Jewish merchants from Venice (remember Shylock of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) would buy the spices from these cities and distribute them all over Europe. The goods would then travel on land to Alexandria or Istanbul.
The trade of the Arabian Sea was controlled by the Arabs and Baniyas of Gujarat who took the cargo of pepper from Kerala and textiles from Cambay, reached Aden and then handed them over to Egyptian, Abyssinian and Arab merchants. Among these spices, cloves and cinnamon came to Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) from Malacca (Malaysia) and Sri Lanka respectively. Seafarers like the Phoenicians, Arabs and Jews, and Venetian merchants used these stories to inflate the prices of the merchandise like spices like black pepper, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon. The chronicles of the journey sounded as if they were taken straight from the adventures of Sinbad the sailor. Before Vasco da Gama set foot in India on, the trade route from India to the West, known as the spice route, had to traverse tricky seas, hostile winds, perilous deserts, regions of looting nomadic tribes, greedy sultans and so on.
