An Age of Miracles Continues: The Empire of Rhomania
- Thread starter Basileus444
- Start date
I'll admit I haven't commented on the last few updates mostly because aside it being Rome there isn't much to comment on in terms of alternate history. These updates do a beautiful job of showing the lifestyle and limits of medieval governments and show well that although Rome is probably the most advanced administrative state on the planet they are; outside of cities and ports; almost completely absent as a day to day force. For many villages and towns off the major roads aside from the tax collector who comes every couple years for the head tax and the favoured son who comes home from the army/navy these villages have next to no contact with Rome outside of the Church.
What I really like about these updates is that it shows clearly that the peasantry of Rome; or anywhere else; isn't stupid. They know that they could increase their productivity with new techniques; they know about economies of scale and how to increase productivity; they even know how to conduct trade and barter; but the downside of switching to these new techniques is famine in a time before mass transport of bulk goods overland if while learning the new techniques they mess up, the upside is at some point in the future they will have more of a cushion IF and only if they don't starve while learning first. The overwhelming majority of peasants outside coercion will stick with what they know rather than literally risk them and their families lives trying new agricultural techniques. This is a time when a central Anatolian village could have an early frost, lose their crop, all starve over the winter, and the first Constantinople will hear of it is the next fall when the tax collector reports it to the local governor who passes it up the line. These updates have shown that well and it is these sorts of updates that separate this timeline from so many others.
I won't speculate too much on the future as it is difficult to know at this point how Rome will fare during this cold period. The nearest OTL example of the Ottomans is too far removed from Rome at this point to be useful as anything more than a geographic comparison. Rome itself has completely a different administrative system, completely different infrastructure, even different trade networks from the OTL Ottomans which make it difficult to see how Rome will adapt and react to the pressures of the time. I am optimistic though as Rome has in the past couple years lived by the advice "never let a good crisis go to waste" and has used previous times to force through reforms. Hopefully that trend continues. One thing I could see would be upgrading minor ports around Anatolia/Levant/Greece and improving roads within 1 or 2 days of these minor ports to increase the radius of control that the government can exert and also to try to get more of the population in a position to increase their agricultural productivity as the government can promise relief should a harvest fail.
The on bit of alternate history I'll comment on was the transfer of North Africa to Sicily. From Rome's long term perspective it is brilliant. Rome is solidly an Eastern Mediterranean/Adriatic/Aegean/Black Sea power while Sicily is a central/western Mediterranean power. Giving North Africa to Sicily allows Rome to concentrate on the Eastern Mediterranean/Adriatic while also pulling Sicily out of the Adriatic and more fully into the Central Mediterranean. This ironically makes Sicily more reliant on Rome; as they will need to weaken their navy in the Adriatic to more fully patrol/control the sea lanes between North Africa and Italy; while at the same time making Sicily more able to act as the western shield of Rome by giving them ports that they can now upgrade on both sides of the sea. Ports that Rome will also be able to take advantage or without having to invest any money in upgrading/fortifying/defending them. It was an incredibly shrewd deal from Rome that in time will be seen as brilliant I am sure.
What I really like about these updates is that it shows clearly that the peasantry of Rome; or anywhere else; isn't stupid. They know that they could increase their productivity with new techniques; they know about economies of scale and how to increase productivity; they even know how to conduct trade and barter; but the downside of switching to these new techniques is famine in a time before mass transport of bulk goods overland if while learning the new techniques they mess up, the upside is at some point in the future they will have more of a cushion IF and only if they don't starve while learning first. The overwhelming majority of peasants outside coercion will stick with what they know rather than literally risk them and their families lives trying new agricultural techniques. This is a time when a central Anatolian village could have an early frost, lose their crop, all starve over the winter, and the first Constantinople will hear of it is the next fall when the tax collector reports it to the local governor who passes it up the line. These updates have shown that well and it is these sorts of updates that separate this timeline from so many others.
