119 In what has been considered one of history’s greatest paradoxes, a taste for spices is credited with impelling early modern Europeans around the globe. 1 This apparent contradiction, which highlights seemingly frivolous desires that transformed the world, stems from a perspective shaped by historiographical advances and popular traditions that have focused on consumption in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire. 2 By that period, “sugar and spice / and all that’s nice” had become the essential, accessible, mundane and commonplace ingredients of “little girls,” to cite a famous nursery rhyme. 3 Over three centuries, in the words of Sidney Mintz, sugar had been “transformed from a luxury of kings into the kingly luxury of commoners.” 4 The same could be said for spices, which became “demysti- fied” over the sixteenth century, as Stefan Halikowski Smith has argued with reference to Portuguese trade. 5 By examining courtly rituals, moreover, the present chapter highlights changes in consumption practices and material culture in response to an increased supply of spices and shifting demand for them. Associated with princely wealth and prestige, spices acquired a symbolic value that would be transferred to other goods. Since the Middle Ages, the successive, cumulative efforts of Venetian, Portuguese, Castilian, Dutch and English adventurers who risked their lives and fortunes overseas, not to mention countless Americans, Africans and Asians, made sugar and spice ever more abundant and less expensive in Europe, transforming their uses and meanings. The demand for sugar and spice has been persistently and convincingly credited with “fueling” Iberian expansion, initially to compete with the republic of Venice and, later, stimulating Dutch and British intromissions in Iberian enterprises that would nourish their own incipient empires. 6 Famously, the fortunes of late medieval Venice were built upon privileged access to Islamic spice caravans and maritime control of the Black Sea and western Mediterranean, compli- cated by the Ottoman Turk’s territorial expansion. 7 Further challenging the Venetians, though without destroying them, Portuguese mariners, traders and captains circumnavigated Africa to reach the Indian Ocean and attained 7 Taste Transformed Sugar and Spice at the Sixteenth-Century Hispano-Burgundian Court Bethany Aram B. Aram et al. (eds.), Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824 © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014