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