Massimo Montanari
When Vladimir I, prince of Kiev, decided to abandon paganism and embrace the new faith for himself and his people in 986, he summoned to his palace representatives of the four main religions—Christians from Rome and Byzantium, Muslims, and Jews—in order to gauge the validity of each. Among the long theological disquisitions that were made, considerable attention was devoted to the dietary prescriptions of the four faiths, according to the twelfth-century Russian chronicle that describes the event.1 The Jewish and Muslim ban on pork was viewed with disfavor by Vladimir, who also disliked the fact that alcohol was forbidden, telling the envoy of the Bulgarian Muslims: “We Russians like to drink, and there is no way we can live without it.” Nor was he impressed by the Roman Christian observance of fasting as a form of purification, reportedly quipping: “Our forefathers would not approve.”
These were clearly not the only reasons why Vladimir chose Byzantine Christianity, adopting both its doctrine and rituals. But the text stresses the value of diet as a sign of religious, ethnic, and cultural identity. Thus, before continuing our journey through the dietary culture of western Europe under the Church of Rome, we need to focus on the religions with which it came into conflict from the Middle Ages on—Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism. The relationship between these religions involved hostility and exchange, osmosis, and the reaffirmation of difference.
Cultural specifics, nationalist claims, and religious conflict were frequently expressed by means of food and behavior at table. Blessing food indicated faith and conferred upon it a specific identity, excluding others from its consumption. Gregory of Tours tells the story of two priests, one Catholic and one Aryan, who, when invited to lunch by a married couple of different faiths, competed to see who could bless the food first as it arrived at the table, thus preventing the other from eating it. Even eating at the same table as people of a different faith was regarded with suspicion, when not explicitly prohibited, during the Middle Ages. Eating together was a sign of communion and identity, of belonging to the same group. Whether a Muslim should or should not eat with non-Muslims was discussed at length.
However, it was primarily among the Jewish community that dietary prescriptions and proscriptions functioned as a powerful cultural bond, indicating both the identity and the otherness of the group. This worked both ways. Just as Jews distinguished themselves by means of dietary rules, so Christians attempted to define them from outside. Jews were forbidden to use Christian butchers while, in Valencia in 1403, “Jewish” meat was banned from Christian market stalls. These norms were evidently dictated primarily by the desire to define cultural identity with easily recognizable social markers. But there must also have been a more or less conscious “magical” awareness of food, according to which it transmitted metaphorical or symbolic qualities. There is no other way to explain a curious episode described by the fourteenth-century English chronicler Walter Map in which Patarine heretics put a precise food strategy into practice in order to “capture” reluctant proselytes: they “offered special dishes to convert those they could not approach through words.”2
There were many points of contact between the different religions and cultures in medieval Europe and beyond. These links reflected common biblical roots and a basic complicity that was most solid—despite appearances to the contrary—in the early Middle Ages. The language and spirit of the Old Testament was more pervasive in early medieval Christianity than those of the New Testament. Food taboos from Leviticus (such as a ban on meat “soiled by blood”) persisted in apostolic writings and penitential texts. Monastic rejection of meat revealed a perception of it as impure, a marked contrast to the message of the New Testament. This excessive proximity to the Jewish cultural model was one of the accusations made against Roman Catholicism by the Greek Orthodox Church following the schism in the eleventh century. Once again, food symbolism was a central issue. The unleavened bread of the Jewish tradition (similar to the host of the Roman Catholic tradition) was in marked contrast to the “real” leavened bread of early Christianity, proudly preserved in the Orthodox ritual as the symbol of a distinct religious identity.
Meat played a central role in mechanisms of cultural and religious differentiation during the early Middle Ages, when the subsistence-based economy was silvipastoral and forests were measured in terms of the number of pigs they contained. In this context, it is hardly surprising that pigs were regarded as both a symbol and a guarantee of otherness. The remains of St. Mark were smuggled out of Saracen territory hidden beneath salted pork, a technique that was redolent with symbolic implications. Furthermore, in the medieval iconography of the pig’s patron, St. Anthony, it was the only “real” animal (that is, without a symbolic function) to appear above the altar.
