Christianity, Social Stratification and Medicine: The Early Middle Ages, 5th to 11th Century
Mentioning the Middle Ages invariably brings up stereotypes. In particular the early centuries of this period are often perceived as ‘dark ages’ when the sophistication and knowledge accrued during classical times were destroyed by barbarian tribes, a horde of savages who loved nothing more than to sink their teeth into raw meat and get drunk on beer, as opposed to the refined and well-informed gourmets and wine lovers of Roman times. Another stereotype of the high Middle Ages is that of courtly knights and gracious damsels dining in castle halls at tables covered with heavily spiced, ‘exotic’ dishes such as stuffed peacock and spit roasted ibex. There is truth in both of these extremes, but they are from different points in time – with at least five centuries between them – and represent extreme social differentiation. Where you lived continued to strongly influence your larder and menu, but so did the circles in which you moved and the social group to which you belonged. If you were born a peasant, you ate gruel, just as a noble’s son learnt to hunt.
When the Roman Empire’s influence in Central Europe came to an end in the first years of the fifth century, everybody seemed to be on the move, pushing west and south, some from sheer belligerence, but most out of hunger for food and the land to produce it. With the people came their food preferences, such as the Slavic habit for rye and buckwheat. In other cases existing food landscapes acquired the labels we are now familiar with; the Friesian, Saxon, Frank, Alaman, Swabian and Bavarian tribes settled down roughly in the areas we associate with them today. The population went into sharp decline, not least as a result of devastating pandemics and less favourable climate conditions. Larger cities like Cologne, Trier, Mainz and Augsburg continued to exist, but on a much more basic level. When migration subsided, more land was once again brought into cultivation, with animal husbandry now of equal importance to grain cropping.
At the time, another important influence on how Germans cooked and ate was gaining in strength: Christianity, the new religion that had developed out of Judaism and spread through the Roman Empire. Although early Christians had been severely persecuted, their faith proved extremely resilient, producing an extraordinary missionary zeal. By the turn of the millennium almost all of northern Europe was converted, if not necessarily always of their own free will, though the Slavic east could not be persuaded to accept the new religion until well into the thirteenth century. Based on the general virtues of thrift, modesty and honesty, Christianity had a strong influence on the diet and in retrospect proved to be quite pragmatic when confronted with economic and social problems. In some cases the church adapted pagan traditions to comply with the new religion; in others it prescribed abstinence from them (though it often turned a blind eye to non-compliance). When a series of severe famines threatened the stability of sixth-century Rome, the pope declared gluttony one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Two centuries later one of his successors denounced horsemeat consumption as ungodly and impure, intervening against erstwhile pagan rituals.
As Catholic Christian faith became the official German state religion, the hierarchical structure of the Christian church furthered social stratification. Tribal leaders developed into territorial princes, and the particularism that is one of Germany’s defining characteristics in food, as well as other areas of life, began to take shape. Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire provided a counterbalancing unifying element. With the offical blessing of the pope, as shown by his coronation in Rome at Christmas of the year 800, Charlemagne set out to renovate the former Roman Empire throughout western Europe, embarking on a programme of strict and aggressive Christianization (above all, of the stubbornly pagan Saxons). Based on a standardized administration and unifying system of laws, he established the Franks as the new European superpower.
Charlemagne is reported to have been physically impressive, at least in part because of his decidedly imperial appetite (which wasn’t limited to food, as his five official wives, Frankish, Lombardian, Swabian, East Francian and Alemannian, indicate). His daily meal, admiring reports say, contained little bread but invariably included the spit roasted game his hunters brought to the table in person. Despite repeated warnings from his doctors, the emperor resolutely refused to cut back on his meat consumption, complaining that he had problems eating less. Meat, Romans’ erstwhile offering to the gods, was considered power-food in a ‘magical’ sense. As such it was undoubtedly essential for an emperor who asserted his authority through his personal presence by constantly travelling and staying mostly at church and royal properties. The symbolic importance of these reports becomes even more clear when we read about the Byzantine emperor who, at the end of the tenth century, was disparagingly described by an Italian diplomat as living on a diet of garlic, onions and leeks while drinking his own bathwater.1
Hieronymus Bosch, detail of ‘Gluttony’, from The Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1480.
