Ewald Kislinger
Constantinople, the great city on the Bosporus, symbolizes the fusion that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries between the Roman concept of the state and Christianity. New Rome, the heir to the empire, was bound by its imperial heritage. At the same time, however, it was strongly influenced by Greece and the East. Despite the ideological and spiritual foundations that it shared with a Latin-Germanic West, the city nevertheless developed its own civilization, now known as Byzantine, from the old name of the city, Byzantion.
The Land and Its Produce
During its thousand-year life, from the late classical period to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the territory ruled over by the Byzantine Empire varied considerably. Up to the Arab advance in the seventh century, it covered the entire eastern Mediterranean. Before that, under Justinian I (525–65), it had gained control over Italy, North Africa, and part of Spain. At a later date, during the reign of Basil II (976–1025), it grew once again, stretching from Calabria to Syria. The core territory—that with which we are most concerned—remained the Balkan Peninsula (more or less to the east of present-day Belgrade and south of the Danube), the Aegean Isles, including Crete, and Asia Minor as far as the Caucasus.
Climatic factors and the lay of the land clearly influenced agricultural production (and, indirectly, population density). The fertile lowlands of Thrace and Thessaly, the floodplains of the Axios and the Aliakmon near Salonika, Bithynia, the river valleys of western Asia Minor with their estuaries on the Aegean, and the coasts of Pontus made it possible to grow cereals (wheat, barley, and millet), olives, fruit and nut trees (apple, pear, plum, apricot, peach, pomegranate, fig, and hazelnut), and many varieties of vegetables, especially pulses. The empire’s woodlands also provided an ideal place to raise pigs. The arid high-lying lands of central Anatolia and the mountainous regions of the Balkans—from the Rhodope massif to the Pindus range—were well suited to a developed pastoral economy. Fishing was carried out in all coastal areas. The sea salt extracted in Macedonia and the Black Sea was used to preserve fish in brine (an activity carried out on a large scale, particularly in the Crimea). Islands like Crete, Euboea, Lesbos, and Rhodes produced good-quality wine, but even areas on the mainland, such as Phrygia, grew vines up to 1,500 meters above sea level, while the merchants of Cilicia (c. 500) exported wine as far as Constantinople. In short, the empire offered a full range of basic agricultural produce, typical of the Mediterranean diet. Issues regarding the use of land (and any damage caused to fields and pastures) were dealt with by the nomos gheorghikos, or peasant law.
Politics and the Food Market: Supply and Demand
The devastating appearance of the plague in 542–45 and successive epidemics, together with Arab invasions of Asia Minor and the Slav occupation of the Balkans, radically transformed the population distribution of these areas in the sixth and seventh centuries. Vast tracts of land were depopulated or fell under foreign domination, while late-classical cities (poleis) were reduced to fortified settlements (kastra). But people’s diets achieved an equilibrium. The reduction of cultivated land (and thus produce) did not create problems for an equally reduced population. A few annual fairs were enough to ensure the volume of regional trade needed. The categories of producer and consumer were, for the most part, one and the same, or at least increasingly similar. It is no surprise that an Avar attack on Salonika should have found its inhabitants outside the city, working in their fields (Miracula Demetrii 2:1). Patras was supplied with food by the slaves living in the surrounding countryside.
By the end of the ninth century, the political situation in the Byzantine Empire had already stabilized. External enemies had been repelled while numerous lands within the empire, which had previously evaded state control, had been reconquered. Great landed estates, or latifundia, increased dramatically in the tenth and eleventh centuries, producing surpluses in areas where harvests had previously yielded no more than three or four times the seed sown. Buyers for the surplus were found in Italy, where increasing food demands could not be met by local supplies. The relative safety of movement between East and West (partly owing to the decline of Arab power, with the loss of Crete in 961 and of Sicily from 1061 on) made it easier for the Marine Republics, above all Genoa and Venice, to develop their trade. Previously restricted to luxury items from the East (spices and silk), trade in these cities became increasingly comprehensive.