In relation to the Islamic world, the pig played an absolute symbolic role, representing Christian Europe in its entirety. (This was less true with regard to Judaism, where the ban on pork was one of many such prohibitions.) Another basic distinction concerned wine, a feature of Christian tables that was specifically excluded—ideologically, if not always in practice—from the Muslim diet. From this viewpoint, the arrival of Islam on the Mediterranean scene played a decisive role in defining European food culture. Under the Roman Empire, the countries around the Mediterranean had been considered a largely homogeneous area, held together by geographical contiguity and uniform political domination around a central point. The Arab invasions of the seventh century turned the Mediterranean into a dividing line. This shift has been regarded as the moment at which the center of the world moved northward to become the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. The foods that represented the new Europe—pork and wine—were confined to areas north of the Mediterranean, a paradox when one considers that wine had always been part of the traditional Mediterranean triad. Even bread, as basic a food in Islamic as it was in Christian culture, acquired an additional sacred role in Europe, becoming in one sense an exemplary element of Christianity. Bread and wine, which had previously defined Mediterranean culture, now defined, along with meat (especially pork), the diet of medieval European Christians.
Islam not only defined medieval Europe’s dietary identity by exclusion but also—and equally significantly—by introducing new elements, often from Persian culture. Many aspects of Islamic cooking turned up in Christian Europe. Even though spices had been adopted in Roman cuisine, their use was extended in variety and quantity (saffron, for example, was actually grown in Europe for the first time). New vegetables, such as eggplant and spinach, were introduced alongside new fruits, including citrus fruits. The arrival of cane sugar led to such delicacies as candied fruit, marzipan, and nougat, along with a taste for creamy textures, scents, and contrasting flavors. Even more substantial contributions to European cuisine were rice and pasta, introduced by the Arabs of Sicily and Spain. These significant additions helped to strengthen those bonds around the Mediterranean that Arab invasion had weakened. Although there were evident northern influences in European cooking, even in Mediterranean countries such as Catalonia and southern and central Italy, these were overlaid and interwoven with equally strong influences from the Arab world.
The extent to which these developments were the result of new influences or a revival of Roman culinary traditions continues to be a subject for debate. There is a good case for both arguments. The Arabs certainly contributed to the development of medieval European culture, while the classical tradition clearly provided its foundation. This is true for gastronomy and even more so for dietetics, which developed during the Middle Ages on the basis of classical authors mediated by Arab writers and doctors. The two sciences shared the same basic interests. Spices, for example, made food more flavorsome and also more digestible.
Classical heritage was even more direct in the food culture of Byzantium, the heir to the Roman Empire and its productive models, based on commerce and the town market. Specific foods were handed down, such as garum (fish sauce), described by Apicius and produced in Greece and on the eastern coasts of the Adriatic up to and beyond the Middle Ages, to be sold in the West. A more general influence was the taste for saltwater fish and lamb (as opposed to pork and beef in the West). Symbols and images of food often mediated the complex political and cultural relationship between Byzantium and the West. The Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to Byzantium, Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, described his disgust at the fatty lamb served at the Byzantine court, as well as the excessive oiliness of the other food and the fetid stench of the garum. He may not have been familiar with these foods. Alternatively, he was emphasizing his otherness from those foods and that culture. In either case, the description was a way of expressing disdain toward his political adversary.3
Food, therefore, frequently played a symbolic role in political and religious disputes. It should not be forgotten, however, that it was precisely these exchanges between different cultures that enabled medieval Europe to forge its own complex and original identity. The people of the time were well aware of this, as is demonstrated by the legend claiming that the school of medicine in Salerno—one of the centers for the diffusion of dietetic and gastronomic medieval culture—originated in the meeting of four doctors of different nationalities and cultures: a Latin, a Greek, an Arab, and a Jew.
NOTES
1. For the episode concerning Vladimir I, see I. P. Sbriziolo, Racconto dei tempi passati (Turin, 1971), pp. 49ff.
2. Walter Map, De nugis curialium, trans. and ed. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
3. See Liutprand, Relatio de legatione constantinopolitana, in Liudprandi opera, ed. J. Becker (Hannover-Leipzig, 1915), pp. 181–82. [Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, trans. and ed. Brian Scott, Reading Medieval and Renaissance Texts (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993).]