Schloss Johannisberg Wine estate label from 1904 (as usual, signed by the cellarmaster). This is the hillside where Charlemagne noticed the snow melting exceptionally early on and ordered it to be planted with vines.
Charlemagne not only needed food for himself, but for cities that were newly founded or had begun to grow again around existing settlements. He worked hard to produce an agricultural surplus because he knew that food shortages endangered political stability and would thereby undermine his position. He depended on local leaders’ loyalty and sought to organize food production more stringently. Roman knowledge and craftsmanship had survived on some large estates and in the monasteries. Charlemagne issued the Capitulare de villis vel curtis imperii, an inventory of detailed directives for the management of the royal estates. They prescribed the more efficient, higher-yielding three-field-system under which summer and winter grain were rotated with root crops and fallow periods; included a list of recommended cultivars; and established hunting, Charlemagne’s passion, as a permanent royal privilege. It went without saying that Charlemagne’s ideas of the culinary world included wine, and directives for its production, such as the use of wooden barrels instead of skins to store it, were included in the Capitulare. The first record of viticulture in the Rheingau region, on the hillside that today belongs to the Schloss Johannisberg estate, dates back to 817. Legend has it that the emperor, staying in his palace in Ingelheim on the Rhine early in the year, looked over to the river at the Rheingau. Noticing that the snow had already melted on the hillside which today is Schloss Johannisberg, he ordered that vines be planted there, declaring it a particularly warm and therefore suitable spot. He was right!
Feudal manorialism, the organizing principle of the rural economy which had its origin in the Roman villa system, was well suited to maintaining order on the emperor’s extensive territories. The peasantry had to pay rent or church-imposed tithes and provide labour, military service and haulage to obtain the right to use land; otherwise labourers could be reduced to serfs or bondsmen. In return the lord of the manor provided legal and military protection. The ultimate goal of manorialism was agricultural efficiency, as landlords could impose on a frequently reluctant workforce innovations such as the three-field system, the use of watermills and the systematic use of manure.
Sharing food was strongly loaded with social significance. In reports from Carolingian times meetings are often described in terms of how people met and spoke, ate and drank together, and then departed in peace. Such early medieval conviviality had little to do with personal friendship; rather the communal feast guaranteed and reinforced peaceful alliances among its participants. As a ritual, communal eating had a quasi-legal character. During his visit to the monastery of St Gall in 912 King Konrad made a point of dining with the monks and even spiced up their meal with pepper from his own provisions.2 Treason and aggression were especially to be condemned when related to meals; the misuse of hospitality was a sign of extreme evil and treachery. After the feuding King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII met in 1077 in Canossa, Henry was said in numerous reports not to have touched his food and to have barely talked during the communal meal, indicating how reluctant he was to admit defeat in this battle for ultimate power.3
From a political point of view, one could argue that Charlemagne’s grandiose vision of a united western Europe was short-lived. His system was not strong enough to make it last, as his empire was divided into three after his death in 814. But food-wise it worked rather well. Charlemagne knew that national strength required population growth and that this was only possible with a grain-based diet, which in turn required solid organization of production. In this respect (though keeping in mind that the system had a lot of not so agreeable aspects for some of those involved in it) his legacy was a positive one. On top of that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Christian Church together continued to represent a unifying idea, without whose influence Europe might have fragmented even further.
Vikings, Arab tribes and nomadic Hungarian horsemen represented a continuing threat of invasion throughout the ninth and early part of the tenth century, but they also made for additional cultural impulses. The Vikings, called nortmanni or northern men by the Franks, in particular played an important role as merchants, explorers and colonists. In fact they probably did much more trading than the plundering legend attributes to them. Their seaworthy ships, while capable of making repeated Atlantic crossings, were sufficiently shallow of keel to allow them to be sailed or rowed upriver, maintaining trade routes which reached all over Europe and into northern Africa and the Black Sea, and extending the old Roman trade route along the Rhine that linked the Nordic countries with northwestern Germany. It is easy to imagine how they brought along exotic foodstuffs and spices which made for surprising and inspiring aromas and colours; great exceptions to the local cuisine.
