Bees

 Most people take honey bees for granted.  They make honey, we figure, and honey ends up in granola and shampoo and herbal tea, but we don't think much more about it.  In fact, something like a third of our food would not be possible without bees.

This is because a lot of our crop plants have to be pollinated, the fruits and nuts and vegetables (though not the grains).  They flower, but they don't set seed or fruit unless the flower is pollinated.  And unless we want a whole horde of people out there with little brushes, swiping pollen a flower at a time, we need bees to do it for us.

Medieval people understood this just fine.  Domesticated bees had already been around for several thousand years at the beginning of the Middle Ages.  Every medieval manor or village, every orchard had to have a hive of bees.  The bees, led by their queen, lived in it, and this was where they had their honey comb.  Beekeepers who knew how to keep from startling the bees (and who wore protective covering) would harvest the honey and keep the hive clean.  The bees thus served two main functions, pollinating fruits and vegetables and providing the only real source of sweetness in the medieval diet.  In addition, the wax of the honeycomb was used for high-grade candles in church.

There was a great deal of folklore associated with bees.  They were considered a symbol of hard work and industriousness, as we still use the expression, Busy as a bee.  The Merovingian kings of France of the fifth through eighth centuries used bees as their symbol, a symbol Napoleon borrowed to try to assert he was part of a thousand-year tradition.  A rural English tradition is that you have to "tell the bees" about any major life changing event, but it is not clear if this goes back to the Middle Ages.

Medieval philosophers thought that bees were born without feet, which of course is not true, although medieval bestiaries commonly repeated this idea.  This is because Isidore of Seville (writer of the late Merovingian era) said that the word apies, Latin for bee, came from a- (without) and -pies, meaning feet (which it doesn't).

Modern agriculture continues to depend on bees.  There are wild bees that will pollinate flowers, but the honey bee is really necessary, meaning it has become the basis of an industry, where bee keepers take their hives around to wherever pollination is needed.  "Colony collapse," the death of a hive due to mites or fungus, has been a real challenge to bee keepers in recent years.

It was quite fortuitous, but I posted this on what turned out to be World Bee Day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Cheese

 Cheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago.  Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth.  Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic acid in milk (though if one keeps drinking it all the time growing up, this intolerance is much less likely).  Cheese to the rescue!

To make cheese, fresh milk is deliberately curdled using rennet, which used to come from an animal's stomach lining.  The cow gives birth and starts producing milk, you kill the calf to have a tasty veal dinner, and now you have the calf's stomach lining as rennet to make cheese from the milk the cow continues to produce while you keep milking her.  (Note:  modern cheese uses cultures for the curdling process, not requiring death of a calf or kid or lamb every time.)

Properly curdled milk gives you curds and whey, basically cottage cheese.  This can be pressed to get the whey out, formed into a wheel or other shape, sometimes washed or heated, and aged so it develops a rind and hardens up.  Some cheese, like Roquefort, is aged in caves where interesting molds are found, to give it the distinctive blue veins.  There are hundreds of different kinds of cheese, some very local productions, some made in big factories.  Some of the modern French varieties are about as specific as "Madame Grangier makes this cheese in the spring from the milk of her cows Bessie and Bossie."

The Romans enjoyed cheese, and our word comes from the Latin caseus, meaning (you guessed it) cheese.  They distinguished between caseus (any kind of cheese) and caseus formatus, the latter specifically hard cheese made (formed) into a wheel.  This formatus was one of the foods given to soldiers in the legions, and is the root of the modern French  "fromage" and Italian "formaggio" (both of course meaning cheese).

The medieval diet included a lot of cheese.  It was more readily available than meat and acceptable to monks as meat was not.  Even those wealthy enough to enjoy meat on a regular basis would eat cheese or fish on Fridays instead of meat.

A story told about Charlemagne related that he visited a monastery on a Friday, and because they had no fish, they served him their local cheese (which would have been considered second-rate for a king, behind a nice trout).  When Charlemagne started cutting off the rind, the abbot unwisely corrected him, saying the rind was perfectly edible.  Now, no one tells the king he's doing something wrong.  Charlemagne pretended not to mind, ate the rind, said it was all very good, then got his revenge by ordering the abbot to send the royal court 200 big wheels of this tasty cheese every year.  After five years of the abbot scrambling madly to get enough milk to make this much cheese, leaving nothing for his monks, Charlemagne forgave him, but he'd learned his lesson!

Final note:  So-called "cheese food product" is an abomination before the Lord.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Sicily

 Sicily is the island that forms the football off the toe of Italy's boot.

Because it is as far from Rome or from the big industrial/financial centers like Milan or Turin as you can go and still be in Italy, it can be overlooked (though it is often evoked as a cradle of the New York Mafia).  But in the Middle Ages it was an important crossroads, where different cultures met.  It is a good indication that medieval Europe was not simply the white Catholic land it is often portrayed to be.

During antiquity, Sicily was home to Phoenician colonies, succeeded by Greek colonies, and it still has many excellent Greek temples.  The Romans conquered it and made it part of their empire, concerned because it was halfway between Rome and Carthage, home of Rome's arch-rivals.  In the early centuries AD Sicily was Christianized along with the rest of the Roman Empire.  But then in the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, it became the home of many Muslims.  (On the map you will notice what a short distance it is from Sicily to Muslim North Africa.)  In the Middle Ages, three major civilizations met in Sicily, Byzantine Greek, Latin west, and Muslim.  Plus a solid Jewish minority.  All had to get along, at least some of the time.

But the Byzantines fought a fairly continuous low-level war against Muslims in the Mediterranean, including in Sicily.  In the first half of the eleventh century they invited some fighters from Normandy to come fight as mercenaries in Sicily.  Even before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, then, Normans were heading off to conquer places.  Fairly quickly the Sicilian Normans decided that rather than fight for the Byzantines it made more sense to fight for themselves.  Soon the leader declared himself duke of Sicily.

The Sicilians gained the support of the popes, who were fighting the German kings (Roman emperors) and needed allies.  In return, the popes put up no fuss when in the twelfth century the dukes decided they were actually kings of Italy.  They conquered most of the foot part of the Italian boot over the following decades, declaring their whole territory the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The dukes and kings of Sicily were active in the Crusading movement.  Indeed, the First Crusade in 1095 began when the Byzantine emperor asked the pope for some more mercenaries like those Sicilian Normans, to help fight the Muslims, and got a whole lot more than he bargained for.

In the 1180s, Constance, daughter of the king of Sicily, married Henry VI, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, which he took over in 1190 on the death of his father, Frederick Barbarossa.  She was the daughter of the king of Sicily's third wife and had plenty of brothers and nephews.  But after they all died for one reason or another, she became queen of Sicily in 1194.  In that year she also gave birth to a son, future Frederick II, heir both to the Empire and to Sicily, thus squeezing the popes from both sides (the Holy Roman Empire officially included the northern half of Italy).

Although the Holy Roman Emperors usually were centered in Germany, Frederick made Sicily his home.  Popes hated him, and he wasn't much of a favorite with other European leaders.  After his death, all his sons and grandsons were hunted down, and Sicily was given to a younger brother of Louis IX of France.  But he was overthrown in 1282 with the so-called Sicilian Vespers, and title to Sicily went to the crown of Aragon (Spain) who (more or less) held onto it through the rest of the Middle Ages.

(For more on some of the people mentioned above, follow the links.)

A good book on medieval Sicily is by Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Meet (Cornell University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Italy, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.