To start with, not only the producer benefited from this trade, but also the Byzantine state through taxes and tributes. As time passed, however, western traders began to take over the domestic market to such an extent that they controlled the retail sales of foodstuffs. The account books of a middleman (c. 1360) in Heraclea, on the Black Sea, contain numerous references to Venetian cheese imported from Crete and caviar from the Venetian colony of Tana on the Sea of Azov. Between 1436 and 1440, in the Constantinople suburb of Pera, many Byzantines bought everyday items from the merchant Giacomo Badoer. The Byzantine oikumene, or world, had been economically undermined and fragmented, primarily as a consequence of the Fourth Crusade, into a series of small political entities. As a result, they were unable to resist the immense political and economic power of Venice and Genoa. In the best of cases, they were relegated to the role of junior partners and thus easily subjugated. In 1348, for example, Genoa reacted to the Byzantine policy of dumping in Pera, the independent Genoese colony within the capital, by withholding supplies of grain and wine (Alexis Macrembolites, Logos historikos, 147). It was not until the Ottoman conquest (or pax turcica) that the market became unified and balanced once again.
THE SPECIAL CASE OF CONSTANTINOPLE: SUPPLYING A METROPOLIS Constantinople inherited not only Rome’s historical role but also its incredible size and urban structure. The area inside the Theodosian walls was approximately 1,400 hectares while in the same epoch Salonika and Trebizond covered only 270 and 90 hectares, respectively. At almost all times, then, the city par excellence had hundreds of thousands of mouths to feed.
During the earliest centuries, Byzantium continued to follow the Roman custom of importing grain from Egypt. A special fleet left Alexandria three times a year to transport the 800,000 units of grain requested by Emperor Justinian’s edict (XIII.8).
Without even considering bad years, the distances that had to be traveled made the entire food supply system unreliable and subject to crises. Contrary winds often blocked ships at the entrance to the Sea of Marmara. At the mouth of the Hellespont on the island of Tenedos, a grain warehouse made it possible to unload supplies so that the fleet could be rapidly prepared for further voyages. Despite this, crises in supply occurred more than once. When it became impossible to buy wheat bread in 582, the emperor ordered barley from the imperial reserves to be used. The situation remained desperate, and ground pulses were mixed with the barley flour. Nevertheless, people continued to die of hunger and only a miraculous catch of tuna saved the city from starvation (Michael Siros, X, 19).
The victims of disasters of this kind accentuated Constantinople’s population decline, which was already dramatic following the epidemics mentioned above. At the same time, however, they had the secondary effect of making it easier to feed the city. Already during the Sasanian occupation of Egypt (which began in 616 and lasted several years), it was possible to find a rapid substitute for Egyptian grain. Thrace and Bithynia soon supplied the city with its needs, later to be supplemented by grain from the northern regions of the Black Sea. Supplies from Egypt were interrupted even before the country was finally lost to the empire (641–42).
State control covered almost all basic Byzantine foodstuffs. It is significant that the term “meat” was limited to the flesh of pigs, sheep, and goats. Cattle did not provide meat but were regarded as working animals. The gourmet who, in a twelfth-century satire inspired by Lucian, dictates a shopping list from the after-world, would have been satisfied by the array of goods offered in Constantinople: “Send me then a five-month-old lamb, two fattened three-year-old chickens, like the ones the poultry sellers (ornithopolai) have at the market, where the fat of the breast hangs down to the legs, a month-old suckling pig, and, finally, a pig’s udder, the fattest you can find” (Timarion). In the fifteenth century a similar wealth of produce could be found at seaside markets, where—according to a contemporary source—butchers, dried-meat vendors, fishmongers, and fruit and vegetable sellers (lachanopolidai) all had their stalls.
Fruit and fresh vegetables do not appear in the Book of the Prefect, although they were widely grown in the surrounding countryside and in the city itself. It was probably their abundance that made it possible for market regulations to ignore them. The Gheoponika, a sixth-century collection of rules concerning the cultivation of fields and gardens that was then revised in the tenth century, provides an idea of the variety available in its list of the seasonal products permitted by the climate of Constantinople: “In February, sow: parsley with leeks and onions, carrots, beets, beans, salads of various types, and also green cabbage, sprouts, coriander, dill, and rue. Transplant: salads, chicory, lettuces, Phrygian salads. In May, sow: beets, orache, as well as mint. In September, sow: beet mallow, late endives, and wild beet. Transplant: turnips, winter endives, coriander, and horse-radish. In October, sow: salads, chicory, lettuces. Transplant: rape, beets, endives, watercress, rocket, cabbages. In November, fenugreek. Transplant: beets and, separately, mallow.”
