The Taste of Conquest (9 page)

For the Venetians, the Crusades were undoubtedly an enormous strategic as well as financial windfall, whereas, for the rest of Europe, the consequences were ultimately to be more cultural than directly economic or even political. The Latin knights who disembarked, first in Byzantium and then in the Holy Land, were in for a culture shock. Only when confronted with the plush lodgings and refined cuisine of the East would most of them have realized just how dank and dismal were their drafty donjons and how dull their diet back home.

In Constantinople, the great lords of Europe were fed spiced delicacies in the perfumed palace of the emperor, but even lesser souls were exposed to the decadent ways of Byzantium at inns and bathhouses across the great metropolis. The imperial capital was the kind of place where, on Easter Sunday, the ruler would parade to the world’s largest church, the Hagia Sophia, past a fountain “filled with ten thousand jars of wine and a thousand jars of white honey…the whole spiced with a camel’s load of [spike]nard, cloves and cinnamon,” an event reported by a Muslim hostage a century earlier.

Meanwhile, in the boomtowns of Palestine, common Italian merchants lived better than Burgundian princes. Their salons were decorated with mosaics and marble and decked out with carpets of plush damask. Perfumed meats arrived on platters of silver, if not gold. Fresh water ran from taps, carried by the still-standing Roman aqueducts. Chilled wine flavored with the spices of the Orient filled delicate goblets and beakers.
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Many Crusaders would have spent as much as a year exposed to Constantinople’s spice-laced cooking, though, of course, this was nothing compared to the decades some would spend in Palestine—or Outremer, as they came to call it. Western European pilgrims came to the Holy Land by the thousands. There were those who settled so that they could live a step closer to paradise. Others found God in more earthly rewards. “Those who were poor [in France],” wrote the royal chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, “God has made rich here. He who had a few pennies possesses bezants [a gold coin] without number; he who held not even a village now by God’s grace enjoys a town.” But for every pilgrim made rich by conquest or trade, there were many more who spent their last penny to get here, and then they were stuck. Yet as numerous as they were, the Catholic immigrants remained a tiny minority among the indigenous Syrian Christian and Muslim population. What’s more, since most of the conquerors were male, they were desperate for local women to be their consorts, servants, and cooks—and they found them, whatever the means. If all else failed, the necessary help could be purchased at the slave market, though buying women slaves for sex was technically illegal. Fulcher describes the mutation he witnessed: “We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is here a Galilean or a Palestinian…. We have already forgotten the places where we were born…. Some have taken as his wife not a compatriot but a Syrian or an Armenian, or even a Saracen [that is, Muslim] who has received the grace of baptism.”

Whether they liked it or not, the Europeans ate a largely Arab, Middle Eastern diet. No doubt, many were nauseated by the local cuisine and, much as some homesick Americans resort to McDonald’s when in Rome, stuck to a western European diet of thick beer, plain meat, garlic, and beans. But less conservative palates would surely have thrilled to the new ingredients and flavor combinations. The local cuisine was closely related to what they had tasted in Byzantium—after all, the region had been a part of the Eastern Roman Empire for centuries—but it must also have echoed the kind of sophisticated food that was dished up in Baghdad and Alexandria. Baghdad, in particular, was the foodie capital of its day, where (much like today) cookbooks were written as much to be read and discussed as to be utilized for their directions. At a time when European dukes and counts were satisfied with great, gristly haunches of grilled venison, the connoisseurs of the Arab capital could dine on pasture-raised mutton and tender chicken redolent of imported Asian spices; they could pick and choose among a wide assortment of freshly baked breads and nibble on confections crafted of local fruits and imported sugar. These delicacies could even be cooled with ice that was carried from distant mountains, something that hadn’t been seen in Europe since Roman times. In Baghdad, a host was judged by the diversity of ingredients and the variety of preparations rather than crude quantity. The Arabic cookbooks of the time give us recipes aromatic with spices layered over a distinctly sweet-and-sour taste. To give just one representative example, an Egyptian fish stew called
sikba
was seasoned with pepper, “perfumed spices,” onion, saffron, and sesame oil as well as honey and vinegar to give it the requisite tang. Of course, the Arab cooks in Palestine could hardly have been up to the standards of a caliph’s court, but they surely had some idea of what the Muslim gentry were eating.

