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  Venice carefully built its reputation as a reliable supplier, and so contracts with the merchant state were desirable. Venice was able to dictate terms for these contracts. In 1250, when Venice agreed to supply Mantua and Ferrara with salt, the contract stipulated that these cities would not buy salt from anyone else. This became the model for Venetian salt contracts.

  As Venice became the salt supplier to more and more countries, it needed more and more salt producers from which to buy it. Merchants financed by the salt administration went farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt from Alexandria, Egypt, to Algeria, to the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, to Sardinia, Ibiza, Crete, and Cyprus. Wherever they went, they tried to dominate the supply, control the saltworks, even acquire it if they could.

  Producing salt for the Venetian fleet was hard work—moving mud and rocks, clearing and preparing ponds, building the dikes that separated them, carrying heavy sacks of harvested crystal. Often entire families—husband, wife, and children—labored together. They were paid by the amount of salt they harvested.

  Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt. The Venetians then brought in all the salt needed for local consumption, built stores to sell the imported salt, and paid damages to the owners of saltworks. The policy was designed to control prices and at the same time keep the locals happy. But two centuries later, when a salt fleet en route from Alexandria was lost at sea, the farmers of Crete were in a crisis because salt was so scarce on the island that they could no longer make cheese, which is curdled milk drained and preserved in salt.

  In 1473, Venice acquired Cervia, forcing the onetime rival to agree to sell to no one but them. An exception was negotiated for Cervia to continue supplying Bologna in the nearby Po Valley. When Venice’s new archrival, Genoa, made the island of Ibiza the largest salt producer in the Mediterranean, the Venetians made Cyprus into the second largest producer. In 1489, Cyprus officially became a Venetian possession.

  Aiding its ability to ruthlessly manipulate commerce and control territory, Venice maintained the ships of the merchant fleet as a naval reserve and called them into combat where needed. The Venetian navy patrolled the Adriatic, stopped ships, inspected cargo, and demanded licensing documents to make sure all commercial traffic was conforming with its regulations.

  No state had based its economy on salt to the degree Venice had or established as extensive a state salt policy except China. Possibly this was not entirely a coincidence, since Venetian policy was influenced by one of its best-known families, the Polos.

  IN 1260, NICCOLÒ Polo and his brother Maffeo, both Venice merchants—Venice was by then a city of international merchants—left on a commercial trip to the court of Kublai Khan, a dynamic leader who ruled the Mongols and had just conquered China. They returned in 1269 with letters and messages from Kublai Khan to the pope. The khan asked for more Westerners, intellectuals, and leaders in Christian thought to come to his court and teach them about the West. Two years later the Polo brothers went on a second trip, this time taking with them Niccolòs seventeen-year-old son Marco and two Dominican monks. The Dominicans abandoned the arduous trek, but Marco stayed on with his father and uncle.

  If his account is true, no teenager ever went on a better adventure. They traveled the Silk Road across central Asia and the Tarim basin and, four years after leaving Venice, arrived in Shando, or as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it in his famous poem, Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Mongols. The khan, at least by Marco’s account, was not disappointed that the Polo brothers had returned with no greater emissary of Western knowledge than Niccolò’s young son. Marco traveled throughout the vast empire the khan had conquered, learned languages, studied cultures, and reported back to Kublai Khan.

  Almost twenty-five years later, in 1295, the Polos returned to a Venice, where few, even in their own household, recognized them. Three years after his return, Marco Polo, like other Venetian merchants, was serving in a naval fleet at war with the Venetian rival, Genoa. He was taken prisoner and supposedly dictated the story of his adventures to a fellow prisoner named Rusticello, a fairly well known author of adventure tales from Pisa.

  There are a number of problems with Rusticello. He may have taken great liberties to improve on the story. Whole passages appear to have been borrowed from his previous books, which were imaginary romantic adventures. For example, the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai Khan bears a disturbing resemblance to the account of Tristan’s arrival in Camelot in Rusticello’s book on King Arthur.

  From its initial publication in 1300, the Venetians were suspicious. Some questioned if Marco Polo had ever gone to China at all. Why did he write nothing of the Great Wall, about the drinking of tea, about princesses with bound feet? It seemed odd to the few knowledgeable Venetians, and it has seemed suspicious to subsequent scholars that Marco Polo completely missed the fact that China had printing presses in an age when this pivotal invention had not yet been seen in Europe. This omission seemed even more glaring to Venetians 150 years later, once Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe, and Venice became a leading printing center.

  His book was full of unheard-of details and was missing many of the facts known to other merchants. But later travelers to China were able to verify some of the curious details of Marco Polo’s book. And he had been away somewhere for twenty-five years. Polo’s account sparked an interest in Chinese trade among many Europeans, including Christopher Columbus, and remained the basis of the Western concept of China until the ninteenth century. His legend has grown.

