Food Consumption in Medieval Iberia

A Socio-economic Analysis, 13th-15th Centuries

Juan Vicente García Marsilla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000582567
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the banquets of kings and nobles to the daily struggle for the subsistence of the poor, food was already much more than a biological necessity in the Middle Ages: it was a social phenomenon full of meaning. In this book all the implications and meanings that food had on the Iberian Peninsula between the 13th and 15th centuries are analyzed. Historical assessment of the region is particularly rewarding because of the quantity and variety of historical sources, and because of the coexistence in medieval Iberia of the three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Taking both economic and sociological perspectives, every aspect of food is analyzed, from the commercialization of food production to its consumption, and from the evolution of culinary techniques to table manners.

1 Fighting for food in the great medieval market Forms and problems of food supply

DOI: 10.4324/9780429345692-2

We must take hold of the hood and shake off the fleas and pluck the feathers from the wings of him who hoards and hides at home more than he needs, who plunders the whole country with all the wine and grain, fearing neither sin nor dishonor, so that the poor man can find nothing and starves to death with his wife and children. Hence life is now so expensive, and we are now even worse off than before. A short time ago wine was worth only ten pounds, and in a month, it has risen in price so much that it now easily costs thirty; the same is true for wheat, rye and spelt. And I do not want to speak of usury, which is practiced with interest and payments in kind, with loans, cheap purchases and credits … I know many, whom I do not wish to name, who are engaged in illicit trade, and all the law and justice is silent about it. Many of them bow gratefully to the hail and laughingly point to the frost.

Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools (Basilea, 1494)¹

As can clearly be noticed, in this heartbreaking complaint about the dearth of life that appears in the work of an Alsatian humanist from the end of the fifteenth century, Sebastian Brant, and which could perfectly well be applicable to the Iberian Peninsula at that time, there is no trace of the Christian morality that attributed the lack of food to divine punishment and the fatalities of the weather, which are only mentioned in a secondary sense. For him it was obvious: those responsible for the hardships of the people were the speculators. Thus, the market was the cause of the cost of living, including food and the most basic products, having run amok.

Nowadays, testimonies such as this are being confirmed with quantifiable sources and specialists in the medieval cities’ supply, who have opted in recent decades to give a greater role in the causal analysis of famine and shortages to market mechanisms, and less to droughts, hail or torrential rains. It is not that adverse weather conditions did not occur and did not periodically affect harvests, which undoubtedly caused very serious shortages. Nevertheless, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, improved transport, especially by sea and river, made it possible to obtain supplies from more distant lands, and this could cushion, at least in part, the impact of these calamities. What was really happening was that each city, each town, each village, had to find its place in the competitive European and Mediterranean food market that was then being structured, and the laws of supply and demand were beginning to take over, often causing what we might call “artificial” shortages.

Cities in need

The issue of food supply and prices cannot therefore be explained, even in the Middle Ages, by a simple Malthusian comparison between population and resources. After all, in our case, the Iberia of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries was by no means a “full country,” even if we take into account the limited development of the means of production at the time. The advance of the Christian kingdoms toward the south, at the expense of al-Andalus, which was particularly rapid in the first half of the thirteenth century, only to slow down later, generated population movements that were certainly not as massive as the conquering monarchs would have liked. If there was a relatively “overpopulated” kingdom at this time, it was perhaps the Nasrid Sultanate of Granada. By the mid-fifteenth century, its capital was home to some 50,000 inhabitants (Torres Balbás 1953), making it one of the largest cities on the Peninsula.

Overall, in the five kingdoms into which the Iberian Peninsula was divided at that time (Portugal, Castile, Navarra, Aragon and Granada), it has been estimated that between six and seven million people lived there at the end of the fifteenth century, which means a population density of only slightly more than ten inhabitants per km² (Pérez 2010; Ladero Quesada 2014; Furió Diego 2015). These are really low figures, even for the medieval reality, but they should be considered in relation to cultivated land rather than the total extension, within a geographical environment in which not only mountains and wastelands predominated, but in which other extensive forms of exploitation, not related to food products, and especially pastures for sheep, dominated over large territories (Map 1.1).

Map 1.1 The largest cities on the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.

As Derek Keene explained on a European scale, although the proportion of this population living in cities was quite small, it was of major importance because of its economic, political and cultural background, and due to the capacity of urban centers to become the “computers” of a country’s food strategy. Indeed, it was the hierarchy of population centers that established the supply systems, especially for cereals, which, according to him, constituted 70 percent of the caloric intake of our medieval ancestors (Keene 1998).