I won't speculate too much on the future as it is difficult to know at this point how Rome will fare during this cold period. The nearest OTL example of the Ottomans is too far removed from Rome at this point to be useful as anything more than a geographic comparison. Rome itself has completely a different administrative system, completely different infrastructure, even different trade networks from the OTL Ottomans which make it difficult to see how Rome will adapt and react to the pressures of the time. I am optimistic though as Rome has in the past couple years lived by the advice "never let a good crisis go to waste" and has used previous times to force through reforms. Hopefully that trend continues. One thing I could see would be upgrading minor ports around Anatolia/Levant/Greece and improving roads within 1 or 2 days of these minor ports to increase the radius of control that the government can exert and also to try to get more of the population in a position to increase their agricultural productivity as the government can promise relief should a harvest fail.
The on bit of alternate history I'll comment on was the transfer of North Africa to Sicily. From Rome's long term perspective it is brilliant. Rome is solidly an Eastern Mediterranean/Adriatic/Aegean/Black Sea power while Sicily is a central/western Mediterranean power. Giving North Africa to Sicily allows Rome to concentrate on the Eastern Mediterranean/Adriatic while also pulling Sicily out of the Adriatic and more fully into the Central Mediterranean. This ironically makes Sicily more reliant on Rome; as they will need to weaken their navy in the Adriatic to more fully patrol/control the sea lanes between North Africa and Italy; while at the same time making Sicily more able to act as the western shield of Rome by giving them ports that they can now upgrade on both sides of the sea. Ports that Rome will also be able to take advantage or without having to invest any money in upgrading/fortifying/defending them. It was an incredibly shrewd deal from Rome that in time will be seen as brilliant I am sure.
One frequent argument I’ve seen for France’s comparatively slow rate of industrialization compared to its neighbors was that the changes in land tenure caused by the Revolution improved the lot of the French peasantry. With stable landholdings of their own, they were prosperous enough to stay put, and thus France had a much smaller mass of rural landless that would then migrate to the cities to be dirt cheap factory labor.
Of course, the usual narrative of progress thus says having a prosperous peasantry, because of this factor, is therefore a bad thing…
Indeed. There’s some city work, such as unskilled construction labor, but that’s intermittent and unreliable and low-paid. And then there’s the like of being the street sweepers and cesspit drainers. But your point stands.
And then you have the Enclosure Movement in the UK, where farmers were actively pushed off their lands.
I do have some ideas for ways the Roman government can and will stimulate agricultural innovations by providing resources and backup for the peasant villages to do so. But at this specific point in time in the TL, the Sweet Waters of Asia is not that good of a tool for this, for reasons I cover in the upcoming update. (Thanks for reminding me about the Sweet Waters; I’d forgotten to include the bit about it in the earlier version that I’d been meaning to do.)
Thanks. They’re a lot of fun writing and researching.
Thanks for the info; I wasn’t aware of this, but it may prove useful.
Yeah, I admit that so far there’s not that much that is very ATL or even particularly Roman-specific. Tweak the details and this would apply to Spain or Italy. Some of this is world-building for the fun of world-building, but it’s also to provide important background info once we’re back in the narrative. The Roman Empire is an advanced state, but by the standards of the 1600s, which isn’t saying much by our post-industrial standards. So this is really my way of preempting questions about ‘why can’t Constantinople just ship in food to stave off the famine?’ or ‘why won’t Roman peasants just do [insert agricultural innovation] to fix the issue?’ Plus laying out how Rhomania is in detail really helps to explain why Romans react the way they do to the Little Ice Age. I’m naturally biased, but I think my planned narrative for the Little Ice Age would make much less sense without the detailed background info. It will get more Roman and alternate-specific though.
And it is a good way to push back against the ‘peasants are dumb and refuse to change and so therefore are acceptable collateral damage’ narrative.
The Romans probably use Albanian tribesmen for light cavalry units.