  It is widely accepted that he introduced Italians to pasta. It is true that China at the time, and still today, abounded in fresh and dried, flat and stuffed pastas. But Marco Polo’s book says almost nothing about pasta other than the fact, which he found very curious, that it was sometimes made from a flour ground from the fruit of a tree. Maccheroni, one of the oldest Italian words for pasta, appears to be from Neopolitan dialect and was used before Marco Polo’s return. The word is mentioned in a book from Genoa dated 1279. Most Sicilians are certain that the first pasta came from their island, introduced by the Muslim conquerors in the ninth century. The hard durum wheat or semolina used to make pasta was grown by the ancient Greeks, who may have made some pasta dishes, and the Romans ate something similar to lasagna. The word lasagna may come from the ancient Greek lagana, meaning “ribbon,” or from the ancient Greek word lasanon, which probably would not make the dish Greek since the word means “chamber pot.” The Romans, according to this theory, started using lasanon—presumably not the same ones but perhaps a similarly shaped vessel—as a pot for baking a noodle dish.

  Marco Polo never mentioned that the Chinese printed paper money, but it is more significant that he did describe how in Kain-du salt cakes made with images of the khan stamped on them were used for money. Among the unexpected details in Polo’s book are many on salt and the Chinese salt administration. Polo described travelers journeying for days to get to hills where the salt was so pure it could simply be chipped away. He wrote of the revenue earned by the emperor from the brine springs in the province of Karazan, how salt was made in Changli to the profit of both the private and public sector, how Koigan-zu made salt and the emperor derived revenues from it. Marco Polo seldom mentioned salt without pointing out the state revenues derived by the emperor.

  Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and may have been genuinely interested in salt and the way it was administered. He also may have decided that, since his readership would be Venice merchants, this would be a subject of great interest to them. But it also could be that whether he had gone to China or not, one of his motivations for writing the book was to encourage the Venetian government to extend its salt administration, especially in possessions around the Mediterranean.

  The extent of Marco Pol
o’s influence is difficult to measure, but it is clear that Venice, like the khan, did extend its salt administration and derive great wealth and power from it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between

  WHAT WAS IT about this not especially salty stretch of the Adriatic that made Venetians get into the salt trade, along with the merchants of Cervia, the monks at Comacchio, and the archbishop of Ravenna? It was not so much the sea in their faces as the river at their backs. The Po starts in the Italian Alps and flows straight across the peninsula, spreading into a marshy estuary from Ravenna to Venice. The valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula, so strikingly different that its uniqueness becomes apparent after a moment’s glance at a map of Italy. With the Alps to the north and the sylvan mountains of Tuscany to the south, one thick ribbon of rich, rolling green pastures stretches coast to coast along the Po. A haven for agriculture, this has always been the most affluent area in Italy, and today, known as Emilia-Romagna, it still is.

  The Romans built a road, the Via Emilia—today it is the eight-lane A-1 superhighway—connecting what became the centers of culture and commerce from Piacenza to Parma to Reggio to Modena to Bologna and on to the Adriatic coast. The agricultural wealth of this region depended on both a port for its goods and a source of salt for its agriculture. By competing for this business, two fiercely commercial competitors at opposite ends of the Po, Genoa on the Mediterranean and Venice on the Adriatic, became two of the greatest ports of the Middle Ages.

  On the rich plains of Emilia-Romagna, off of the great Roman road, are the ruins of a Roman city named Veleia. Historians have puzzled over Veleia because the Romans had a clear set of criteria for the sites of their cities and Veleia does not fit them. Not only is it too far from the road, it is on the cold windward side of a mountain. But it has one thing in common with almost every important city in Italy: It is near a source of salt. Veleia was built over underground brine springs, which is why it came to be known as the big salt place, Salsomaggiore.

  The earliest record of salt production in Veleia dates from the second century B.C. Like many other saltworks, it was abandoned after the fall of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne, the conquering Holy Roman emperor who, like the Romans before him, had an army that needed salt, started it up again. The name Salso first appears on an 877 document.

  In ancient times the brine wells had a huge wheel with slats inside and out for footing. Two men, chained at the neck, walked inside on the bottom, stepping from slat to slat, and two other men, also chained at the neck, did the same on the outside on top. The wheel turned a shaft that wrapped a rope, which hoisted buckets of brine. The brine was then boiled, which meant that a duke or lord who wished to control the brine wells had to also control a wide area of forest to provide wood for fuel.

  Engraving from the late Middle Ages of a wheel powered by prisoners used to pump brine at Salsomaggiore. State Archives, Parma

  Starting in the eleventh century, the Pallovicino family controlled the wells and the region. But in 1318, the city of Parma took over thirty-one Pallovicino wells. The event was considered important enough to be recorded in a fresco in the city palace. He who controlled the brine wells at Salsomaggiore controlled the region, and the takeover of these thirty-one brine wells marked the transfer of power from feudal lord to city government.

  IN THE SEVENTH and eighth centuries, before Charlemagne restarted the wells at Salsomaggiore, sailors brought salt from the Adriatic to Parma. For this labor they could receive either money or goods, including Parma’s most famous salt product, ham—prosciutto di Parma.