Back then only the aristocracy travelled any distance from home. The average life expectancy was slightly over 30 years and infant mortality was very high. Most Germans lived in very small villages, hamlets or isolated farmsteads surrounded by small agricultural clearings amid vast forests. Labour division by gender meant that domestic economy was women’s duty. For peasant women this included grain milling, beer brewing, cooking and cleaning, but also working in the lord’s vineyards, collecting wild berries in the forest and helping with the grain harvest – not to mention making their own family’s and the lord’s garments from vegetable fibres and wool. While noble families tended to be large, peasants lived in small ‘nuclear’ families with three to four children on average, occasionally sharing houses or forming an estate with other families in which each household cultivated between 2.5 and 3.4 hectares.4 At this time Córdoba, capital of the Muslim caliphate of Al-Andalus on the Iberian peninsula and the largest metropolis in Europe, counted some 300,000 inhabitants, 1,600 mosques and 900 bathhouses – which gives us an idea of what the kitchens must have been like.
It is difficult to know what was actually cooking in the early medieval pots and pans of Germany, as relevant written sources are sparse. Some historians maintain that high culture and refined cuisine were destroyed at the end of Roman era to be replaced by pagan gluttony. The graves containing food shared with the dead in funeral feasts are cited as evidence. While grave offerings became less complex during the following centuries, two fifth-century graves found under a church in Cologne contain chicken and eggs cooked with honey, along with other meats prepared with mustard and sage. Beef ribs and a large roasting spit were unearthed in a sixth-century grave in Krefeld.5 Other historians support the idea that there was a more gradual transition from the dominance of Roman-style cuisine to local styles of cooking. This begs the question of whether essential ingredients of the Roman kitchen such as liquamen (a kind of fish sauce) and asafoetida continued to be imported. There is evidence from the early eighth century of the use of imported garum in a monastery in northern France, l’Abbaye de Corbie, along with other imported groceries such as olive oil, pepper, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, spikenard, costus, dates, figs, almonds, pistachios, olives, chickpeas and rice.6 On the one hand, this might well have been the case in Germany as well. On the other, local herbs, vinegar and verjus might have replaced Roman condiments. The Capitulare lists some 70 herbs and vegetables as being cultivated in the imperial gardens. From the tenth century onwards, however, spices began to arrive once more from Asia, this time through Venetian merchants who dealt in pepper, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, galangal and sugar. Almonds were also a new luxury.7 Saffron, among the most expensive and most valued of spices, was frequently mentioned as an imported spice, even though it was widely planted throughout Italy, Spain and France (and, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, in southern Germany and Austria).
Ibrāhīm ibn Ya’qūb, a tenth-century travelling physician, geographer and merchant from Arab Spain, provided us with a rare window on German habits of the time. When describing ‘the very big city’ of Mainz on the Rhine, he was amazed at finding ‘in the utmost west of the Occident spices that only grow at the very end of the Orient, like pepper, ginger, cloves, spikenard, costus, and galangal; these plants are imported from India where they are growing abundantly.’ There were two possible routes between Asia and Europe; one on the Mediterranean, from France or Spain through Alexandria or Antioch, the other across Central Europe, to Constantinople or the areas on the lower Volga. Mention of a well-stocked spice chest at this time confirms that these mysterious symbols of other worlds – possibly paradise – did not, as widely suggested, require re-introduction as Crusaders’ souvenirs to European kitchens.
