Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands approximately 2,000 km (1,243 mi) east of Java. Despite their popularity in European cuisine, the origin of the spices was unknown to Europeans until the early 16th century.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original content at https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1872/european-discovery--conquest-of-the-spice-islands/.