Medieval vegetarianism

 Medieval people ate a largely vegetarian diet.  Unlike modern vegetarians in the West, who usually choose vegetarianism primarily because they think it wrong to kill and eat animals, or else because they believe a vegetarian diet is healthier, medieval people for the most part did not have nearly as easy access to meat as we do.

Raising meat for food is always going to be more expensive than raising vegetables or grains, because you have to grow the food for the animals first, and a lot of the calories in that animal feed are going to be spent in having the animal grow and run around before you can eat it.  Hunting animals that feed themselves in the wild solves part of this problem, but over-hunting can quickly reduce the number of potential game animals.

Hence for most medieval people for most of the time one's principal foods were bread and vegetables.  In a recent post I discussed the fruits and vegetables medieval people grew.  There were a lot of them, although of course the emphasis was on those that could be dried and stored (like peas and beans) or that would keep for a long time anyway (like onions and turnips).  Lettuce could be eaten all summer long, but forget having a salad in the winter.  The same was true of most fruits, though some, like apples, will keep at least a little while.  They did not of course have the New World vegetables we now take for granted, most notably potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and winter squash.

 Between the turnips, the radishes, the beans, the zucchini, the leeks, and the sauerkraut, there was at least some variety in the vegetables to be eaten.  I've read that the single most common vegetable eaten in the US now is the potato, and that mostly eaten as French fries.

Still, medieval people liked their meat.  Because most of the population was not vegetarian out of principle but rather because meat was hard to get, they ate it whenever they could.  Indeed, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, they were given meat broth.  The wealthy ate meat when they could get it, putting restrictions on hunting to keep the peasants from getting all the wild animals.  Everyone ate pork in the fall, when the pigs, who had been running wild for months, were rounded up and slaughtered.

Even if mostly vegetarian, medieval people were not vegans.  They were happy to have milk, butter, and especially cheese.  Eggs were also fine.  The most determinedly vegetarian people were monks and nuns, who gave up meat along with other pleasures of the flesh, in order to focus more on spiritual matters.  They were still generally fine with eggs and cheese, and, depending on the monastic order, they might have fish once a week.  If someone in the monastery was sick, they got beef broth.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval social history, see my book Positively Medieval, available either as an ebook or a paperback, from Amazon and other book sellers.

Descended from Charlemagne

 It has been suggested that everyone with European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne.

You remember Charlemagne.  He was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in the year 800, the first independent western Roman emperor since the late fifth century--although there continued to be emperors in Byzantium (basically modern-day Turkey) who were considered Roman emperors until the fifteenth century.

Charlemagne's empire is sometimes called the Holy Roman Empire to keep it separate from the empire of antiquity, and the European Union considers him (in some sense) their founder.  He had France, western Germany, and, he thought, Italy, though Italy tended to disagree.  France claims him as theirs, as the nineteenth-century statue shown below seeks to "prove," whereas the Germans call him theirs.  (The Italians figure you can have him.)

 

So how did we get to where everybody in the west is considered to be descended from him?  Well, all of Europe's royalty were.  He had multiple wives, multiple concubines, and multiple children, including a whole lot of daughters.  As long as one counts (as one should!) one's descendants through the female as well as male line, and the illegitimate as well as legitimate line, it is clear that his descent quickly spread throughout Europe's leading families.  Those who were kings of France, Germany, and Italy in the tenth century were all descended via women from Charlemagne.  So are all of today's European royalty, including King Juan Carlos of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England.

It was considered appropriate in the Middle Ages (as is still the case) for great nobles to marry great nobles.  (The reason Prince Charles married Diana Spencer was because she was of noble ancestry, descended from an illegitimate child of King Charles II.)  Although the actual medieval kings and queens quickly became too closely related to keep on marrying each other, due to prohibitions on consanguinity, there were plenty of rising lords for them to marry.  The great counts and dukes then quickly passed royal blood to their children, who in turn passed it to their children, often offspring of lesser lords.