The last state interventions to be made in the supply and demand relationship occurred during the reign of the Palaeologi (1259–1453). These interventions were mainly prompted, however, by the state’s desire to raise income through taxes. In the middle of the fourteenth century, for example, Venetian taverns boomed in Constantinople, since the exemption from sales tax, established by their contracts, enabled proprietors to sell wine from Crete and other places at lower prices, thus attracting Greek customers. The imperial authorities repeatedly threatened to block imports and to impose special duties in order to increase the volume of business—and of taxes—in Byzantine inns. In 1363, after long negotiations, a compromise was reached. The number of Venetian taverns permitted to sell draught wine (ad spinam) was reduced to fifteen, while the number allowed to sell tax-free wine in bottles remained the same. Groups of customers thus had the choice of buying a bottle to share outside the tavern or drinking their wine on the spot. Watered down to this extent, the agreement made little difference to Byzantine tax returns.
SUPPLYING THE ARMY A soldier’s rations depended, above all, on the extent to which specific products could be preserved. Instead of fresh bread, he received paximadion (in Latin, buccellatum), a kind of rusk, baked twice to make it light and dry. During marches, meat and bacon were available in salted form and, during campaigns, in salt water. When soldiers were in the camp, they had fresh meat provided by the animals they took with them. The quality of drinking water was carefully controlled. Mixed with wine vinegar, it became phouska (in Latin, posca). Repeated warnings in military writings that water bottles should be filled with water and not with wine, however, clearly reveal the soldiers’ preference.
Cooking Methods
The Byzantine cuisine did not always offer hot, cooked food. Apart from ideological and sociological restrictions, the working day of the peasants restricted their diet to bread, cheese, olives, and fruit. Moreover, in the bigger cities there was a shortage of fuel. Reinhold von Lubenau, who traveled across the Ottoman Empire in 1587–89, noticed that in thousands of houses in Constantinople fires were never lit from one year to the next and that nobody cooked food at home because of the price of wood. People found it cheaper to eat in taverns.
These taverns had replaced the ancient Roman popina and the Byzantine kapeleion. They offered mostly pulses and vegetables, cooked and kept simmering in the pot with water and oil to form a kind of soup. This was followed by pieces of lamb or pork cooked on a spit, familiar to readers of Homer as the “meat dripping with fat” and to today’s tourists as the souvlaki of Greek tavernas. Undoubtedly, with its spit-roasted meat, fried fish, and frequent use of garlic, onions, and leeks, Byzantium respected a centuries-old tradition, although it would be unwise to assume that this was entirely unbroken. Garum (garos), for example, a kind of liquid extracted from macerated fish that had been very popular since ancient times as a condiment, is now the name of a salt solution used in modern Greece to preserve fish with no culinary value of its own. The main sweetener today is sugar whereas in Byzantium honey was used—spread, for example, on flatcakes fried in oil. Citrus fruits for dessert, such as limes with honey, were rare up to the nineteenth century, when they appear to have been imported from the West. In their drinking habits, too, the Byzantines differed from modern inhabitants of the region. Wine was not drunk neat but rather diluted with warm water (the modern Greek word for wine, krasi, comes from the Byzantine kerannymi—“to mix”). Both the addition of resin to ensure that the wine would keep and the mixing of the must with rose petals, fennel, or celery gave the wine an unusual flavor.
Dietary Rules
THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM Basil the Great of Caesarea, in his De legendis gentilium libris, said: “You shall not be a slave to your body, but you shall do all you can to procure that which is best for your soul, which we free, so to speak, from a prison if we separate it from the passions of the flesh.”
One of the main tools available for weakening the bondage of this prison and freeing the soul was fasting (nesteia). While greed was the first step toward a total surrender to the blandishments of the senses, fasting worked as a remedy: contraria contrariis. By fasting, the flesh, susceptible to wayward passions, could be rendered powerless, the influence of the devil curtailed, and the sin of Adam cleansed. Most people chose the wilderness, far from luxury and abundance, for this spiritual exercise (askesis), which had already been prescribed by Judaism and the Cynic philosophers. The act of dietary asceticism held extreme renunciation and the preservation of God-given life in a precarious balance. It was in the desert wilderness that the hermits (eremos, or “solitary”) of the third to fifth centuries endeavored to acquire apatheia, indifference to the senses and earthly passions. Having achieved their aim, some of these hermits returned, less “earthly” than before, to a world that was, in its turn, becoming increasingly detached from paganism. These victorious pioneers of faith had the new task, in a world that was by now largely Christian, of being instructive and stimulating examples for others, advisers who were both within society and yet outside it. After the emperor, the saint was the second guiding figure in Byzantine society, and, at the same time, an unreachable model for normal citizens. He had to be unreachable because a society made up entirely of saints could never function. Other ways, more practicable from a social and economic view, to tear the people away from earthly temptation and lead them toward redemption thus had to be found.
