We really don't give a lot of thought to the spice rack in our house. For most of us, it's just a thing that's there, mostly ignored unless we need to pizazz up a soup or something. It’s nothing but a collection of powders of various colors with strange smells. Cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, and so many more. Magical names that we only know because recipe books demand dashes of this and that, forcing us to run out to the grocery store to spend ten dollars on a bottle containing only a few ounces. However, you’re really not giving these spices for their full due. After all, the contents of all those little jars literally and completely altered the course of world history.
For most of European history, the predominant spice widely available to the people of that continent was salt. Now this might not sound too bad to your "I only eat steak and potatoes" uncle, but for the rest of European society it kind of sucked. They didn't even have pepper. That's right, fucking pepper, salt’s number one chum today on everybody’s tables. Now this wasn't the case for many other places in the world, most notably India and Southeast Asia. In these far off places, people enjoyed a myriad of different spices, creating a multitude of flavor combinations which enticed the tongue and enraptured the mind. They also covered up the taste of rotting meat, which is kind of important when you live in the tropics, but we don't need to go into that right now. Anyways, as early as Roman times, the people of Europe began to realize that their food could be more delicious, and thus was born the lucrative spice trade.
Now getting spices from India and Southeast Asia to far off Europe was no easy feat. There were two major routes by which spices traveled. The first was by sea across the Indian Ocean to Egypt and then on into Europe, and the second was by land across the Silk Road from China to the Roman city of Constantinople. Now as you can imagine, this being in the time when sailing ships and horses were the best ways to get around, this took a lot of time and effort, so of course it cost a butt load of money. Only the wealthiest of Europeans could afford the deliciousness of spices. However, the added flavors were so much better than what was locally available that plenty of people thought it more than worth it to pay more than the spice’s weight in gold to get some. After all, gold was shiny, but it doesn't really make your chicken dish pop.
Now this spice trade continued for hundreds of years, and the money in it was so good that the fall and rise of empires didn't really seem to affect it. There were fortunes to be made, and nothing really gets people to forget about religious and political differences quite like a giant pile of cash. However, this all changed in the fifteenth century when the Ottomans came on the scene (the Turks, not the couch). Throughout the first half of the century the Ottomans conquered the Middle East and Egypt, before turning their attention to the Balkans and what remained of the old Roman Empire. In 1453, they conquered Constantinople, allowing them to rename it Istanbul and effectively giving them complete control over all the spice routes between Europe and the Far East. Now the Ottomans were a little more fanatical at the time about the whole religion thing, especially when it came to hating the Christians in Europe, which is fair because many of the Christians at the time hated them just as much. However, the Ottomans were so fanatical that they decided to be huge dicks by putting massive taxes on any spices exported to Europe, effectively cutting off the flow of deliciousness. This didn’t really sit well with the European ruling elite, who were less than happy with suddenly being forced to eat bland food.
Not being the type to just take things sitting down, the European elite instead went with the idea of finding a creative solution by financing expeditions to search for alternative trade routes. Eventually this led to the Portuguese discovering that Africa had a bottom in 1488. Prior to this, pretty much every cartographer in the world, with the likely exception of those living in southern Africa, just kind of thought the continent went on forever. Thanks to this little discovery, the Portuguese established a new trade route to India, thus ensuring they would be rich as hell. Not wishing to be outdone, the Spanish threw a bunch of money in the lap of some dude named Christopher Columbus, you’ve probably heard of him, who was convinced you could get to the Far East just by sailing west. This didn’t quite work out since America was kind of in the way, but it did create an opportunity for Europeans to exploit the New World for glory and profit. This in turn led to the ascension of Europe and western culture to its current dominance today. All because some rich guys wanted to eat tastier foods and the Ottomans being huge dicks.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spices,_Panaji_(6684415299).jpg