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Chapter 4

Food and Foodways

The act of eating expresses profound, even intimate, acceptance. Conversely, undesirable food is met with involuntary signs of repulsion. Alimentary disgust, suggests Julia Kristeva, “is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.”¹ Acceptance or rejection of food shows others one’s similarities to and differences from them and provides an instantly comprehensible basis for connection or distance. If you eat what I do, or if I can imagine eating your food though it is not a habit for me, we can relate. We possess commensality—we may “dine at the same table.” It is not surprising, then, that eating habits have become essential ingredients of modern ethnography and anthropology: “Like all culturally defined material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relationships, food serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart.”² Observations on “foodways,” which are all the activities of a cultural group relating to their consumption of food, have become a standard part of modern travel writing, too. A growing historical literature has begun to explore premodern European food and foodways, not out of antiquarian curiosity but in recognition of their key cultural role. As Ken Albala observes, “Food preferences, being so central to identity, are perhaps even more revealing than taste in other media. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then what of the dish that savors of the homeland, or displays wealth and elegance, or smacks of simple frugality? Each of these tells a complete story about the person who eats it.”³

Caroline Walker Bynum’s classic study of gender and food practices alerted historians, who (she suggested) had become unduly distracted by modern obsessions with sex and money, to the importance of food and eating in medieval culture. She attributes food’s centrality in medieval societies largely to the perpetual fear of dearth: “In our industrialized corner of the globe, where food supplies do not fail, we scarcely notice grain or milk, ever-present supports of life, and yearn rather after money or sexual favors as signs of power and success. … [W]e should not really be surprised to find that food was, in medieval Europe, a fundamental economic—and religious—concern.”⁴ Hunger and even famine confronted many Europeans at some point in their lives, food production and eating habits were closely tied to seasons and weather, and food and eating helped define individuals by social status as well as reinforce their sense of identity as Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Foodways deserve a central place in our analyses of medieval cultures.

Comments on foodstuffs, dining habits, abundance or lack of produce, the role of food in religious rituals, and strange eating habits such as alleged anthropophagy are among the most common themes in medieval travel writing on distant Easts. Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde includes mention of local produce and eating habits repetitively throughout his chapters on far eastern places, and Odoric’s Relatio shares this fascination; indeed, none of the major late medieval descriptions of eastern travel neglects the subject of food. To an extent, our authors drew on ancient Greek and Roman habits of defining foreign peoples by eating customs, such as the Rhizophagi (root-eaters), Struthophagi (ostrich-eaters), Icthiophagi (fish-eaters), Galactophagi (milk-eaters), Panphagi (anything-eaters), and Anthropophagi (human-eaters), but they brought their own new preoccupations to the theme.⁵

When they wrote about oriental food and eating, medieval travel writers satisfied a range of desires for information and pleasure that were partly dependent on the location described but also inseparable from the motivations of the authors, amanuenses, and audiences. Travelers to Mongolia describe extreme scarcity and eating habits perceived as revolting. This information helped with the compilation of intelligence reports on a fearsome people in the context of immediate fears for political safety but also tapped into ancient prejudices about nomadic peoples. While in many respects the information was a reasonable representation of actual conditions, it also at times emphasized or exaggerated foreignness. Other writers, especially travelers to India and China, comment on sheer fertility and food abundance, taking influences from literary conventions of “Indian” plenitude as well as observation of actual conditions. Accounts of Asian foodways reveal preoccupations with famine that were especially poignant in the context of fourteenth-century European shortages, such as descriptions of the Great Khân’s provisions for famine relief in Yuan China. Readers were sated by revelations of oriental plenitude and extravagance but also by the more dubious pleasures of alien horrors, especially anthropophagy. In contrast with the more consistent stereotypes associated with modern Orientalism, precolonial engagements with eastern cultures were varied, ranging from abjection to glorification and at times held up some Asian societies as offering models from which Europeans could learn and benefit.

