The Italian merchants sometimes sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to Syria, where they could buy black pepper that had been grown on the southwest coast of India. The tiny dried black peppercorns were the perfect item to trade, because the small ships of the time could carry enough to make a nice profit. From India the pepper was shipped across to Arabia, where camel caravans would carry it all the way to Syria. The Italians could purchase enough pepper in Syria to carry with them to the next Champagne fair. Every count whose cook added the bite of costly black pepper to his food knew he was getting a taste of far distant lands. As late as 1300, Jean de Joieville, a French writer who had actually lived in the Muslim world, still believed that these spices came from the outer edges of the Garden of Eden, located somewhere along the river Nile. There, people “cast their nets outspread into the river, at night; and when morning comes, they find in their nets such goods as . . . ginger, rhubarb, wood of aloes, and cinnamon.”

–Sugar Changed the World,
Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

What is the central idea of the passage?

-In the Middle Ages, spices that are now ordinary were rare imports from faraway places.
-The spices at the Champagne fair were from the Middle East, where they were used in cooking.
-Pepper was highly regarded in Europe, so merchants demanded more and more of it.
-The Champagne fairs relied on a vast trade network that drove up the prices of new and rare goods.