As members of a pious community, the faithful could effectively compete to save their souls. Independently of their social class, a good 10 percent of the population chose this path. The first monasteries in Egypt and the area of Syria and Palestine grew up out of the local community of hermits and were still regarded as rigorously alternative worlds. The monastic community of Mount Tes Nitrias, to the west of Alexandria, comprised 5,000 men with “diverse life styles: each does what he can and what he wishes, to the extent that one can stay alone or in the company of another or of many others. There are also seven bread ovens that serve these men and the anchorites of the desert…There is a big church…and, next to the church, a hostel (xenodocheion)…. On the mountain there are also doctors and pastry-makers. Wine is used and even drunk” (Palladius, Lausiac History, fifth century). The large monastic centers, such as those on Olympus in Bithynia, on Latmos near Miletus, or the haghion oros, still in existence, on Mount Athos, were organized along the same lines.
Although the monastic system was originally conceived as being in opposition to the rest of society, like the figure of the hermit himself, it soon settled into a form of coexistence, becoming part of the local economic and social fabric. Founded in 1088 on the then deserted isle of Patmos, the monastery of St. John already owned four ships by the end of the twelfth century, using them to transport goods from one of the monastery’s Aegean possessions to another. Despite its imperial role as an “island of monks,” Patmos also provided a home for lay people. These men worked five days a week for the monastery before returning to their families. The diet offered by the monastery was the basic minimum—one meal a day of uncooked food. According to the statutes of other monasteries, however, both the number of meals and the amount of food varied considerably from one monastery to another.
Thanks to the weekly days of fasting and four other periods of abstinence (Lent, Pentecost, the first half of August for the Feast of the Virgin, and the forty days following November 15 for Christmas), eastern Christianity reached far beyond the walls of the monastery, influencing everyday diets by offering laypeople another, less demanding way to achieve saintliness in life.
The fasting prescribed by the faith, however, was not simply a question of voluntary renunciation. It was often used as a form of punishment by ecclesiastical trials. The sinner had to make up for his shortcomings by subjecting himself to a diet that was more or less that of a monk. Penitence through renunciation implied that the object of renunciation was normally available and appreciated. These rules thus shed light on everyday diets.
The Christian attack on alcohol and, in particular, on wine—since the Byzantines considered beer to be barbaric—was highly effective. Sigurd of Norway, during his time in Byzantium IIII, realized that his men were dropping like flies. The reason for this seemed perfectly clear, and Sigurd ordered them to drink less wine or to dilute it. But the intemperate drinkers were later absolved. It was not so much the amount they had been drinking as the quality of the wine itself: when a pig’s liver was immersed in undiluted wine, it immediately dissolved. In vino veritas. As a monk said centuries earlier, enlightened after a couple of glasses as to the nature of the liquid: “Stop, don’t you know that this is the devil himself?”
SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION The table of Isaac II Angelus, emperor of Byzantium (1185–95), overflowed with bread, game, fish, and wine (Nicetas Choniates, 441). Wholegrain bread (psomos pithyrodes) and fresh cheese (asbestotyron), however, were the only things available in the cupboard of a simple woman (Theophanes Continuatus, 199). At first sight, the king and the peasant woman would appear to come from two different worlds. Yet they both belonged to the same Byzantine society. The quality and quantity of produce available was correlated to the social position and economic possibilities of the consumer. In other words, the supply was inversely proportionate to the social pyramid, at whose apex stood the emperor and his court.
The successors to the throne of Constantine remained faithful to the food culture of an Apicius. In homage to the self-representation of imperial dignity, the table at court was laid with a boned chicken filled with almonds in honey sauce, or even an entire roast sheep whose belly was opened to reveal a flock of live sparrows (Theodoros Prodromos, Rodanthe and Dosicles, twelfth century). Fishermen from Tembros (today’s Porsuk Çayi) in Phrygia cast their nets in the service of the court. Carp (kyprinos) and other freshwater fish were also part of this lavish imperial diet, independently of the restraint of numerous sovereigns. Measure (metron) and a sense of economy (prosekon), two typical virtues of the basileus, must have ensured that the solemn feast did not degenerate into debauchery and that these Christian rulers behaved in a manner befitting that of kings whose power was granted by God. Moreover, even during feasts, no opportunity was wasted to demonstrate toward subjects ostentatious philanthropy and charity (phrontis, euerghesia) by inviting the poor to certain banquets.