Ya’qūb’s notes make fascinating reading. In the course of his travels Ya’qūb made a clear distinction between the Frankish (today Franconia and southern Germany) and Slavic (northern Germany) realms, confirming yet another cultural borderline along the Rhine and midway through Germany towards the east that can still be observed today. Travelling to Soest in Westphalia, he mentioned a source of salted water which the inhabitants of the fortified city boiled in large kettles on a big fire in a stone oven, a process which yielded a hard white salt. This method, he said, was employed in all of the Slavic countries. In fact Lüneburg was officially recognized for its saltworks in 956. Schleswig, an immediate neighbour of Haithabu, was described as a very big city on the ocean, poor in grain but surviving on abundant fish. Quoting the work of another Islamic author of the period, Ya’qūb wrote about ‘strange’ trading habits in Augsburg:
When a merchant acquires merchandise, he writes the price on it and leaves it exposed in his shop. If a customer agrees with the price, he pays it and takes it with him in exchange for the money he is leaving. The shops are guarded and any disappearance of merchandise for the guardian leads to a fine equivalent to the loss.8
Ya’qūb mentioned wheat, barley, rye and vines, as well as fruit in abundance. As Charlemagne had envisaged, from the ninth century onwards a three-field crop rotation system had developed that distributed work more evenly through the year because of the more balanced use of winter and summer crops. This rotating system of cropping and fallow periods did not by itself lead to higher yields, but primarily served to restore soil fertility, though this was by no means understood in anything resembling a scientific manner. Such a system needed a close-knit village community and careful organization to regroup the small parcels of earlier times into larger, more efficient fields, a process which also limited individual decision-taking. Once again Germany gradually switched its diet to cereals, seen as nutritionally most efficient, with smaller supplements of meat and dairy products. Grain came in many different forms, from the thin, dark gruel eaten by the poor to fine white bread for the rich, reflecting the diversity of breads still found in present-day Germany (although today the social classification is almost reversed). Undemanding rye saw a very quick expansion from the eighth century. By the late Middle Ages it was to be by far the most important of Germany’s grain crops, even on more fertile soils. Grain cultivars of lesser importance were huskless wheat (a winter crop), barley (a winter and a summer crop), oat, millet, spelt, emmer and very rarely einkorn. These were cultivated together with oil seeds and legumes – typical summer crops. All these crops, particularly grains, were in all probability a mix of different varieties, the genetic diversity a kind of insurance policy against pests and diseases.
However, famines were a regular feature, since regional redistribution was limited and the surplus from good harvests quickly turned into a shortage in bad years. Also, systematic cultivation gradually began to exhaust the soil, a problem exacerbated by earth-turning ploughs which exposed the subsoil and led to greater soil erosion. Lower numbers of animals also meant less manure, with sheep and cattle murrains such as rinderpest frequently reducing them even further. Manure became a commodity much in demand, and tithes could actually include ‘a pot of dung’, with pigeon droppings considered the most valuable kind.9 Marl was one of the few known alternatives to manure, though it added no new minerals but simply activated those already present in the soil, and, if overused, resulted in even poorer soils. In the northwest, where rye cultivation was especially intense on compact soils, the much more efficient Plaggen system developed. This required overlaying the surface of the soil with a mixture of animal dung and heather turf along with other organic and non-organic matter such as grass, leaf mould, peat, clay and sand.
Our imagined gruel-centred meal starts to be more limited in popularity and reputation, turning into a marker for non-urban lower social groups. Archaeological finds from small rural settlements indicate that the early medieval rural diet in the northwest was very much dictated by local conditions, with a notable lack of exchange or trading activity even between neighbouring communities. At one particular site only four crops were grown: fava beans were by far the most important (and might have been partially fed to the horses these peasants kept), while the other three were barley, oats and flax for oil, without any evidence of any fruit gathered from the wild; besides horses there were sheep and cattle, along with smaller numbers of pigs. At another site where winter floods made for more fertile soils, those four crops were supplemented by wild fruits, apples, camelina, common vetch (a legume and again possibly fed to livestock) and emmer, a rare throwback to earlier times, perhaps because rye dislikes wet soil. On a third site nearby, with poor sandy soils, three-quarters of all available land was planted with rye, with subsidiary crops of barley, oats, flax, a little wheat, fava beans, vetch and peas.