On that note, I wonder if Skanderbeg will ever make an appearance in this timeline. A military genius Orthodox Albanian tribesman that elevates the scattered Albanian mountain tribes into a respected nation within the Roman Empire could be pretty cool. Doubly so if he's the descendant of Andreas Niketas through his Triumvirate granddaughter.
I doubt they'd only use one source of light cavalry. They've got a solid half dozen excellent light cavalry traditions to pull from.
Most Russians that end up serving in the Roman army end up in the Varangians, but not very many Cossacks make it to Rhomania. Because of Ukraine's very different history ITTL, ATL's Cossacks are active east, as opposed to west, of the Caspian Sea.
I think an alt-Skanderbeg would probably be as troublesome for TTL Romans as for OTL Ottomans. Uniting Albanian tribes under one banner turns them into a much bigger political threat to Roman control. Now that doesn't mean there couldn't be a famous Roman strategos who is Orthodox Albanian, but anyone attempting to follow Skanderbeg's OTL political trajectory would immediately be sounding big alarm bells in Constantinople.
Roman light cavalry units are still called Turkopouloi, as they were back in the Late Middle Ages, which gives a rather obvious hint of where a lot of them came from. Most light cavalry come from either the Kappadokians (which is what I'm calling the ethnically mixed central and east Anatolian population), Albanians, or nomadic Melkites (Arab Christians).
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 5-3: Innovations in Agriculture
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 5-3: Innovations in Agriculture
As mentioned, the barriers to innovations in agriculture were many, but they were not impermeable, and examples of change and development in this period are readily apparent alongside the long arc of traditional practices.
Most barriers pertained to cereal cultivation. Cereals, while necessary for life, were per-unit the least profitable and were extremely bulky. Thus investing in improving cereal yields was only worthwhile on larger consolidated holdings near a large market or with easy access to water-borne transport. Cereals were grown as a cash crop near the larger cities, with the big and heavily-manured estates producing impressive yields by the standards of the day, but they were very much the exception.
Most innovations focused on other areas, where the incentives were greater and the barriers smaller. The majority practiced by agriculturists in the mid-1600s were not new and would’ve been recognized by their medieval predecessors. Examples included bringing waste land under cultivation, establishing irrigation systems and water wheels, and planting gardens, orchards, olive trees, and vines.
Roman law incentivized land improvement in these ways, even to the extent of somewhat overriding private property rights. If an individual or individuals (sometimes a whole village would band together to take advantage) built an improvement, such as a water wheel or a vineyard, on wasteland that belonged to another, the labor gave the laborer a claim, even though it was not on their land. And not just a claim, but a priority claim. By the 1600s, the already centuries-old legal tradition was that in such cases, two-thirds of the profit from the improvement went to the one responsible, and only one-third to the actual owner of the land used. [1]
The increase in size and number of markets and traveling merchants, including even the humble peddlers, further encouraged improvements that would increase yields of cash crops, and even with typical smallholding practices, almost everything other than cereals could fall into that category. Some areas even had regional specialties. The Pontic coast was, and is, famous for its hazelnuts and cherries, while Amisos then and now produced what are considered the best pears and pickles in the Roman heartland, and the Tauric peninsula was the source of the best honey. [2] Farmers in those areas knew the reputations and planted accordingly.
But for all the charm of cherries and pickles, and the clichéd but accurate examples of cotton and flax, far and away the most common cash crops were the products of the vine and olive tree. (Olive trees and vines were also subsistence crops and thus illustrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of rigid categorization.)
Olive trees produced olive oil, mostly for consumption, but even low-quality oil had its uses. It was used to make soap and also as a cheap fuel for oil lamps. Thus the owner of an olive tree could rely on definitely being able to sell their product if they had any access at all to a market. It is estimated that a good olive tree could yield a profit of 20-25% [3], with minimal labor requirements except for brief high-intensity periods. The disadvantage was that olive trees took several years to mature before they could produce oil, and the crop was every two years, so it was a long-term investment.
