The French have a special love affair with fruit. Each year, France produces more than 2.5 million tons of apples, grapes, pears, and the like—but even this staggering bounty is not enough to slake the French appetite for les fruits, with imports rising every year.1 Many French people satisfy their cravings at specialty shops called fruiteries, which sell only fruits and vegetables, and with a sense of reverence that can be astonishing to outsiders. Customers must not touch the wares themselves, for example, but wait for an assistant to carefully select and bag the perfect specimens.
This French affection for fruit can be seen in many idioms of everyday life. If you want to come to a compromise over something, you must “cut the pear in two” (couper la poire en deux). Picking one’s brain might be expressed as “squeezing one’s lemon” (presser le citron). If you want to convey a sense of “eh” or “so-so” when asked for an opinion on something, you might say it’s “half fig, half grape” (mi-figue, mi-raisin).
Yet there is one particular French fruit idiom that seems to make no sense at all: ça compte pour des prunes (“it was worth plums”). This is something you might hear when you’ve invested a great deal of effort in something that eventually came to naught. The clear implication is that plums are worthless, nothing to strive for. But plums are actually adored in France. So where on earth does this saying come from?
To begin, we must clear up some linguistic confusion. The juicy fruits known as prunes in France are what most of the Anglospeaking world would call plums, while the dried plums known elsewhere as prunes are in France called pruneaux. In France, both are produced in the sun-drenched southwest, between Toulouse and Bordeaux. The most highly prized variety of plum is the small, green, and succulent Reine-Claude. It is named for the wife of King Francis I, Queen Claude, who during her reign in the early sixteenth century was known for distributing plums from her garden to the common people. Today, their appearance in French markets every August provokes squeals of delight from gourmands, who might use them to create a sweet confit to accompany foie gras, or perhaps preserve them in Armagnac, or just gobble as many as possible while their short season lasts. The southwest region is also home to the famous pruneaux d’Agen, the delicious and nutritious prunes that sustained seafarers in centuries past and today continue to delight French palates. They are particularly tasty when accompanied by Roquefort and perhaps a bit of cognac.
The popularity of these plums hints at a more obscure history underlying our curious idiom. In the end, we might attribute the notion of plummy failure to God—or, more accurately, his representative here in the earthly realm of France, namely the Catholic Church.
In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade with a ringing speech before a great crowd in Clermont, in central France. The occupation of the Christian Holy Land by the Seljuk Turks had become intolerable, and the tottering Byzantine Empire was unlikely to repel them. Pope Urban had also grown frustrated with the European nobility, who fought each other endlessly, preyed upon the clergy and the weak, and were not sufficiently obeisant to his authority. Why not find a way to channel all that violent energy toward a more worthy cause, like reconquering the Holy Land? Those who met their death, either in battle or by some misfortune on the road, would be granted admission to heaven—a powerful inducement back in those pious times. (Of course, more venal incentives, such as wealth and glory, could not be entirely discounted either.) The pope must have been pleased at the enthusiastic response to his call, as tens of thousands of men signed up for the crusade.
The armies of the First Crusade, led by some of Europe’s greatest lords, departed the following year. Over the next three years they gradually conquered more territory in the eastern Mediterranean, and in 1099 they finally captured Jerusalem. Their victory was capped with a horrific massacre of the town’s defenders and civilian inhabitants: “There was so much slaughter that our men put down their feet in blood up to the ankle,” wrote the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, one of the most important contemporary accounts of the First Crusade.2 It was neither the first nor the last Crusader atrocity, and it evoked little spiritual angst (the primitive laws of war at the time only applied when facing Christian foes). The European forces continued to seize important towns, such as Acre, Tripoli, and Tyre, and created new European principalities known as the Crusader States (or Outremer, French for “overseas”). As it happens, the conquest was the easy part, greatly facilitated by the bitter political and religious schisms afflicting the Islamic world at the time. Holding on to the conquered lands would prove a lot more difficult.
It is commonly said that European gastronomy benefited greatly from the Crusades, due to the invaders’ encounters with new exotic spices and ingredients. But in truth, this narrative is misleading. A number of spices often said to have been discovered in the Crusades, such as pepper and ginger, had graced noble tables in Europe since Roman times. Saffron, which had been cultivated in Europe in antiquity, was reintroduced by Arab invaders sometime after the eighth century. Substantial cross-cultural exchange and trade occurred long before the Crusades, especially in Islamic Spain and Sicily. So the actual culinary impact of the Crusades in Europe is more limited than commonly thought, although the late-medieval preference for sweet and fragrant dishes probably owes something to a greater appreciation of Arab and Persian cuisine. European merchants also benefited from Crusader control of Levantine port cities, which allowed them to temporarily seize a portion of the lucrative spice trade. Perhaps the greatest effect, in terms of its global impact, was the Crusaders’ encounter with sugar, which Europeans began importing from the Middle East in larger and larger quantities.
It can’t be said that the Crusaders bequeathed to the locals any sort of culinary riches in turn. In fact, one of the streets in a new Jerusalem marketplace servicing European pilgrims was known by the locals as Malquisinat, the “Street of Bad Cooking.” It was situated between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount, where the Crusaders converted the Al-Aqsa Mosque into a Christian church.
