Amazing passage from Fernand Braudel’s book The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II on the Mediterranean snow trade. Reads like something from a magical realist novel:

In Turkey in the sixteenth century [snow] was not merely the privilege of the rich; in Constantinople, but elsewhere as well, Tripoli in Syria, for instance, travellers remarked on merchants selling snow water, pieces of ice, and water-ices which could be bought for a few small coins. Pierre Belon relates that snow from Bursa used to arrive at Istanbul in whole boatloads. It was to be found there all the year round according to Busbecq, who was astonished to see the janissaries drinking it every day at Amasia in Anatolia, in the Turkish army camp. The snow trade was so important that the pashas took an interest in the exploitation of the ‘ice mines’. It was said in 1578 to have provided Muhammad Pasha with an income of up to 80,000 sequins a year.

Elsewhere, in Egypt, for example, where snow arrived from Syria by relays of fast horses; in Lisbon which imported it from great distances … Western pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land in 1494 were astonished to see the owner of the boat presented, on the Syrian coast, with ‘a sack full of snow, the sight of which in this country and in the month of July, filled all on board with the greatest amazement’. On the same Syrian coast, a Venetian noted with surprise in 1553 that the ‘Mores’, ‘sprinkle snow on their food and dishes as we would sugar’.