The fact that they were perishable meant that you always had to buy more; you could never have enough. And they were supply-limited because they only grew in areas distant from Europe and it took a long, difficult, and dangerous voyage to get them.
Spices/herbs that grew in Europe (anise, sage, dill, thyme, mint) were also tasty but were easier to get and so less valuable.
Incense, though, like spices, is the very reverse of non-perishable. Then there are luxury textiles, which fall somewhere in between jewels and spices on the perishability scale. All of these were “frivolities” that wealthy people have always been willing to spend money on. And what wealthy people are willing to spend money on, non-wealthy people are willing to risk life and limb to acquire in order to sell them to wealthy people.
Yes, but in that claim you made a rather misleading distinction between “your spices” and “our spices”. AFAIK there is no medical evidence suggesting that, e.g., Europeans are any more likely than Indians to be allergic to spices that are native to India, or that Indians are any more likely than Europeans to be allergic to spices that are native to Europe.
There are of course some food sensitivities whose prevalence differs significantly along regional/ethnic boundaries, such as lactose intolerance in East Asians as compared to Europeans. But no evidence has been presented that any spice allergies fall in this category.
You know - I just saw someone post a hilarious video in the “what makes things funny” thread. Spoiler - it’s about a Rocket Scientist demeaning a Brain surgeon 
This argument about Spanish saffron versus Turmeric is the same. An Indian spice snob (and there are many) will Pooh Pooh Spanish saffron and say Kashmir Saffron is the best. Same discussion goes with hops among beer connoisseurs.
In my opinion, whatever spices you grew up with are the ones you like.
Because you could lose most of your fleet, make it home with a handful of sailors on a single ship, and still make several times the cost of the expedition on the spices you returned to Europe.
In other words, your post had no relevance for Europeans in general.
Turmeric was introduced to Spain by the Arabs. Perhaps curcuma is more popular today than in the past but it’s hardly unheard of in Spanish (or Latin American) cuisine. And besides that, spices have been imported to Spain from the East Indies since the days of Magellan at least.
Because spices were rare, thus very expensive (since they made their way to Europe along the Silk Road, changing hands many many times with a mark-up each time) and in high demand because if you tell a rich man there’s something, *anything *out there he can’t necessarily have, he must have it NOW. Cornering the spice trade meant making a LOT of dosh.
Another reason is that the people mostly profiting from the trade of spices were Arabs and Turks, and that would obviously not Do. The first expeditions (Vasco de Gama, Columbus, Vespucci…) have to be understood and observed in a medieval context of Reconquista and Crusades still very near and dear to European leaders’ hearts (and purses, but they were piously quiet about that bit) - the ultimate goal was still very much to take back the Holy Land. Finding ways to undercut the Muslims from major international trade routes ; carving a niche for Europeans within the thriving Indian Ocean network, increasing wealth and making diplomatic inroads beyond the Near East were all moves made towards that goal. This because at the time, the Middle East was seen as THE ultimate cash cow even beyond its religious significance.
Anecdote : when Vasco de Gama landed near Calicut (India) in 1498, astonished Tunisian traders there asked him where he came from and what he was looking for there - his answer was “Christians and spices”. This because Vasco de Gama and his backers were ardent believers in the Kingdom of Prester John, a myth stating that a fabulously wealthy kingdom (possibly set in the garden of Eden) existed somewhere beyond Muslim lands ; and they hoped to contact them and ally with them to attack the Holy Land from both sides.
Of course, once the money started flowing in, and Europeans realized there was so much land to be plundered out there, and Spain leveraged them enough to kick the last Caliphs out of Cordoba ; the Holy Land started to look more and more like a big fish in a decidedly small pond and commerce with China became the new hot ticket. But that’s a whole 'nother story.
Other point worth making : the major driver behind colonization and slavery wasn’t spices but… sugar. Sugar had been brought back from the Holy Land by the first crusaders and Europeans just couldn’t get enough of it. There again Arab traders controlled production and distribution, so Europeans tried to pull the rug from under them. They tried to cultivate sugar cane in the Med., in Cyprus and Sicily and then Spain but it didn’t really work ; then Portugal set up a pilot project on the island of Madeira off the coast of West Africa, pioneering sugar mills powered by raw human misery and it took so much better. So of course it couldn’t stop there. Fast forward to the colonization of the Americas and the displacement of slaves to the Carribean and Brazil for the sole purpose of making bags upon bags of sugar, the numbers of slaves needed growing almost exponentially every year, yadda yadda.
Of Magellan’s original expedition of five ships and 270 men to the Spice Islands (Moluccas), only one ship and 18 men (not including Magellan himself) made it back to Spain after circumnavigating. Its cargo of 381 sacks of cloves was worth more than the entire original cost of the expedition, so despite the enormous losses the trip was profitable.
Especially considering that several of the most popular and characteristically “Spanish” spices today, such as pimentón (paprika) and guindilla, originated in the Americas and became part of Spanish cuisine significantly later than the spices of Asian origin such as saffron, mustard or turmeric.
I’m just mad about saffron…
My mistake, I got confused on my geography a bit : the big Eureka re:Portuguese sugar production wasn’t Madeira (where sugar was cultivated but was still very expensive to make) but São Tomé - closer to the equator, closer to African kingdoms for mass slave procurement.
Yup, that’s the one I was thinking of. I dimly remembered it, but couldn’t remember exactly who it was.
It wasn’t just that the Arabs/Turks dominated the trade. There were two related factors:
After the Turks took control of the Spice Road, supply became flaky and undependable.
After the Turks took control of the Strait of Constantinople, the Portuguese lost their trade route through the Black Sea to the Spice Road. Those people who used to sail through the Black Sea now had nothing to do, and looked for something else to do.
So, a bunch of money sitting around with nothing else to do, and sharp rises in the price of spice.
Simple.
Spices are a luxury good that is always in demand.
Spices are compact, have good-ish shelf life, and are very transportable.
Spices have very good cost-per-storage ratio. Some spices are literally more expensive than gold. So one shipload is a literal fortune.
Spices can be bought from their producers for relatively little money.
So you have something that is always in demand, easy to get, easy to sell, easily transportable, and hugely profitable. It is also completely dependent on imports, cannot be made locally.
The only way to make it a better trade product is to make it an addictive drug.
*refer tea, coffee, opium. Also sourced from the same places as the spices, mostly.
For certain values of “easy.”
I wonder if it was ever just a convenient excuse to get away, like “going out for cigarettes”.
Well, I can’t speak for every culture out there ; but the Breton folk repertoire is naturally rife with sailor songs (Brittany was not only a terrible farming land ; but Lorient was built from the ground up as the French East India Company’s town. Hence the name) and many of those songs do feature the “guy who enlisted to avoid a shotgun wedding with some girl he got pregnant” or who fled “some girl he was starting to really fall for and would have settled him down” as protagonists. And of course literature is rife with characters who were strongly “encouraged” by their families to make something of themselves in the new colonies instead of embarrassing every one at home.
That being said, considering the hiring practices of the time, it’s also probable many guys did go out for actual cigarettes ; only to wake up with a sore head somewhere off the coast :p.
Another point in favor of spices as a trade good is that, in the appropriate climate, you can have a never-ending supply of them. A gold seam will eventually be mined out, but you can always just grow more saffron next year.
Considering how a little black pepper goes a long way it wasn’t then actually out of the reach of a skilled man and his family if they wanted it. The price of half an ounce of black pepper would take less than an hour to earn assuming a ten hour day. Thus the market for spices was considerably wider than just “the rich”.