However, the pilgrims who made it as far as Jerusalem didn’t always get to taste the best local cooking. We can infer this from the name given to the central market where Westerners got their takeout. They called it the
Malquisinat,
or “Place of Bad Cookery.” Presumably, the food was better in the Crusaders’ quarters, where Western residents of the city would typically employ local women to do their cooking. Arab cooks were in high demand, at least according to Usmah ibn Munqidh, a Muslim warrior and courtier who seems to have been a regular visitor in the occupiers’ homes. He writes that some Franks—though apparently not the majority—had become acclimated to local customs. During the course of a social call at the home of a soldier of the original Crusader generation, Usmah was offered lunch. “The knight presented an excellent table with food extraordinarily clean and delicious. Seeing me abstaining from food, he said, ‘Eat: be of good cheer! I never eat Frankish dishes, but I have Egyptian women cooks and never eat except their cooking.’”

So, clearly, in spite of the antagonism between the faiths, the mounted, mailed, malodorous invaders holed up in their fortified Jerusalem residences must have had at least an inkling of how the other side lived. For they, too, hired couriers to bring snow from the mountains of Lebanon—a two-to three-day run—in order to chill their wine in the heat of summer. They, too, sprinkled their food with sugar. (This luxurious “spice” had been cultivated in well-watered enclaves of the Holy Land for generations and exported to Europe in minuscule quantities.) And apparently, the Crusaders even started to bathe! In imitation of local ways, the Frankish women are known to have gone to the baths three times a week, and it is supposed that men, who were less constricted, might have gone even more often.

Moreover, for Europeans, their culinary education wasn’t limited just to the Holy Land. After all, Muslims ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula well into the twelfth century (Islamic Granada held out even longer, until it was conquered in 1492) as well as Sicily for more than two hundred years. In their day, Moorish Palermo and Córdoba were the largest cities in Europe and accordingly major outposts of Muslim culture and cuisine.
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And as Usmah’s memoir shows, relations between the two confessions were not always combative. Especially in Spain, Christians and Muslims (and Jews) lived together in relative harmony for centuries. The dominant culture of these western caliphates was naturally Arabic and drew inspiration for its music, literature, and food from Baghdad and points east. The introduction of oranges, lemons, eggplant, and other fruits and vegetables to the West is generally ascribed to Arab intervention. Pasta as we know it seems to have been invented in Moorish Sicily. Arabic recipes soon insinuated themselves into Italian compilations, while these were, in turn, disseminated north. Culinary ideas flowed across Europe in much the way that Gothic art and architecture spread across the continent. In the same way that the Arabic arch was incorporated into Western cathedrals and then transformed into an indigenous art form, the Middle Eastern way with spices was adapted to the European kitchen. John of Salisbury, a twelfth-century English Crusader and scholar, gives us some sense of the new culinary melting pot when he criticizes a dinner he was served at the house of a merchant in the southern Italian province of Apulia. The menu reportedly included “the finest products from Constantinople, Babylon, Alexandria, Palestine, Tripoli, Syria, and Phoenicia,” but then the priggish pilgrim has to add, “as though the products of Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Campania were insufficient to adorn such a refined banquet.”

Needless to say, the Arabic influence wasn’t limited to food and architecture. The Middle East had plenty to teach the Western barbarians about mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. Most medieval nutritional theory came straight from Arabic writers, who had, in turn, picked up the earlier Greek medical tradition. The scholars in Baghdad, however, altered the old system to suit their taste and culture, giving their dietary advice a distinctly Arab accent. It is no coincidence that medieval dietitians in Bologna and in Paris would suggest the same ingredients (expensive Eastern imports such as spices, sugar, dried fruit, citrus, almond milk, and rose water) as their Muslim sources.