You can see that in the 1200 years since Charlemagne there has been plenty of opportunity for his descendants to spread out.  If someone has multiple children, and they have multiple children, one can come up with a whole lot of descendants very quickly.  There was a proud announcement in our paper the other day of a couple welcoming the birth of their 100th great-grandchild.  And this is far from the record, even for a couple, much less for someone with many wives and/or concubines.

Cystic fibrosis, which has a strong genetic component, seems to have originated about 1200 years ago in the European population.  Did it begin with a mutation in Charlemagne's genes?  Intriguing thought.  The leading families of Europe can trace their family trees with excellent documentation right back to the eighth century.  The rest of us can just imagine a lot of those entries in the family tree.

Before anyone reading this blog becomes too excited about having imperial blood, let's think about how ancestry works.  You've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on.  Just mathematically by the time you get back to the late Middle Ages you have more European ancestors than there were people in Europe then.  Okay, all of us have ancestors who may pop up on more than one line of descent.  And we all have to take a deep breath and recognize that the majority of our European ancestors were peasants.  But it's pretty clear that everyone is related to everyone.

And if you've had your "DNA done" you'll find that you have maybe 1 or 2% of something you had no idea about.  (Where did that Middle Eastern or South Asian descent come from?  I thought we were lily-white!)  And even the nationality or ethnic group that's responsible for your last name may only be a minority of your DNA.  So we may all be "blood of kings" (as well of course "blood of peasants").  Pro tip:  If you're visiting Charlemagne's palace in Aachen, don't announce that you are the returning heir.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Exotic Birds

 The wealthy in the Middle Ages liked luxury goods—as of course do the wealthy in the modern world.  Something unusual, rare, exotic, and gorgeous, which also cost a whole lot, was both something to enjoy and something to show off to other people.

Rare and unusual animals were real luxury items, both because they were expensive and because the proper care and feeding were complicated and expensive.  Both Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century and the emperor Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century had elephants, given to them as gifts from distant rulers in the Middle East/North Africa--who of course would have had to obtain them from sub-Saharan Africa, making them even more of a novelty.

Frederick II also had a cockatoo.  Wait, you say, I thought cockatoos were native to Australia, and Australia was totally cut off from the rest of the world until centuries later.  So how did he get it?  Was it really a cockatoo?

Yes, it was really a cockatoo.  He wrote a book, which we still have, about birds.  Most of it was about training hawks (the art of falconry), but he also described other birds, and there are several very detailed descriptions and drawings of his cockatoo.

Although cockatoos are most commonly found in Australia, they are also found in Indonesia and parts of the Philippines.  So the emperor's bird almost certainly started life in southeast Asia.  Then, as now, wild-caught chicks were raised in captivity, so they would be used to humans (they do not breed well in captivity—trade in wild-caught chicks in some areas today threatens the wild population).

It would have then passed through many hands before ending up in the emperor's court in Sicily, being bought and sold for increasing sums of money as it traveled across the Indian Ocean or across central Asia, on the spice routes, and fetched up in the Middle East.  There it was acquired by the Egyptian ruler (referred to as the Sultan of Babylon in the Sicilian records), who made a gift of it to Frederick.  He was also the source of Frederick's elephant.  Being able to give someone a rare luxury item was even more of an opportunity to increase one's prestige than just owning it.

Although this is the only cockatoo we know about in the thirteenth century, medieval wealthy people sometimes had other exotic birds, especially parrots.  These were African parrots, and they too reached Europe via a long, complicated road.

Another cockatoo shows up in a Renaissance painting, done by the artist Mantegna and commissioned by the Gonzaga family that ruled Mantua in the fifteenth century.  The main picture shows the duke kneeling at the feet of the Madonna, and up at the top are all sorts of decorative motifs, including an extremely lifelike cockatoo.  Although there is no written record of either Mantegna or the Gonzaga family acquiring the bird, the inventory of the artist's possessions does include a large and extremely elaborate birdcage, which could have been the bird's home.  Was he given it in partial payment for the painting?

The cockatoos in medieval Europe are an indication that Europe was never completely cut off from the rest of the world.  Trade continued to tie different areas together, and both spices and exotic birds were considered worth the expense.