Foodways of the Enemy

In the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol Empire continued to represent a significant threat to European security. Although the immediate danger to western Europe had receded with the death of Ögödei in December 1241 and subsequent Mongol withdrawal from Hungary, the inhabitants of kingdoms and territories of the West could not be sure the terror would not come again. Moreover, the conquest of Russia and Batu’s establishment of the Golden Horde was in its early stages.⁶ “Tartars” remained a ferocious presence on the borders of western Europe. Yet it was only a few years after the Hungarian withdrawal that papal embassies led by Carpini, Ascelin, and Andrew of Longjumeau (1245–51) were sent to engage in dialogue with Mongol leaders and to return with precious information on the enemy.⁷

Though some Mongol groups practiced limited forms of agriculture and their territories included mountainous and forested regions, the vast treeless plains of their homelands were more conducive to nomadic pastoralism. Carpini says they are “extremely rich” in camels, oxen, sheep, goats, and especially horses and mares but lack pigs or other farm animals.⁸ The absence of trees, he says, requires food to be cooked at fires made with cattle and horse dung, and “[n]ot one hundredth part of the land is fertile, nor can it bear fruit unless it be irrigated by running water,” though water is itself in short supply. The land is adequate for grazing cattle but could not be called good for that. He writes, “To conclude briefly about this country: it is large, but otherwise—as we saw with our own eyes, for during five and a half months we travelled about it—it is more wretched than I can possibly say.”⁹

For our authors, food scarcity is among the most notable features of Mongolian life.¹⁰ Carpini, who attempts to list Mongolian good points alongside bad, praises their willingness to “share their food with each other, although there is little of it.” They are “also long-suffering. When they are without food, eating nothing at all for one or two days, they do not easily show impatience, but they sing and make merry as if they had eaten well.”¹¹ Marco Polo makes similar remarks, telling how Mongols will live on the blood of living horses if need be, and the Spaniard Clavijo in the early fifteenth century concurs that “[t]hey suffer cold and heat and hunger and thirst more patiently than any other nation in the whole world,” gorging when food is available but subsisting on sour milk when it is not.¹² Carpini’s vivid description of their markedly unfussy eating habits is less complimentary:

Their food consists of everything that can be eaten, for they eat dogs, wolves, foxes and horses and, when driven by necessity, they feed on human flesh. For instance, when they were fighting against a city of the Kitayans, where the Emperor was residing, they besieged it for so long that they themselves completely ran out of supplies and, since they had nothing at all to eat, they thereupon took one out of every ten men for food. They eat the filth which comes away from mares when they bring forth foals. Nay, I have even seen them eating lice. They would say, “Why should I not eat them since they eat the flesh of my son and drink his blood?” I have also seen them eat mice.¹³

The Tartar Relation repeats the tale of anthropophagous besiegers, tells another of Chinggis ordering the eating of one man in ten during an arduous desert trek, and echoes Carpini on Mongols’ unclean diet of wolves, foxes, dogs, carrion, afterbirths, mice, and human flesh.¹⁴ Joinville’s account of Tartars, probably drawing on reports by Andrew of Longjumeau, asserts Mongols eat no bread but live on flesh and milk, and favor horseflesh, which they lay raw between their saddlecloths and saddles until all the blood is pressed from it then eat it raw. Joinville interjects that he knew a Khwarazmian (an inhabitant of approximately modern Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan) who guarded him in prison and who had some of this meat in his bag: “[W]hen he opened his bag we had to stop our noses; we could not bear the putrid stench which came out.”¹⁵ Johann Schiltberger’s narrative repeats the detail about pressing salted meat beneath saddles; he adds that they will bleed their horses and cook and drink the blood.¹⁶ Rubruck, who offers a greater level of detail throughout his reports of Mongol eating habits, acknowledges a little more culinary discernment: they will eat mice with short tails, marmots, conies with long tails, and many other “little creatures which are good to eat, and which they are quite able to tell apart,” but they refuse to eat mice with long tails, giving them to their birds instead.¹⁷ He does not repeat the rumors about eating human flesh. Mandeville follows Vincent of Beauvais’s extracts from Carpini and Simon of St. Quentin, emphasizing the meagerness and meanness of their diets—eating dogs, lions, and even mice and rats—and their unclean habits, such as wiping their dirty hands on their clothes, eating without tablecloths or napkins, and failing to wash dishes. He omits the references to devouring human flesh, though he alleges a wartime habit of cutting off the ears of the slaughtered and sousing them in vinegar to eat.¹⁸ A crude illustration accompanying Mandeville’s Book in London, BL MS Harley 3954 shows a Tartar eating small black creatures, possibly rats, while a beast lies dead on the ground and three viewers gesticulate in horror.¹⁹