After the conquest of Jerusalem, many Crusaders returned home, and it proved difficult for the Christian rulers to maintain security within their newly won territories and along the historical pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land. In response, a French knight named Hugh de Payns gathered a handful of fellow knights and formed a new military-monastic order in 1120, with the aim of defending Jerusalem and Christian pilgrims. As monks, they took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but instead of working in the fields or copying books, they trained and fought as warriors. The popes at that time, ignoring the fact that “warrior-monk” should have been an oxymoron, not only approved of the new order but granted them special rights, and as a result they only answered to the papacy, not to any national sovereign. The king of Jerusalem gave them living space near the former Temple of Solomon, and thus they became known as the Templars.
Nobles in Europe were increasingly drawn to the Templars, who offered the opportunity to continue fighting and slaying while earning salvation. Donations also started flowing in from pious nobles and grateful pilgrims, and the Templars quickly became very rich. Much of this funding was used to support Templar forces in the Holy Land and to build the mighty fortresses that were crucial to maintaining European control in these territories where they were heavily outnumbered. But the Templars also began to dabble in monetary transactions: you could, for example, deposit money with the Templars in France and withdraw the sums when you arrived in Jerusalem. The French kings began to keep their money with the Templars—what safer place could there be than a bank guarded by warrior-monks? Later, the Templars also loaned money to the nobility, circumventing the Church’s ban on usury with a series of complex financial mechanisms. (Evidently, using complex financial mechanisms to get around the rules is not a recent banking invention.)
Over time, the Templars came to own a vast portfolio of lands and properties throughout France and western Europe. They built fortresses and churches in many towns and cities, and their huge agricultural estates—known as commanderies—produced copious amounts of food, wine, and livestock. They also owned salt ponds, enabling them to produce that most valuable commodity. At their height in the thirteenth century, the Templars owned more than nine thousand forts and dwellings in Europe and the Holy Land. Most of these no longer exist, but some key sites and ruins can still be visited in France today. The Larzac plateau in southwestern France, for example, hosts several Templar villages, including the remarkably intact La Couvertoirade.
The diet of the Templars very much resembled that of other monks, but they were allowed to eat meat three times a week. It is actually thought today that their restrained eating habits, which involved lots of vegetables, fruits, and fish, were responsible for the noted longevity of Templar knights, which back then was seen as a sure sign of divine approbation.3 The Templars were less likely to suffer from cardiovascular diseases or gout, a painful disease common among the nobility that results from too much meat and alcohol.
Unfortunately for the Templars, the whole crusading business did not end up very well for the Christians. In 1187, Salah ad-Din—the legendary sultan of Egypt and Syria, known to posterity as Saladin—defeated the Crusader armies in the famous Battle of Hattin, which allowed him to reclaim Jerusalem. (It is said that Pope Urban III dropped dead upon hearing the news.) Subsequent crusades failed to reclaim the city, and finally the rise of the powerful Mamluk dynasty in Egypt spelled the end of the Crusader kingdoms. Acre, the last Christian stronghold, fell to the Mamluks in 1291.
The expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land created a problem for the French king, the strong and ambitious Philip the Fair (nicknamed the “Iron King”). When the Templars were sending their men and wealth to the Middle East, they were not a serious threat to the monarchy. But now the warrior-monks were stuck in France, and they did not answer to the jurisdiction of the king. They had been given the right to impose taxes, which they did, and they were basically a state within the French state. In the increasingly bitter confrontation between King Philip and Pope Boniface VIII over who held ultimate authority in France, they were a powerful ally of the papacy. And worst of all, Philip owed the Templars a lot of money.
La Couvertoirade, in the heart of the Larzac plateau, is one of the best-preserved Templar villages in France. © Richard Semik (Dreamstime Photos).
In 1307, Philip had most of the Templars in France arrested on the same day, nationwide. The Templars were accused of a range of crimes, including worshipping Satan, spitting on the cross, and sodomy, and many were burned at the stake. The mighty order was essentially eliminated in France, and all of this happened with the agreement of the new pope, Clement V. He was French, and understandably more conciliatory to Philip’s agenda than his predecessor Boniface VIII, who had died shortly after being attacked and arrested by Philip’s troops in 1303.
In 1314, Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, was burned to death in Paris (a plaque marking the execution site can be found near the Pont Neuf). He is said to have put a curse upon Pope Clement and King Philip, and as it happened, both died within a year. Philip’s three sons then succeeded him to the throne in turn, but all died young, leaving no legitimate male heirs, and so their royal line within the Capetian dynasty came to an end. The French throne passed to the House of Valois, descended from Philip’s brother, and an epic succession battle ensued that ultimately led to the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. If the Templar curse was responsible for all this, as many people at the time believed, then it was a remarkably successful case of revenge.
But what about our plums? Well, in 1148, the European armies of the Second Crusade decided to attack the ancient city of Damascus, even though its Muslim rulers were allied with the Christians at the time. Their attempt at siege warfare failed, and in the end the Crusaders suffered a major defeat that doomed the Second Crusade. But according to legend, it was during this campaign that the Crusaders discovered the famous plums of Damascus on the outskirts of the city. A group of Templars apparently brought some plum trees back to southwest France, a region with a gracious climate and a substantial Templar presence. Local monks grafted the Damascus plum onto their existing plum stocks, and sensational new varieties were created. Through the following centuries, long after the Templars disappeared and the monasteries faded away, orchard keepers continued to nurture their plum crops, to the enduring gastronomic delight of the French people.
So this is what the Templars ultimately fought for: plums. Not a lot indeed. And so while the French today adore their lovely plums, and create elaborate dishes to celebrate them, they also serve as a sardonic historical reminder of how the mighty can fall.