and a pillory for punishing criminals can be spotted adjoining it.

Here a group of the merchants who sustained Lisbon's power can be seen paddling to port from their ship, docked in the River Tagus.

And here's one of the wide-bodied trading vessels that routinely made the hazardous, month's-long voyage to Portugal's colonies and feitorias (trading posts) in Brazil, Africa's slave coast and India.

The full map (click for a much more detailed version):

Georg Bauer and Hogenberg (engraver), Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Vol. 5 (Cologne: 1598). An accompanying Latin note calls Lisbon "the most noted center of trade for the entire Orient... and for Africa and America," adding "in historical times there where two cities we might call 'Ruler of the oceans and the high seas,' from whence ships could set sail for the East and the West: one is Seville, the other Lisbon."

For those interested in learning more, Michael Swift's Cities of the Renaissance World is a nicely illustrated volume that looks at more of the remarkably detailed urban maps from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum. There's also a book on the Lisbon earthquake that's just come out called Wrath of God, but I have yet to read it. Finally, Voltaire's Candide is one of my favorite short books. Read it for free online here.