Many European food staples are said to be practically nonexistent among the Mongols. Carpini states they lack bread, herbs, and vegetables, and though they eat meat they have “so little that other people would scarcely be able to exist on it.” Their summer staple is mare’s milk “in very great quantities”; in winter they (except the wealthy) lack even this and instead drink water in which millet has been boiled, along with a little broth and meat in the evenings.²⁰ Rubruck agrees, saying that in summer “as long as their comos [fermented mare’s milk, ayiragh in Mongol or kumis in Turkic] holds out, they care for no other food,” and “[w]ith the meat of a single sheep they feed fifty or a hundred men.”²¹ Carpini’s account of the journey to the camp near Karakorum shows the friars shared in their hosts’ hunger en route, eating little but millet with water and salt: “[W]e could scarcely keep alive, for the food provided for four was barely sufficient for one.”²² Rubruck also complains about the starvation rations: “Were it not for the biscuit we had, and God’s grace, we might well have perished”; his companion wails, “I feel as if I have never eaten.”²³ Rubruck laments that during their long journey their guides gave them nothing to eat before evening but a little millet, though they had meat and plenty of broth in the evenings.²⁴ In contrast, Pegolotti advises prospective merchants traveling from Tana to Cathay that although they should take enough flour and saltfish to last the journey, they would be able to procure sufficient other provisions, especially meat, along the way.²⁵ Perhaps merchants would have taken a more southerly path through present-day Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and would have been spared the worst of the steppe conditions. What the Mongols lack in gluttony they allegedly make up in drunkenness, as Carpini, Rubruck, and Ricold all attest, imbibing extraordinary quantities of kumis when they could get it, drinking till they vomit then drinking again.²⁶ Andrew of Longjumeau also comments that their favorite drink is horse’s milk brewed with herbs.²⁷

Food scarcity is portrayed as such a potent presence in Mongolian life that wasteful habits meet with draconian punishments. To pour out any milk, food, or other drink on the ground is a serious evil, and, says Carpini, “if anyone takes a morsel and, unable to swallow it, spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made under the dwelling and he is dragged out by that hole and without any mercy put to death.” They avoid washing dishes, pots, or spoons, except to swill them with some meat broth then add this back to the meat pot, and even extract the marrow from bones before giving them to the dogs. Rubruck comments that they put meat bones away in their carry bags for gnawing on later.²⁸ Carpini’s secondhand account of Chinggis Khân’s rise to power offers an historic explanation of waste prohibition. Returning from campaign the Mongol army

ran short of food and suffered great hunger. Then they happened to come across the fresh entrails of an animal; they took them and, putting aside only the dung, they cooked them and brought them before Chingis Chan, who ate them with his men. As a result of this Chingis decreed that neither the blood nor the entrails nor any part of an animal that can be eaten, with the exception of the dung, is to be thrown away.²⁹

Hunger was also a recurrent theme of Chinggis’s life in Mongolian legend. The Secret History of the Mongols tells of his mother Hö’elün’s widowhood and tribal abandonment when he was a child and her attempts to nourish her children with whatever she could forage.³⁰ The tremendous value of food is also apparent in Mongol religious practice. Carpini says they always offer the first milk from mares and cows and the first portion of each meal to their idols. They give the idol the heart of a slaughtered animal in a cup—though the next morning they thriftily take it back to cook and eat. Their veneration of the sun, the moon, fire, water, and the earth is marked by first offerings of food and drink. Dead men are buried in one of their tents, seated at the table with meat and milk before them.³¹