By far though the greatest cash crop was that of the vine. Based on the estimated annual imports into Constantinople, the inhabitants of the Queen of Cities consumed two-thirds of a gallon of wine per person per day. There is no reason to assume the consumption of the rest of the population was appreciably different, and in addition to the thirsty denizens of the Imperial heartland Rhomania had a thriving wine export trade, especially to the massive Russian market. Even as early as the late stage of Andreas Niketas’s reign, the island of Crete alone was producing over 100,000 metric tons of wine a year, half of which was exported. [4] Wine was an important source of calories and, very importantly in pre-refrigeration days, it kept well.
Vineyards were by far the most valuable agricultural real estate, surpassing even the first-rate and highly-fertilized arable cereal lands near major settlements. Going by tax assessments to estimate their market values, vineyards were eight to twelve times more valuable than first-rate arable land of comparable size. [5] Considering that, it is understandable that anyone who could grow grapes would grow grapes.
Roman wine exports were facing increasing competition by mid-century. Roman sweet wines had been a prominent export going back well into the Middle Ages, partially because they kept well on long sea voyages unlike French and Italian dry wines. However by 1650 the Spanish were growing sweet wines of their own while the French invented the glass bottle and cork stopper combination characteristic of all wines today. This enabled dry wines to be kept for much longer. [6] Morea and Crete, which had specialized in the production of sweet wines for the Latin market, were especially hard-hit by this, and Monemvasia’s relative decline in this period is connected.
Another source of profitability was via the growing availability of distillation technology. During the Little Ice Age, farmers with lands that had been marginal for grape-growing beforehand, partially in Bulgaria but predominantly in the Kingdom of Serbia, gave up the practice because of growing impossibility. However this potential massive blow to their income was overcome by growing plums instead and distilling them into raki, a type of plum brandy, and selling that to thirsty Serbian and Roman townsfolk. [7] It is still a common product and popular drink south of the Danube to this day.
An additional factor spurring wine production was the nature of Roman inheritance patterns. Overwhelmingly the practice was of partible inheritance, although with regional variations. Usually the division among offspring was equal, at least as much as physically possible, although sometimes one heir might be favored above others. (This would go to the extent of livestock being divvied up into shares, with proportional rights to its labor and products, such as milk, wool, and dung. These shares could be commodified and traded, with certain types of shares that also included claims on offspring of said livestock being more valuable than ones restricted to the animal only. [8]) Usually though, the favor was relatively modest, and the practice of primogeniture was conspicuously absent. The one exception was the Imperial throne itself, and even there while primogeniture was de facto, it was never de jure.
Primogeniture was highly offensive to the Roman sense of justice, even disregarding its association with Latins. The idea of the sanctity of contracts was important in Roman society, but social pressure bore heavily on that in the matter of inheritance. A parent that would show such obvious and overweening favoritism toward one offspring, at the expense of all others, was clearly a terrible parent and committing a monstrous injustice.
Custom played a major role here. In theory, the will could be arranged however the principals willed, but one example of social pressure has already been given. Furthermore, by custom at least a third and typically one half of all property had to be willed to offspring; a parent couldn’t try and disinherit their heirs entirely by bequeathing all their property to the church. The fraction was determined by local custom, as well as whether or not the first or favored son would get a slightly preferential inheritance.
Now a common workaround was for parents to give their offspring their ‘inheritance portion’ early, with a daughter’s marriage portion acting as their inheritance portion as a frequent example. Once that obligation was discharged, then the principal was free to bequeath their remaining property as they saw fit, but the key was that they could do so only after they had discharged that obligation. In the absence of a will, the property would be evenly divided among all the offspring, with sons and daughters all receiving an equal portion. [9]
This was done to uphold a sense of justice and familial obligations, but it also had the effect of fragmenting landholdings over the course of generations. Small plots were not effective for cereal production, but plots of even minute proportions could be commercially viable if they were planted with vines or acted as vegetable gardens and had access to a market. So peasants in these positions would focus on grapes and vegetables for sale at markets, which did increase their activity in commerce but also increased their dependence on said markets for cereals. Given the limitations of transportation of the period, this could be a risky gamble.