An article in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, July 5 2021, discusses the original identification of the cockatoo in Mantegna's painting.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on the medieval economy and luxury goods, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval fruits and vegetables

 In a medieval-style fantasy or historical fiction about the Middle Ages, the people always seem to eat a lot of stew, which tends to be characterized as "brown."  The elite are shown eating meat (generally whole haunches) cooked over an open fire.  But what about the fruits and vegetables?

When I first started this blog two of my earliest posts (still popular favorites!) were on what medieval people did or did not eat.  More recently I discussed a ninth-century garden.  But today I want to focus on what went into a medieval vegetarian diet, which is what peasants ate almost all the time, what monks and nuns ate all the time unless they were sick, and what the elites ate much of the time.

Bread was the basic staple for everybody.  Most of it was made from wheat, essentially the same winter wheat still grown today, but one could also make bread from barley or oats or rye or spelt (a close relative of wheat). Grains could also be made into porridge.  Barley could also be made into beer, the standard drink for everybody.  Ninth-century inventories of monastic property always indicated the grain fields right up front.  Grain of course can be stored without refrigeration and will last quite well if the mice and rats don't get into it.

Storage in a pre-modern era was vital.  Dried peas and lentils and chickpeas and beans would last as well as grain (the beans were like the beans now made into bean soup or baked beans, not green beans, which they didn't have).  Root vegetables would be harvested in the fall and, if kept dry, would last much of the winter.  Here onions were universal, along with onion-relatives like leeks, garlic, shallots, and chives.  Medieval people also ate beets, turnips, and parsnips.

 Root vegetables are not nearly as popular in the modern West as they were in the Middle Ages, now that we have refrigeration plus the ability to get fresh vegetables year round.  Modern Germans are in fact averse to turnips, which Germans ate a whole lot of during the privations of World War II (because they were available) and are now considered cow food.

Some vegetables just could not be stored, like lettuce, but medieval people still grew and ate it in the spring and summer.  Cabbage is leafy but stores fairly well, especially if made into sauerkraut.  They also had summer squash (like zucchini), which will last a certain amount of time without refrigeration, though not the winter squashes (like pumpkin) of the New World.  Celery, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers were popular in the right season.

(You will notice an absence of such New World foods as potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and avocados.  Plus no chocolate!  Maybe there's a reason one hears reference to the Dark Ages....)

A big hearty dish of lentils and turnips can be pretty bland.  Salt helps, but salt was expensive—it was all sea salt from salt panning along the coast, with few exceptions.  Spices like black pepper were very expensive because they were imported from Asia, so most people could not afford them.  But they did grow a wide variety of herbs, which could be dried and kept fairly indefinitely.  These included parsley, sage, rosemary (do we hear a Simon & Garfunkel song coming on?), fenugreek, coriander, and caraway.

Among fruits, the most important were wine grapes, grown wherever the climate was suitable and some places where it really was not, because wine was both the preferred drink of the well-to-do and required for the liturgy (though in Scandinavia beer was often substituted for the communion wine).

 A good sized manor would have an orchard with a number of fruit trees.  They grew a wide variety of apples (no Fuji or Honeycrisp or Granny Smith—ninth-century apple varieties included "gozmaringa" and "geroldinga," now unknown), pears, peaches, plums, quinces, mulberries, and cherries.  An orchard would also have nut trees, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and chestnuts.  Wild fruits (especially berries) and wild nuts could supplement what was cultivated.  We now preserve fruit by boiling it up with sugar to make jam, but this doesn't work nearly as well with honey, their only sweetener (and they didn't have a lot of it), so most fruit was eaten fresh.

Medieval people were primarily vegetarians but not vegans.  That is, eggs, butter, and milk (usually made into cheese because it lasts a lot better) and fish were considered fine even for austere monks.  Chicken could count as "not red meat," but everyone liked red meat when they could get it.

A good discussion of medieval food is found in the article, "Nutrition and the Early Medieval Diet" by Kathy L. Pearson, in the journal Speculum (journal of the Medieval Academy of America), vol. 72 (January 1997).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and drink, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.