European accounts of Mongolian food and foodways are thus dominated by infertility of the land, lack of recognizable staple foods, willingness to eat unclean meats, habitual drunkenness, and subsistence on blood or even human flesh when necessary. With the exception of anthropophagy (which will be considered in more detail later in the chapter) and perhaps drunkenness, this seems a largely fair representation of Mongolian conditions but also has rhetorical value. No doubt Mongols acquired the ability to endure hunger interspersed with periods of gorging on high protein and calcium foods, given the severe continental conditions of much of their homeland and predominantly nomadic habits. Dependence on meat and milk is still a mark of Mongolian cuisine today and doubtless was even stronger 750 years ago. Yet if an army marches on its stomach, it is hard to see how even the staunch Tartars could have maintained their ferocity for long on a diet of horses’ blood, fermented mares’ milk, and the occasional small rodent.³² Remember Carpini’s remark that the land is “extremely rich” in horses, camels, oxen, sheep, and goats. Mongols were herders who moved over wide areas to gain pasture for their beasts; they were also keen hunters.³³ Medieval travel writers emphasize scarcity and willingness to eat foods beyond perceived margins of edibility not only to represent reality but also to define and construct Mongol characteristics.

One rhetorical purpose is to heighten the impression of Tartars as the most hardy, ferocious, and belligerent of men. Despite Carpini’s measured tones in the ethnographic chapters of his book (chapters 2–4), his later warnings about the dangers they pose as untrustworthy and ruthless enemies are explicit: “It is the intention of the Tartars to bring the whole world into subjection if they can” (in this, Carpini was correct); on no account should Christian countries enter peace treaties with them because of the “intolerable” servitude to which they reduce conquered nations. They are “full of deceit,” speaking fair words at first but afterward stinging like a scorpion, though he also feels they can be defeated because of their small population and their weak bodies compared to those of Christians.³⁴ His message is, therefore, somewhat mixed: the Mongols are a terrible foe, yet ultimately defeatable. The emphasis that he and other travelers place on capacity for hunger endurance and willingness to eat even vermin and carrion helps convey this dual message: the scarcity that signifies their toughness also indicates potential military weakness.

Connected to this characterization is the ancient image of the barbarian, though this is more often implicit than stated outright in our travelers’ books. The belligerence, cruelty, and deceit Carpini attributes to Mongols were also conventional traits of barbarians, as were their filthy eating habits.³⁵ The Mongols’ lack of bread and dependence on flesh and milk are especially revealing. Bread is among the most venerable signifiers of civilization in western traditions. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu is tamed and civilized when brought in from the steppes where he has roamed with the beasts and lived by suckling their milk and taught to sit at a table, drink beer, and eat bread.³⁶ In Homer’s Odyssey, danger befalls “men, eaters of bread” when they sail into the land of the lotus-eaters whose intoxicating food has the power to make them forget their families and the way home.³⁷ In Mandeville’s and Witte’s descriptions of some eastern monstrous peoples (discussed in Chapter 8), failure to eat bread while instead living off meat, milk, or raw plants are common identifiers for the barely or partially human.³⁸

Yet travelers do not impose a simple template of barbarian imagery on Mongol peoples. “Tartars” are not undisciplined or without law, which are other conventions of the trope. They may (according to Carpini) be “dirty in the way they take food and drink,” lack tablecloths and napkins, and wipe greasy hands on leggings or grass, but they are not devoid of dining etiquette.³⁹ Rubruck comments on the formal dining arrangements witnessed at the imperial court.⁴⁰ Hetoum, whose motive of persuading the pope to form an Armenian-Mongol-French crusading alliance made his account of the Mongols more positive, states they are generous and courteous in sharing their food and if others are not quick to share in return they do not hesitate to take supplies by force.⁴¹ A Mongolian law stating “[w]hen a wayfarer passes by people eating, he must alight and eat with them without asking for permission, and they must not forbid him this” echoes Hetoum’s account of Mongol hospitality.⁴²