The Crusaders and Figs in Medieval Europe
The Mediterranean fig-growing area extended during the medieval period. In particular, the Moorish conquests in the Iberian peninsula brought fig production on a large scale to Spain and Portugal, which proved to be climatically very well suited and where figs quickly became a crucial part of the Iberian diet. The household accounts of Henry VIII, as we shall see, pay particular attention to a gift of a basket of Portuguese figs received by the king.
With this spread into Spain and Portugal, the entire Mediterranean region became a fig-growing zone. As such, by late medieval times, the zone of the olive (used by the social historian Fernand Braudel as a key definition of ‘Mediterranean’) was very closely matched by the zone of the fig – the difference being that figs continued to grow extensively in the lands of their origin in Arabia and Mesopotamia.
Throughout southern Europe figs were revered and given the highest possible food status, in spite of their abundance in their season (especially the early autumn). They also began to be more widely known and, as fresh figs, even more highly valued in the countries of northern Europe in which, certainly until around the year 1100, fig trees hardly grew at all.
Crusaders marching in a stained-glass window from Brussels Cathedral.
It seems probable that a crucial factor in the spread of a love of figs through northern Europe was the encounter with figs, from the year 1095 onwards, by the invading Crusaders. The northern knights brought back many new food preferences from their barbarous Levantine adventures, and one of them was figs.
The Crusaders, known to the Arabs as al-Franj, encountered new sights, new smells and new tastes, as well as new temperatures, as they travelled south from Constantinople. Everything seemed strange and exotic in the heat hazes as they passed through Turkey and Syria. In the earliest years of the invasions, the response to the exotic sights and places tended to be hatred and savage brutality, as evidenced in the massacres of Jerusalem (1099) and Beirut (1110), and barbarian savagery continued to be typical of some later invaders, most notably King Richard I of England. But in a good number of cases, the Franj warriors started to show signs of going native, forming local alliances, and regarding some of the towns, such as Antioch and Sidon, as their oriental homes. The lush fruit and the Levantine orchards warrant frequent mention in the Crusader accounts of the lands they were occupying. For many of the Franj settlers, the victories of Saladin (Salāh al-Dān) between 1187 and 1192 seemed like an eviction from paradise.
The littoral area remained longer in Western hands, and the lands around Tyre and Acre in particular were occupied by Venetian settlers, following the successes of the fleet of Doge Domenico Michiel (d. 1130). The Venetians acquired orchards of lemons, oranges, almonds and figs. The Venetian fig-growers around Tyre were especially known and admired; but such ownerships were only for a fortunate few. Most Crusaders had to return north with their memories.
Various personal accounts and chronicles tell how the flavours and perfumes of the Near East entranced the Crusaders. The lemons, orange water, rose water and tamarind from these lands captivated their palates. Some strange legacies have been left by the encounter with such tastes – none stranger than ‘brown sauce’ (perhaps best known under the brand name HP Sauce). Now a commonplace accompaniment to the full English breakfast, it was originally an intriguing mix of tamarinds, oriental fruits and spices, sugars and vinegars which the Crusaders found new and wonderful.
The attention of the Crusaders was captured both by new combinations and wholly new flavours. Some were crude and strong, such as the mixtures which we now find in brown sauce and Christmas pudding; some were unthought-of food pairings, like sweet mint sauce with lamb; others were light and exquisite, such as rose water and fresh figs. The Crusaders coveted all these exotic flavours, crude or subtle, and wished to transport them northwards. They sought to create import–export routes, and these worked well for spices, almonds, dates and candied fruits. They were no use, however, for the highly perishable and seasonal fresh figs. As a result, some of the more optimistic returning Franj began to look at ways of transporting fig trees to the north – trying to protect them from the northern winters and to maximize their exposure to the paler summer sun.
Picking figs, from the 14th-century illuminated manuscript Tacuinum Sanitatis.
Fig trees were thus introduced into sheltered south-facing corners of gardens in northern Europe. The example most often cited is the Disiboden cloister garden in Germany, where the figs and other exotics have been convincingly attributed to Crusader influence. Religious cloisters came to have a particular association with fig trees. Even in England, a fig tree in Lambeth Palace is said to have been planted by Cardinal Pole around the 1520s, and a fig tree on the estate of Archbishop Cranmer is said to have been imported from Italy and planted by the archbishop himself, probably in the 1530s.
Figs decorating a Levantine plate.
There is one remarkable English source, from as early as 1257. That was a year of extremely severe weather, and Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk based at St Albans Abbey, reported that ‘the fig trees were almost all destroyed.’ The evocative phrase and especially the words ‘almost all’ imply that there was a good number of destroyed fig trees and, this being our earliest English source, we are left to wonder whether perhaps their recent planting was a contributory factor in their destruction, and whether this is an early reference to a Crusader introduction.
We do have one English reference which is even earlier, although there is no written evidence. There has long been a strong local tradition that a ‘White Marseilles’ fig tree growing in the Tarring Fig Gardens near Worthing was a descendant of a tree first planted there by Thomas à Becket around 1162, the year he became archbishop of Canterbury. Becket was closely associated with the Crusades, and his murderers were sent to do penance by crusading in Palestine, where some of them are said to be buried in Jerusalem.
Throughout this period (from the twelfth century to the fifteenth), the big cities were fig cities. There was no European city of the population of either Istanbul or Cairo. These were the two great centres of the Western and Near Eastern world, and in addition Aleppo, Damascus and Tunis were city states and market centres of similar size and significance to Venice, Florence and Paris. The market structure of the world which had the Mediterranean Sea as its centre was therefore perfectly adapted for the export and import of figs, especially dried figs. The problems which intervened were of wars and alliances, trade routes and transport methods. The position in respect of these problems was very slow to improve. As early as the 1180s, Saladin, that most enlightened of rulers, had courted controversy by setting up trading arrangements with the Venetians and other Christian city states. The Church in the West and Islamic hardliners in Saladin’s own lands were outraged by this trade, and for many centuries religious bigotry was as big a problem for the fig trade as transportation.
Seller of dried figs, from the 14th-century illuminated manuscript Tacuinum Sanitatis.
The Myth which Seduced the Crusaders
The Crusader and chronicler Jean de Joinville, writing around 1305, produced a much-respected life of the French king Louis IX, but the biography also included an account of how the fishermen of the River Nile cast their nets and hauled in exotic products such as ginger, rhubarb, aloes and cinnamon, ‘and it is said that these goods flow from the earthly paradise’. No one can be sure whether Joinville truly believed that the Garden of Eden lay up-Nile and allowed its products to be borne northwards by the great river, but this sort of semi-mythological account of the mysterious and exotic Orient was common between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Those wondrous distant lands, conceived, in the words of the French historian Jacques Le Goff, as un horizon onirique (a horizon of dreams), were laden with images of paradise, especially in respect of their foods.
The Crusaders were seduced by this myth. Some of them sought to gain ownership of the Palestinian land around Acre and Tyre, with its orchards of lemons, oranges, almonds and figs. But most had to try to find ways to bring that exotic distant paradise of dreams home with them, back to northern Europe.