In the context of the Iberian Peninsula, the largest cities are located in the east and south, and the most pessimistic estimates for Valencia and Seville are around 40,000 inhabitants, to which we should add a large population, both privileged and transient, and therefore unregistered, which would perhaps number around 70,000 shortly before 1500 (Collantes de Terán Sánchez 2004; Furió Diego 2015). Meanwhile, Barcelona, which had reached 45,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the fifteenth century, suffered especially from the crisis caused by the Catalan Civil War in the 1460s and 1470s and fell to 25,000 (Butiñá Jiménez 2010), while Zaragoza would reach another 20,000 by the end of the fourteenth century, including the villages in its district (Laliena Corbera 2015). In Granada, in addition to the heavily populated capital, Malaga would be inhabited by some 20,000 people (Ladero Quesada 1972). The Crown of Castile would have the major centers of Andalusia – in addition to Seville, those of Córdoba and Jaén, with some 24,000 and 20,000 inhabitants respectively (Flores Varela 2005) – and a network of at least 14 other cities above 10,000 inhabitants (Toledo, Burgos, Valladolid, León, Segovia, Cuenca, Salamanca, Ávila, Murcia, etc.), but, on the other hand, in certain areas, especially Galicia and the Cantabrian Sea, no population exceeded 5,000 (Asenjo González 1999). In Portugal, Lisbon would have between 35,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, while Porto would become the country’s second largest city in the fourteenth century, growing from just 4,000 inhabitants in 1390 to around 12,000 a hundred years later (de Oliveira Marques 2010). Finally, in Navarra, Pamplona had almost 14,000 inhabitants in the fifteenth century, while the second largest population, Tudela, was around 8,000 (Monteano Sorbet 1996).

Obviously, if we compare these figures with the populations of today’s megacities, they may seem almost ridiculous, but in the context of the feudal economy, ensuring food for several thousand people was certainly not an easy task. As we shall see, wheat bread would be the basic sustenance of these people, and it is estimated that around four hectoliters of wheat are needed by an adult per year in order to survive (Furió Diego 1998; Viciano Navarro 2018). This implies that, taking into account that a part of the population were children and therefore would need something less, perhaps half, a population of around 50,000 would consume about 18 million liters of wheat each year, which, according to the usual estimates, would weigh about 13,500 tons.² To achieve these numbers an enormous amount of land and manpower would be needed, that, taking into account land productivity at this moment, could arrive at 70,000 hectares destined only for wheat production for a city of around 50,000 inhabitants.

For these large cities, one of the main options to ensure supply was to have a land area, which in Castile was called an alfoz, of large dimensions, a land area in which the city imposed its law on the surrounding countryside, and somehow forced most of the harvest to go to satisfy its huge stomach. This was the case in some Castilian cities, such as Seville – a large producer and regular exporter of wheat as well – or Toledo, to mention just two examples, and more rarely in the Crown of Aragon. There, the main concern for the local governments was that this production would not escape massively to other cities that would pay more for the wheat, but also that the land designated for its cultivation would not diminish in favor of others that might be more profitable but less strategic in ensuring the city’s subsistence. The aim was to strike a difficult balance between the profits of the farmers, merchants or even the nobles who provided the wheat, and keeping prices low to ensure the livelihood of the city’s inhabitants. The reason for this is that urban supplies, except in very rare cases of extreme urgency where municipal governments were involved in the market in the first place, were always left in the hands of private individuals, and it was always necessary for these private importers to consider it good business to bring their goods to a city just so that it could survive.

In the aforementioned case of Toledo, the seat of the Primate Archbishop of Spain and former capital of the Visigothic kingdom, and therefore a symbolic reference of the highest level in the Peninsula, no more than around 11,000 inhabitants lived there in the sixteenth century, which was barely 14 percent of the population of its “kingdom,” a large demarcation of the Crown of Castile which occupied a significant part of what are now the regions of Castile-La Mancha and Madrid (González Agudo 2015, 34). In principle, the alfoz of Toledo provided enough to feed this population, and it was even quite common for grain to be exported from this region. However, Toledo suffered from a shortage of supplies in the second half of the fourteenth century, due to the abandonment of many lands by the demographic crisis of that century. In particular, the cereal fields began to be replaced in many cases by vineyards, whose production was more profitable. Therefore, in 1401, the city council forced all those who had grown vines in the last ten years, or those who did so in the future, to sow three times as much grain. Nevertheless, the problem continued throughout the fifteenth century, even if it was no longer due to the proliferation of vineyards but, increasingly, to the proliferation of pastures for grazing the sheep. For this reason, in the 1460s, the King of Castile, Enrique IV, authorized Toledo to lease some of these meadows for local leaders to convert them back into farmland (Izquierdo Benito 2002, 35).