The inhabitants of Crete, with small and often rugged plots, focused on sweet wine production for export to the point that by 1620 the island only produced a third of its cereal needs. The remainder was made up by imports of grain, financed by the sale of said sweet wine, from Thessaly and especially Egypt. Crete was extreme, with its easy access to the Egyptian grain trade, but only in extent, not in concept. [10]
Romans were not blind to the problems of fragmentation and worked to mitigate its effects. One way was to limit the amount of offspring, although the high infant mortality rate meant that family planning this way could easily backfire to the other extreme. This might explain the comparatively late age at which Roman infants were weaned, with this not happening until the age of 2 at the earliest, with at least one example of a four-year-old still being breastfed. [11]
Marriage strategies were probably more reliable, with marriage alliances allowing new holdings to be consolidated out of fragments from separate family lands. Less attractively, this could also incentivize marriages within the family, so as to keep property within the family. This was more an issue with the upper class, who were more likely to have the resources and connections to push against the church consanguinity restrictions. One of the most extreme examples comes from 1650, when the Megas Tzaousios (Imperial Chief of Police) tried to marry his twelve-year-old niece, the only heir of his deceased brother, to keep the substantial property associated with her in the family. The Patriarch’s exact response is unknown, simply listed as ‘unprintable’, but the marriage did not go through, much to the rage and resentment of the Megas Tzaousios.
These strategies were not entirely effective, and sometimes potential heirs were encouraged to migrate to the cities with some sort of allotment in lieu of their inheritance. Others made that journey more ‘voluntarily’, abandoning their meager or by-now nonexistent holdings in search of opportunities in the cities, with their left-behind crumbs being absorbed into more viable estates. This was the main impetus behind the urban expansion of Rhomania, creating a large population of urban poor, or even destitute.
With minimal resources and lacking the connections and social safety nets of their villages, their prospects were grim. And even with this flow, the proportion of landless or near-landless rural poor, dependent on working on others’ land for survival, was growing as population increased, with the increasing working of ever-more-marginal lands only helping somewhat. This was a precarious position with the agricultural labor market being extremely unreliable, with intense demands for labor at certain times (harvest) and virtually nil at others, while the person needs to eat all year round. Comparatively, the Russian peasant might have a worse climate (although not necessarily soil), but he would be much more likely to own at least some land, which made him much more secure than the Roman rural landless.
A major possibility of agricultural innovation during this period was the adoption of Terranovan crops, and the Roman record of the period is again a mix that defies easy categorization. Tomatoes are an example of a breakout food, quickly adopted and spread throughout the Empire where conditions could support it. A major contributing factor was the spread of pizza, a Sicilian invention that took the Roman Empire by storm, with a tomato sauce base, which produced a huge demand. Demetrios III helped to popularize it by his well-known consumption of the food, although even without him it was spreading wildly. In just a generation, pizza became an important part of the Roman cultural expression, with the details of pizza presentation and consumption having important social ramifications. Roman pizza etiquette was already well-established as early as 1650.
A boon to tomato production was that it was a garden crop which could be grown in those patches without the need for communal consent. When one moved outside the garden, it got more complicated, which delayed the introduction of other foodstuffs. Corn/Maize production was growing slowly but steadily by the mid-1600s, with its resistance to drought making it an attractive alternative to grain, and it could just replace grains in its agricultural niche. Another boon was that its stalks and cobbs could be used as fodder and also fuel, a concern in areas where firewood was scarce and manure was needed for fertilizer. Areas dependent on corn though commonly had issues with pellagra, as they were not necessarily planted with beans as was the native Terranovan practice.