  A fresco on a wall of the Parma city palace that recorded the city’s acquisition of thirty-one wells. The bull is the symbol of Parma. The fresco was destroyed when a tower collapsed on the palace in the seventeenth century. State Archive, Parma

  Parma was a good place to make ham because before the sea air reaches Parma it is caught in the mountain peaks, producing rain and drying out the wind that comes down to the plain. That dry wind is needed for aging the salted leg in a place dry enough to avoid rotting. The drying racks for the hams were always arranged east to west to best use the wind.

  Bartolomeo Sacchi, a native of the Po Valley town of Cremona, who became a well-known fifteenth-century author under the pen name Platina, gave blunt and easily followed instructions for testing the quality of a ham:

  Stick a knife into the middle of a ham and smell it. If it smells good, the ham will be good; if bad, it should be thrown away.

  The sweet-smelling ham of Parma earned a reputation throughout Italy that was credited not only to the region’s dry wind but to the diet of their pigs, a diet which came from the local cheese industry. The Po Valley, where butter is preferred to olive oil, is Italy’s only important dairy region. According to Platina, this was more a matter of necessity than taste.

  Almost all who inhabit the northern and western regions use it [butter] instead of fat or oil in certain dishes because they lack oil, in which the warm and mild regions customarily abound. Butter is warm and moist, nourishes the body a good deal and is fattening, yet the stomach is injured by its frequent use.

  Notice that Platina listed butter’s fattening quality as a virtue, although he was a writer who tended to look for the unhealthy in food including salt, about which he wrote:

  “It is not good for the stomach except for arousing the appetite. Its immoderate use also harms the liver, blood, and eyes very much.”

  And he was not much more sanguine about the pride of his native region, aged cheese.

  Fresh cheese is very nourishing, represses the heat of the stomach, and helps those spitting blood, but it is totally harmful to the phlegmatic. Aged cheese is difficult to digest, of little nutriment, not good for stomach or belly, and produces bile, gout, pleurisy, sand grains, and stones. They say a small amount, whatever you want, taken after a meal, when it seals the opening of the stomach, both takes away the squeamishness of fatty dishes and benefits digestion.

  The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt. Italians call the curds that are eaten fresh before they begin to turn sour, ricotta, and it is made all over the peninsula in much the same way. But once salt is added, once cheese makers cure their product in brine to prevent spoilage and allow for aging, then each cheese is different.

  The origin of cheese is uncertain. It may be as old as the domestication of animals. All that is needed for cheese is milk and salt, and since domesticated animals require salt, that combination is found most everywhere. Just as goats and sheep were domesticated earlier than cattle, it is thought that goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses are much older ideas than cow’s milk cheese. The habit of carrying liquids in animal skins may have caused the first cheeses since milk coming in contact with an animal skin will soon curdle.

  Soon, herders, probably shepherds, found a more sophisticated variation known as rennet. Rennet contains rennin, an enzyme in the stomach of mammals which curdles milk to make it digestible. Usually, rennet is made from the lining of the stomach of an unweaned young animal because unweaned animals have a higher capacity to break down milk. Here, too, salt played a role because these stomach linings were preserved in salt so that rennet from calving season would be usable throughout the year.

  The Romans made a tremendous variety of cheeses, with differences not only from one area to another but from one cheese maker to another in the same place and possibly even from one batch to another from the same cheese maker.

  Parmesan cheese, now called Parmigiano-Reggiano because it is made in the green pastureland between Parma and Reggio, may have had its origins in Roman times, but the earliest surviving record of a Parma cheese that fits the modern description of Parmigiano-Reggiano is from the thirteenth century. It was at this time that marsh areas were drained, irrigation ditches built, and the acreage devoted to rich pastureland greatly expanded. About the same time, standards were established by local cheese makers that have been rig
idly followed ever since. Parma cheese earned an international reputation and became a profitable export, which it remains. Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Florentine father of Italian prose, mentions it in The Decameron. In the fifteenth century, Platina called it the leading cheese of Italy. Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist, claimed to have saved his from the London fire by burying it in the backyard. Thomas Jefferson had it shipped to him in Virginia.

  In Parma, the production of cheese, ham, butter, salt, and wheat evolved into a perfect symbiotic relationship. The one thing the Parma dairies produced very little of was and still is milk. Just as the Egyptians millennia before had learned that it was more profitable to make salt fish than sell salt, the people of the Po determined that selling dairy products was far more profitable than selling milk.

  The local farmers milked their cows in the evening, and this milk sat overnight at the cheese maker’s. In the morning, they milked them again. The cheese makers skimmed the cream off the milk from the night before, and the resulting skim milk was mixed with the morning whole milk. The skimmed-off cream was used to make butter.

  Heating the mixed milk, they added rennet and a bucket of whey, the leftover liquid after the milk curdled in the cheese making the day before. They then heated the new mixture to a higher temperature, still well below boiling, and left it to rest for forty minutes.

  At this point the milk had curdled, leaving an almost clear, protein-rich liquid, and this whey was fed to pigs. It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese. Less choice parts of pigs fed on this whey qualified to be sent to the nearby town of Felino, where they were ground up and made into salami. (The word salami is derived from the Latin verb to salt.)