The urban diet was much more varied and refined than that of the countryside. The best-documented example of urban plenty, a result of favourable natural conditions and trading, was found in the Viking settlement of Haithabu (near modern Schleswig). The town was founded around 800, and we can assume similar conditions in other early medieval towns. Foodstuffs cultivated or gathered from the immediate surroundings of Haithabu included barley, rye, oat, wheat, millet, fava beans and flax. Evidence of plums and peaches was found, as well as eight varieties of wild berries, cherries, beechnuts and hazelnuts, with only wine and walnuts imported from a significant distance.10
Viticulture was practised throughout Germany but tended to disappear in unfavourable areas as trade increased. Wine was barrelled up for export to other regions, travelling from the Upper Rhine as far as Stockholm. In northern Germany the preference was for beer or ale and (less frequently) mead. Weak beer was produced and consumed in large quantities, and (at 2 per cent alcohol) was often safer than water. All grain varieties were used in its manufacture. With hops slowly replacing gruit (which could include all kinds of preservative or flavouring herbs such as bog myrtle and sweet gale), beer improved greatly in both palatability and keeping-qualities, and evidence from Haithabu tells us that hopped beer was not restricted to monasteries.
Detailed plans drawn up in the early years of the ninth century for a monastery garden, known as the Plan of St Gall, were probably never fully realized but still supply us with abundant information about what cooks of the time might have had at their disposal. The vegetables to be grown in the hortus were onions, leeks, celery, coriander, dill, opium and field poppies, radishes, chard, garlic, shallots, parsley, chervil, lettuce, savory, parsnips or carrots, cabbage and nigella. The herbularius was reserved for medicinal herbs: sage, rue, iris, pennyroyal, spearmint, cumin, lovage, fennel, lilies, roses, beans, savory, costmary, fenugreek, rosemary and mint. The orchard included apples, pears, plums, pine nuts, sorb, medlar, laurel, chestnuts, figs, quinces, peaches, hazelnuts, almonds, mulberries and walnuts (it also served as a graveyard).
Archaeological records confirm that many of the plants listed for St Gall (although the list was actually drawn up on the Reichenau island) were available from castle gardens in the lower Rhine area in the eleventh and twelfth century. There fruits included cherries (selected for the largest fruits with the smallest stones), but also sloes, quetsches, elderberries, blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, strawberries, grapes and whitethorn. Archaeologists found also amaranth, hemp, peas, mustard, lamb’s lettuce, purslane, cress, spinach, lentils, chickpeas, centaurium, henbane, physalis, dyers’ rocket, acorns and beechnuts. This demonstrates that a varied supply of fruit, vegetables and medicinal plants could be on offer, at least in some privileged places.11
Cultivated sweet fruit was undoubtedly regarded as a great luxury and reserved for those of high social standing, as an episode recorded by a tenth-century scribe in St Gall shows. He tells of a noblewoman who – unable to resist her sugar cravings in spite of having joined the monastery and chosen the simple life – asked for sweet apples. When given ‘poor people’s sour crabapples’, being well-educated, she understood the reprimand immediately.12
Plan of St Gall, 819–26, Reichenau, parchment.
Meat, especially the roasted choicer cuts, was another aristocratic privilege. Bone debris recovered from the castle mentioned earlier in the western Rhineland indicates a regular diet of meat from pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, domestic or wild geese, as well as duck, chicken, hare, wild rabbit, deer and boar.13 Pigs, of no use as draught animals and offering no secondary products such as wool, were killed at optimum size for culinary use, typically in late autumn after fattening in oak or beech woods. Forests and pastures had by then become separate entities and manorial forests’ use had to be paid for. Because of Charlemagne’s hunting restrictions, game had been removed from the peasantry’s regular diet for good. Charlemagne’s Capitulare also addressed the Forestarii, the royal civil servants who were the predecessors of modern foresters. The common folk were required to provide hunting services to the king, such as maintaining the royal grounds and keeping dogs. The rural population was often forbidden even to trap game and was severely punished for poaching. Not only were their crops damaged by hunters on horseback, but they had no effective means of protecting their crops from being damaged by their quarry – their dogs either had to wear heavy sticks attached to their necks or have their front legs lamed so that they could not chase game.
Hunting rights emphasized a ruler’s territorial claims, with organized hunts serving as a practice for wartime as well as a theatrical performance for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. As meat it became less and less important: by the thirteenth century even the aristocracy consumed less than 5 per cent of their meat as game.14 As a mark of favour, the king could confer hunting rights on his most important loyal vassals, who could in turn pass them on to subordinates. Usually, though, the right to hunt ‘higher game’ was reserved for the king or aristocrats of elevated standing. Thus arose a distinction between Hochwild and Niederwild, higher and lower game (reflecting the Bible’s permissible and impermissible animals). At the top of this hierarchy were the stag (red and fallow deer) and the wild boar, along with bear, elk, ibex, chamois, capercaillie and pheasant. To the category of lower game belonged roe deer, hare, partridge, fox, badger, marten and duck. However, the exact makeup of these categories varied depending on royal preferences and regional differences.