Potatoes meanwhile were known, but rare and very unpopular. It was an ugly food, unlike the more visually appealing tomato and corn, which mattered in terms of attracting new consumers. It was also believed to cause flatulence, which certainly didn’t help its reputation. [12] It was disparaged as a food really for hogs, and it was mainly used to feed pigs at this time; for human consumption it was limited to the utterly destitute. Its taste also disagreed with Roman tastes. The Bishop of Klaudiopolis, who was the 17th-century equivalent of a foodie, and an arbiter of taste during the period, said “the potato requires substantial seasoning to make it at all tolerable to the tongue and is incapable of standing on its own merits, thus illustrating its own merits are worthless. Furthermore nothing can make it pleasant to the bowels; no potato dish should be consumed at a distance from the toilet”. It is unsurprising that such an endorsement fails to attract consumers.
Potatoes thus make no headway in the commercial agricultural sphere, but they also make little headway in subsistence agriculture. Corn visually is an obvious stand-in for cereal grains, but potatoes are not an obvious visual replacement. It would seem the best place to grow them would be in the garden patches; the potato flower blossoms are, in contrast to the tuber, valued for commercial sale in the towns. Except that would mean using land that is typically the most commercially-profitable to grow crops that are commercially worthless. Looked at from that angle, nobody would want to do so.
Those who would most benefit from potato production would’ve been the poor. The landless had no way to do so, but right above them were those who only had a small patch of land to call their own. Their lot was precarious, with real concerns about slipping into the landless class below them, and thus the social cachet of potatoes with destitution would make the idea of themselves eating and growing potatoes especially offensive. The suggestion that they might become so poor as to only have food fit for hogs available to them was absolutely no joke, and while they had little else, they still had their pride and self-respect. Starvation might push someone to suffer such utter humiliation, but practically any Roman peasant who resist, kicking and screaming, having to go over that threshold.
Thus the few potatoes that are grown in this period are mainly for their flowers, with the tubers given to the pigs or donated to the poorest of the population, which further enhances its poor cultural status. The rigors of the Little Ice Age would increase its production and consumption in some marginal areas, but even so it would remain a minor crop, far less significant than corn or the traditional Mediterranean crops. [13]
The Sweet Waters of Asia also help explain the course of Roman agricultural innovations. The Sweet Waters were developed for the purpose of providing food for the White Palace. Agricultural innovations there were keyed toward fulfilling that goal. Ensuring the Emperor could always have the ingredients for a fresh salad was a priority; improving base cereal yields in low-quality Anatolian soil was not. The Sweet Waters could and was an exemplar for other Roman agriculturists, but this operated in the same vein. It encouraged ways to grow crops that could be marketed for the mesoi and dynatoi in the cities, such as tomatoes, but not cheap bulk foods for the poor such as maize or potatoes.
Roman agriculture was thus a bundle of contradictions, the ancient juxtaposed with the modern. The great estate, producing entirely for the market, could be growing only wheat, a crop grown in the area for thousands of years. Meanwhile the peasant next door would be enthusiastically growing tomatoes for the pizzerias in town. Corn would be adopted as a supplement to cereals, while any peasant with a patch of land to their name would rather die than be seen growing or eating potatoes.
It was in-between the pre-modern and the modern, which was a problem. The imperatives of the market were growing throughout regions that had been subsistence, even if it was limited in reach and often tightly focused such as in vineyards, orchards, or gardens. Yet it had been growing remarkably ever since the Flowering and continuing afterwards. But market imperatives damaged the preexisting social safety; surpluses went to the market, not to support neighbors. (One could argue that the resulting monetary surplus could be distributed to neighbors as a type of hybrid, but times of food scarcity were inevitable in these conditions. And in times of food scarcity, the price of food at the market would go up, meaning that right when the money would be most needed, it would also be the least useful.)