There was virtually no influence flowing in the opposite direction. Usmah’s admiration for the Western invaders was limited to their fighting skills, dismissing them “as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else.” But even the knights’ pugilistic prowess couldn’t save them when confronted by the superior forces of Salāh Ad-dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, better known in the West as Saladin. After a bare eighty years in control, the Franks were expelled from Jerusalem in 1187, though Europeans managed to hold on to parcels of what is now the coast of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Turkey until 1291.

During these almost two hundred years of colonialism and crusade, tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, English, and French had traveled back and forth across the whole Mediterranean. The ruling classes of Europe wouldn’t be this well traveled until the invention of the jet set. The ex-colonists who returned to Cologne, Bordeaux, and St. Albans brought with them a remarkably similar idea of what made up sophisticated cuisine. Like the tourist who returns after a week’s stay in Tuscany toting olive oil and porcini mushrooms, those ancient travelers must have craved the complex flavors left behind. As a consequence, the European gentry would increasingly demand that their pigeon pie be flavored with imported seasonings. And, of course, it was Venice that was best placed to take advantage of this burgeoning need.

There are few hard numbers on just how much spice was imported into Europe in the years following the Franks’ capture of Jerusalem. The spice trade had never entirely dried up in the Dark Ages, and elite cooks were certainly sprinkling pepper and possibly ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and galingale onto lordly joints by the time Pope Urban II called Christendom to arms, but just how much of these seasonings made it to Western ports is anybody’s guess. Most historians do think, though, that there was a steady increase that came with the Crusades. In part, this was because there was just more back-and-forth traffic across the Mediterranean. Undoubtedly, the demand was also fueled by a contemporary European population explosion. In the Christian West, there were more people and more money to pay for more and more imported pepper.

It was no accident that the expansionist Crusader era happened to coincide with one of the most prosperous times Europe would see until the nineteenth century. The twelfth century was an age of broadening horizons and progress in just about every field, from agriculture to mining, from transportation to banking. As a result, feudal lords were able to skim off increasingly greater profits from the multiplying mills, fishponds, breweries, and mines under their control. And what did they do with their profits? A lot of them (sometimes more than the petty knights could afford) were spent on life’s little luxuries. The ruling classes of Europe finally had the time and money to be bored, to need entertainment. You might say that the mounted heirs to the Vandals and Huns had gone soft. Instead of bloody battle, men showed their mettle through (relatively) genteel jousting, hired poets to compose weepy romances, and lingered over increasingly complex tasting menus. As usual, we find out about the improved quality of contemporary life by people’s griping about it. Around the end of the thirteenth century in Milan, the curmudgeonly Galvano Flamma contrasted the honest and simple past with the current prosperity:

Life and customs were hard in Lombardy [at the beginning of the century]. Men wore cloaks of leather without any adornments, or clothes of rough wool with no lining. With a few pence, people felt rich. Men longed to have arms and horses. If one was noble and rich, one’s ambition was to own high towers from which to admire the city and the mountains and the rivers. The virgins wore tunics of
pignolato
[rough cotton] and petticoats of linen, and on their heads they wore no ornaments at all. A normal dowry was about ten lire and at the utmost reached one hundred, because the clothes of the woman were ever so simple. There were no fireplaces in the houses. Expenses were cut down to a minimum because in summer people drank little wine and wine-cellars were not kept. At table, knives were not used; husband and wife ate off the same plate, and there was one cup or two at most for the whole family. Candles were not used, and at night one dined by light of glowing torches. One ate cooked turnips, and ate meat only three times a week. Clothing was frugal. Today, instead, everything is sumptuous. Dress has become precious and rich with superfluity. Men and women bedeck themselves with gold, silver, and pearls. Foreign wines and wines from distant countries are drunk, luxurious dinners are eaten, and cooks are highly valued.