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영어

Vasco Da Gama's fleet dropped anchor at the port of Calicut on 20 may 1498. It was Venice that came firstly to know this alarming news. The opening of a new route to India, land of spices, appears of the greatest importance to Venice since venetian prosperity depended on levantine spice trade. Until recently, many historians debate whether the Portuguese reduced the levantine spice trade to permanent insignificance. This article aims to make a good synthesis of the historiography of the rise and fall of levantine spice trade in the sixteenth century after the Portuguese opened their new route to India. In the first place, it is generally accepted that levantine spice trade reduced considerably in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. And then, levantine spice trade began to revive. That revival is not only quantitatively but also qualitatively attested by divers texts such as commercial documents, official records, diary, and so on. In the 1570s levantine spice trade again suffered from the revival of the portuguese indian spice trade. But this crisis was of a short-term fluctuation in the general economic situation. Finally, the Portuguese could not succeed in establishing a permanent monopoly in the import to Europe of oriental spices in the sixteenth century, conceding to new comers to India, Netherlands and England that gave a final blow to the levantine spice trade in the seventeenth century. (Dongguk University / namjk0513@dgu.edu)