Meanwhile the Christian church preached a simpler life. Fasting was presented as the link between diet and virtue. From at least the fourth century on, Christianity had promoted culinary abstinence for its spiritual benefits. The association of meat, eggs and dairy fats with the vices of gluttony and lechery led to a complex pattern of eating. The 40 days of Lent from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday (not counting Sundays), the three Rogation days before Ascension Day and the four Ember days (or even weeks), as well as Advent (the four weeks before Christmas), altogether about one-third of the year, were fast days. The evenings preceding all major saints’ days, Fridays (in memory of the Cruxification) and Saturdays (the Sabbath’s eve) were lean days. Although regional variations undoubtedly occurred, on fast days all parts of warm-blooded animals, milk, dairy products and eggs were prohibited and only one meal could be taken. On lean days the rules were less strict and mostly concerned with the exclusion of meat; a certain amount of intellectual acrobatics was involved, such as the arguments that made the beaver into a fish, citing its amphibious lifestyle and the scales on its tail. Decrees concerning Christian fasting laws flowed freely, the most severe being the Capitulatio departibus Saxoniae of 782, in which Charlemagne imposed the death penalty on anyone who practised any form of paganism, including the consumption of meat during Lent. Fasting could also be imposed as a penance, standing in for prayers, the giving of alms or celibacy. Prohibitions were imposed on certain foods and drink: not only meat and eggs, but fat, oil and wine too. Alternatively redemption could be had by direct payments to the Church and penances could be performed by a stand-in. Carolingian kings tended to use the same measures to punish secular offences, mingling secular and ecclesiastical power.15
The asceticism of nuns and monks – in theory at least – was indicated by modesty in eating as well as clothing. Repeated warnings were issued for priests and bishops not to wear secular clothes, indirectly implying that they had to renounce the possession of weapons and hunting. As we have seen, clerical aristocrats in the early Middle Ages clearly found it difficult to shed the aristocratic lifestyle. Walahfrid Strabo, abbot of the Benedictine monastery on the Reichenau island in Lake Constance in the early ninth century, cultivated and described his sophisticated vegetable garden (possibly the model for the Plan of St Gall) while recommending a simple diet of salt, bread, leeks, fish and wine. He had studied with Hrabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda, who advised what would now be judged a vegan diet as supposedly recommended in the Bible. Strabo really cherished the products of his garden. The monastery had been founded in the eighth century by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries and benefited from an extensive library. In his writings Strabo referred to the works of natural historians of classical times, such as Pliny the Elder, Cato, Columella and Palladius. He stressed the importance of soil quality and the use of dung as fertilizer, recommended adequate watering and was aware of the moon’s influence on growing plants. He clearly favoured regional cultivars such as the bottle-gourd, describing it as being delicious as a dessert when fried in lard (an early example of a recipe!). The garden produced peaches and white-fleshed melons as well as lovage, a newcomer to the monastic herbarium (it is notable that Strabo compared the price paid for pennyroyal in India with that of black pepper in Gaul – another indication that oriental spices did not disappear with the Romans).
The Hunters’ Lunch, c. 1420, tapestry from Alsace. The dogs also get their share.
Admittedly, in contrast to the Mediterranean regions, which enjoyed an abundance of fruit, vegetables, fish and olive oil, such a diet was more difficult to realize the further north you lived. In response to the regional shortcomings, from the eleventh century onwards manors and monasteries stocked their own fishponds and bought in salted herring and stockfish.