And efforts to boost production for the market, such as enclosure and consolidation, while benefitting the specific owners, damaged their neighbors, weakening social cohesion and increasing tensions. Meanwhile, given the limitations of transportation and agricultural production, which did not have the benefits of modern innovations (trains, trucks, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, refrigeration, etc.) which underpin modern market agriculture, the market was thus a questionable and unreliable replacement for that communal village safety net. It was certainly not adequate to the challenges of the Little Ice Age.
[1] From OTL. See Angeliki Laiou, “The Agrarian Economy, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries” in The Economic History of Byzantium, pgs. 362-63.
[2] From OTL. See Carl M. Kortepeter, “Ottoman Imperial Policy and the Economy of the Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth Century”, in Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 86 No. 2 (1966), pgs. 104, 107.
[3] Laiou, “Agrarian Economy”, pg. 359.
[4] Taken from OTL Crete in 1512. Allaire B. Stallsmith, “One Colony, Two Mother Cities: Cretan Agriculture under Venetian and Ottoman Rule”, in Hesperia Supplements Vol. 40 (2007), pg. 157.
[5] Laiou, 360.
[6] Stallsmith, 159.
[7] Jelena Mrgić, “Wine or “Raki”- The Interplay of Climate and Society in Early Modern Ottoman Bosnia”, in Environment and History Vol. 17 No. 4 (2011).
[8] For OTL examples, see Alan Mikhail, “Animals as Property in Early Modern Ottoman Egypt” in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Vol. 53 no. 4 (2010).
[9] Practices and customs are from OTL. Angeliki E. Laiou, “Family Structure and the Transmission of Property”, in A Social History of Byzantium, ed. John Haldon, pg. 55-69.
[10] IOTL, Venetian Crete was also dependent on grain imports by the end of the period for the same reason of focusing on wine production for commercial reasons. And in that case, the imports were from Ottoman Anatolia. See Stallsmith “One Colony, Two Mother Cities”.
[11] Chryssi Bourbou and Sandra Garvie-Lok, “Bread, Oil, Wine, and Milk: Feeding Infants and Adults in Byzantine Greece”, Hesperia Supplements Vol. 49 (2015): pgs. 175-76.
[12] Belief is from OTL. Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life, pg. 170.
[13] The performance of corn and potatoes is copied from OTL, although the cultural effects of potatoes ITTL are elaborated. Potatoes would not become common in the Ottoman Empire until the 1800s. Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 286. The reluctance to adopt the potato prior to the 1700s and 1800s seems to have been a European-wide phenomenon, with some local exceptions. See Braudel, pgs. 167-71 for more.
Impeccably sourced, I'm going to bookmark this so I can hopefully make my way through the bibliography.
Those poor Romans. On the one hand, yes, unseasoned potatoes are as bland as can be. On the other hand, hash browns!
Those poor Romans. On the one hand, yes, unseasoned potatoes are as bland as can be. On the other hand, hash browns!
Vince
Monthly Donor
I take it it's too early for something like the Norfolk Four Course System to be used?
Vince
Monthly Donor
I mean the olive oil and the potatoes are there. We just need some desperate poor person to say what the hell and give it a try to change the course of history.
They don't like like potatoes ehh just feed them some Cypriot potatoes and they will for certain change their mind(fun fact about 3% of the Cypriot exports are potatoes)
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With this lack of arable farm it would make sense for the roman government to start many swamp and lake draining throughout the empire,the swamps of elis and the evros river come to mind and lakes like giannitsa and copaida should be completely drained and im sure that they are many such swamps and lakes all around the empire.
Of course even with these projects completed it would at most make a small dent in the problems facing the empire.
Of course even with these projects completed it would at most make a small dent in the problems facing the empire.
In otl raisins were a major greek export...could be also the case with the romans aswell? At least in the helladic theme?