At that time, large hauling operations were carried out by mule trains, sometimes consisting of hundreds of animals. In fact, the importance of land trade has often been underestimated in the late Middle Ages, when it must have been particularly important, even for goods of great weight and volume, such as grain. By land, inland cities such as Toledo, Valladolid and Burgos had to be supplied. In fact, it is known that there were villages in which a significant part of the population specialized in the overland transport of goods, and especially cereals, to the urban market. Nevertheless, it is clear that, in the Middle Ages, having easy access to the sea, or at least to a navigable river, was a great advantage when it came to supplying food to a city, or also, on the contrary, so that the local harvest could be sold in much more distant places. Having a harbor was then the best way to connect with the world, and that is the reason why only the cities that had that kind of access, or had one relatively close to it, could grow into big metropolises. Therefore, Seville, which had the flat regions of the Aljarafe and the Ribera surrounding it, was basically supplied by them, and its surplus traveled down the Guadalquivir to be sold in Barcelona, Valencia or Lisbon. This was major business for Seville’s merchants and for the large colony of Genoese who settled there. However, if one year the local harvest was lost, these same routes could be reversed and supplied to the city in need. For instance, in 1485–1486, when torrential winter rains caused floods that destroyed the crops, wheat had to be found in the Maghreb (Navarro Saínz 2004, 127–128). And this pendulum movement, between the roles of exporter and importer of wheat, was what characterized many other cities that were somewhere in between the two situations. It can be seen very clearly in Murcia, an inland city but very close to the Mediterranean. Here the municipal by-laws register radical ups and downs from one year to the next, especially in the last quarter of the fifteenth century (Tornel Corbacho 1989, 64).

Therefore, the merchants who specialized in the cereal trade had to be very careful about these changes, and their business involved speculating on the local scourges of the weather or locust plagues, which were also recorded with some frequency in the Iberia of this period. However, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages there were areas which tended to stabilize as exporters or importers of cereals, except in very exceptional years. The physical conditions of each area, but also its social structure, operated in that sense for a greater productive specialization of the different regions of the continent. And in fact, this specialization took place on two levels: one more local, which made the regions around the large cities its main suppliers of grain; and another international, which turned, for example, large islands such as Sardinia, and above all Sicily, into the enormous granaries of southern Europe that supplied the largest cities of Italy, Provence or the Iberian Peninsula, using ships.

The presence of cereal regions near the most important cities must have been articulated in an almost natural way, given the evident business generated by the sale of the surpluses in a very accessible urban market. However, this did not prevent the interests of producers from clashing with those of the consumer cities, generating conflicts that were difficult to resolve. One of the most obvious cases was that which confronted Valencia throughout the Middle Ages with what ended up being the second largest town in its kingdom: Orihuela, at its southern end, the head of a region with a clear surplus of wheat. In the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Valencia had been a net exporter of grain, which for the most part was exported to feed Barcelona (Cuvillier 1970), and royal privileges confirmed then the freedom to extract any product from the kingdom (Soler Milla 2005). But the demographic growth of its capital, together with the first major frumentaceous crises, especially after 1333, meant that Valencia began to claim its preferential right to the cereals of its hinterland from the Crown. Finally, the Valencian governors managed to obtain from the king, Alfonso the Kind, the right to patrol the coasts with armed galleys so that this veto on exports could be effectively enforced (Rubio Vela 1985). This, of course, was against the interests of those who preferred to sell their grain in a free market to whoever paid the most for it. And, especially, the municipality of Orihuela, the head of the cereal area par excellence of the kingdom, the Bajo Segura, was the one that suffered the most, as it openly confronted the capital on several occasions with the aim of being enabled to export part of the harvest. Orihuela, in addition to a mild climate and a wide area, in which since the thirteenth century marshes had been reclaimed and converted into farmland with an important irrigation network, had easy access to the sea through the ports of Santa Pola, Guardamar and Cap Cerver. It therefore had all the conditions to become another of the great “supermarkets” of Mediterranean wheat, on a smaller scale than Sicily or the Maghreb.

As has been seen in other cities, the consell or local government of Orihuela also sought to exercise its own control over the harvest, with some attempts to ban its export in bad years (Soler Milla 2005, 1067). But these attempts were very occasional, and in Valencia a saying became popular that referred to the fecundity of Orihuela’s irrigated land, according to which “rain or shine, there is always grain in Orihuela” (García Marsilla 1993b). The fact was that the power of Valencia weighed more heavily, and successive monarchs extended the privileges of the capital, gr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Declarations
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Translator’s notes
• Measures cited
• Introduction
• 1 Fighting for food in the great medieval market: Forms and problems of food supply
• 2 From the fields to the marketplace: The first steps in medieval food production and distribution
• 3 Avoiding the market: Medieval self-sufficiency, provisions, storage and the conservation of food
• 4 The kitchen: Culture and flavor
• 5 Around the table: The culture of dining objects and the rites of conviviality
• 6 Eating according to status: Food as a symbol of social hierarchy
• 7 The food of others: Religious minorities and food conflicts
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index