In practice abstinence was not always strictly enforced. The chronicler Ekkehard IV, writing of the Benedictine monastery of St Gall, went to great lengths in the early eleventh century to defend the monks’ failures in this respect, concluding that it was possible to be true to Benedict’s spirit even when indulging in good food and wine.16 Fasting periods were preceded and followed by feasting: Easter eggs ritually blessed in church together with the first lamb’s meat, and the twelve traditional dishes standing for the twelve days of Christmas, are the most prominent examples. The excesses of Carnival before the restrictions of Lent can be observed in Germany to this day, especially along the Rhine valley. In many cases pagan habits were incorporated into Christian traditions, as in the case of the Carnival parade in Cologne, first recorded in 1341: this originates in Saturnalia, in connection with the worship of a Roman goddess of shipping and fertility. Other examples include the winter solstice and Christmas, for which the German word Weihnachten (or back then wihe nacht) was first recorded in 1178.
Besides the Christian food rules, medicinal teachings were another, somewhat less obvious factor in determining the composition of early medieval meals. In fact ingredients and spices as well as preparations ‘trickled’ from the pharmacy into the kitchen, since culinary recipes developed out of medicinal prescriptions – the German word for both is still Rezept. It was thanks to Benedict, sixth-century founder of the Benedictine order in Monte Cassino in southern Italy, that classical medical knowledge was preserved and, as a result, disseminated throughout religious establishments in the rest of Europe. Benedictine rules required monks to read at least one religious book a year, thereby furthering literacy, and set the care for the sick above all other duties. Benedictine monasteries were required to provide a separate room and a special ‘servant’ for the purpose of caring for the sick, thus establishing the tradition of monastic hospitals staffed by specialist physicians and pharmacists.
A culinary place in time: Strabo’s Reichenau
Up to the present day the small fertile island at the western end of Lake Constance is renowned for its vegetables and since 2000 a UNESCO world heritage site. The old monastery buildings sit among gardens and vineyards and form a heaven of tranquillity that makes it easy to be transported back to Strabo’s times. His garden has been recreated on old monastery ground. Don’t forget to try the delicious local fish, Felchen (Coregonus wartmanni), which the abbot certainly appreciated as much as contemporary Germans do.
In Germany medieval medicine was significantly improved with the publication of the Lorscher Arzneibuch, a medical and pharmaceutical handbook written in the monastery of Lorsch near Worms around 795. The introduction included a robust defence of the physician’s work against those Christians who thought medical intervention was performed in defiance of the divine will, interpreting illness as a punishment from the Almighty for sins committed. The Lorsch text, in contrast, recommended illness as an opportunity of exercising Christian compassion. The text integrated ancient knowledge with Christian ideals, thus making it part of the Caroligian Renaissance, a process of educational reform which promoted the study of ‘science’.
The Lorsch text also included a great many medicinal recipes based on the works of the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder and recommended that medical treatment be accessible for everybody. Physicians were required to adapt to the patient’s means and acquaint themselves with suitable drugs and herbs available locally. This was a bold defence and valorization of regional products; it might be seen as a medical equivalent to all the vegetables and fruit enumerated in Charlemagne’s Capitulare.
The ideas of the ancient Greeks also flowed back into Germany via the alumni of the medical school of Salerno. Salerno first attracted scholars to what was to all intents and purposes a teaching hospital for the monks of Monte Cassino. It was in eleventh-century Salerno that Constantin, a spice merchant from North Africa, translated medicinal texts from Greek and Arabic into Latin. By this time the Arabs, culturally superior (and more advanced in mathematics and science) and with a far higher standard of living than that of most Europeans, were established in southern Spain, from where they were driven out in 1492, and Sicily, from whence they were expelled by the Normans in 1091. During their ascendancy they introduced a great many innovative ideas to the apothecaries and kitchens of Europe. These included pasta and ice cream as well as the secrets of food preservation and the art of distilling. Perhaps most importantly, they started to cultivate sugar cane in the western Mediterranean region, from where it was exported to northern Europe.
All these elements, disseminated through the close connection between preventative medicine and cookery, made their way slowly northwards and spread throughout Germany. Improved medical treatment led to an understanding of dietetics and, finally, the recording of culinary recipes which were directed at the wealthy classes (since only they were able to read them) – a great leap from the rural labourer’s gruel.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Schwaben, c. 1240–50. Last page, upper third: the banquet on the occasion of Parzival’s return. Note the sumptuous tablecloth and the symbolic difference in size between diners (all seated on one side) and servants.