The upper classes tried to demonstrate their closeness to the throne through external aspects of their behavior, such as a fondness for fine food. Nor should we forget the efforts made by the wealthy to alleviate poverty through charitable acts. The network of benevolent foundations (euagheis oikoi) included not only hostels, hospitals, and homes for the aged but also public soup kitchens. The hospice for the poor run by Michael Attaleiates fed six needy people daily, offering them a piece of bread as well as meat or fish, cheese, pulses, and cooked vegetables.
The fourteenth-century Book of Fish (Opsarologos) reflects, on a smaller and highly specific scale, this kind of social differentiation. The role played by fish in Byzantine cooking, which had fifty everyday ways to prepare it, here takes on a literary form as the protagonists in a trial for high treason are represented as fish. Gray mullet (kephalos), perch (labrax), and sole (psession), all excellent fish to eat, represented high functionaries. The smaller, cheaper, and less tasty sardines (engraulis), scorpion fish (skorpios), and other less prestigious sea fish (smaris) were the minor dignitaries, while the accused was represented by a dried mackerel, and the emperor—which comes as no surprise—was a sturgeon.
MEDICAL RULES Byzantine medicine, anchored in the tradition of Hippocrates and Galen, was based on the pathology of humors. Illnesses were attributed to the unbalanced mixing of the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile. These imbalances were, in their turn, caused by mental disturbances, seasonal and other external influences, and, last but not least, a bad diet. The choice of the right food on a day-to-day basis made an essential contribution to maintaining a healthy psychosomatic equilibrium. Each foodstuff was associated with the qualities of hot, dry, moist, and cold, with each of the four humors possessing two of these qualities.
Academic treatises such as Simeon Seth’s Compendium of the Effects of Different Foodstuffs (eleventh century) certainly existed, but monthly diet and health calendars were far more accessible to the lay person. One of these suggests: “May: wash your hair frequently. Eat warm foods, fennel, and drink its juice to eliminate bile. June: drink undiluted wine [akraton], a glass in the morning, and make sure that it is white. Eat lettuce with vinegar because it is good for the stomach. July: abstain from venereal commerce, do not let blood or vomit, eat sage and rue and drink fresh and pure water.”
As far as eating was concerned, diet-sheets known as Hierophilos contained even more information. For example, they warned against drinking “moist” drinks in November and advised eating “dry” meats such as venison, roe deer, boar, and hare. It is worth noting that game was mentioned far more frequently in these texts than in other sources. Since hunting was a pastime for the powerful, it is likely that these sheets were aimed at people in these circles. The fifteenth-century doctor John Kaloeidas wrote a letter to an illustrious Byzantine suffering from gout. The letter contained a series of dietary recommendations. The patient was to avoid fatty meat, pulses, raisins, and pine kernels, but could eat soup with lamb’s meat, partridge, and thrush. John Cortasmenos blamed marrow, eaten in a state of physical prostration, for cases of shivering and headaches, while he believed that grapes and caviar from Pontus, eaten for breakfast at an inauspicious moment, caused breathing difficulties. It is very doubtful, however, whether an average and possibly illiterate Byzantine, when faced by a plate of salted pork in a sauce of Phrygian cabbage, would have thought for one second about the balance of his humors. Even Psellus devoted a whole letter (no. 233) to the delights of a plateful of truffles (hydnon); warnings that they caused bad humors were completely disregarded.
Food and Drink: The Image of the Other
The best-known book written by a foreigner on Byzantine life was Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, the work of the tenth-century bishop and diplomat Liutprand of Cremona. He was disconcerted by what he found on his travels. He disapproved of the frugal meals of his Greek counterparts (insipit et claudit cenam lactuca tenacem) and of the food at court, which was, in his view, dripping with oil and steeped in a disgusting fish sauce. He was equally unimpressed by some fatty mutton dressed in garlic, which the emperor himself had eaten. According to both Nicetas Choniates, in an account written in 1204, and Eustace of Salonika, a Latin would sell his soul for a fillet of beef or salted pork and pureed beans, dressed in a garlic sauce.
When considering these reciprocal attacks, a question comes to mind. Was Liutprand a precursor of nouvelle cuisine or did Byzantine tastes change rapidly between 1000 and 1200? There can be no way of knowing.
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