An excellent update as usual. However, since there is no Turkish occupation inthe Balkans ITTL, I very much doubt that the plum brandy will be called raki, which is an arabian wold used by the Ottomans. Besides this , in Greece raki is rarely produced by plums. It is usually produced by distilled marcs (pomace) or by grapes. In Crete it is called Tsikoudia or Raki and in mainland Greece it is called Tsipouro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsipouro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsikoudia
How is the uptake of Terranovan crops among monasteries? Does it have any added reverse attraction for those who shun worldly possessions?
Donald Reaver
Donor
Can someone invent potato chips, fairly simple to make, add salt or whatever the Romans like, very addictive. Perhaps a monastery disciplining monks, just is all you get to eat, some cook this all you get to eat, I will slice them thin and cook them. Abbot "Why is discipline lapsing. 
Potato chips actually came pretty late into the game, with the first recipes being recorded in 1817 according to Wikipedia. French fries are likely to happen sooner, but honestly I expect people to use potatoes for more mundane preparations like boiling, mashing, or even baking, especially since Basileus444 mentions that only the poorest of the poor eat it for sustenance in Rhomania (which despite its low status is still a huge boon).
I'm actually more interested in the possibility of amaranth going into the food chain as Mexican officials could introduce it freely to the Romans, and it's notoriously prolific, hearty, and very nutritious, considering the greens and seeds are edible with high nutrient content. I can see it be a garden plant for decoration in a Roman garden before some bloke actually figures out they're really good as a breakfast pudding, candy, or even a salad (which seems to have happened OTL with a local variety).
I'm actually more interested in the possibility of amaranth going into the food chain as Mexican officials could introduce it freely to the Romans, and it's notoriously prolific, hearty, and very nutritious, considering the greens and seeds are edible with high nutrient content. I can see it be a garden plant for decoration in a Roman garden before some bloke actually figures out they're really good as a breakfast pudding, candy, or even a salad (which seems to have happened OTL with a local variety).
Just so you know, all the talk about how to make potatoes tasty 'made' me go to the Smashburger near me. They're a burger joint but they have french fries and tater tots to which they add olive oil, rosemary, and garlic.
Yes. There's nothing like that yet.
Keep a pin in that. We're going to be coming to that.
That could also be the case. Didn't think of raisins.
Good point about the name; didn't think to look it up. The shift to plum brandy because of the Little Ice Age is in Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, so really it's more pertinent to Serbian rather than Roman peasants, but I thought it was a good example of agricultural practices changing because of the Little Ice Age. For Greece, the farmers would've been able to keep producing grapes and so continued business as usual.
Monasteries are a mix, like other Roman farms. Some are quite commercialized and involved in the market (looks at all the commercial privileges Mt. Athos had in the late Byzantine period IOTL), while others are more run-down and poorly managed. Potatoes could be used as a good 'punishment food' or for those who really want to go ascetic.
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 6: Man-Devouring Sheep
The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 6: Man-Devouring Sheep
Keeping animals was a vital component of Roman food production. They provided meat and dairy products and were the main source of the all-important manure, vital for providing everything else. Even the poorest peasant that could still claim at least a little land in their own name would try to have some animals, be it some dovecotes or using their garden patch to support some chickens and a goat or two. Access to common grazing lands for pasturage was vital for these peasants on the margins and they thus stoutly resisted efforts at consolidating those into private holdings and enclosures. To lose the ability to support their livestock meant losing the eggs, milk, and cheese that was often their main source of cash, and the loss of manure imperiled the fertility of their small arable holdings. Close to the edge, such a move could easily tip this group over it, to the point where the choice was either eating potatoes or starving.
Their resistance could easily, and often did, turn violent, but the peasants saw nothing wrong in that. ‘It was not right,’ they argued, ‘that one man should feast at the expense of starving twenty others’. Given the difficulties of expanding production, growth was often a zero-sum game, with one person’s gain truly coming at the expense of others. (As an example, wastelands could be brought under cultivation to make up for the loss of commons. But that required wastelands to be available and accessible, and given that they had been left as wastelands before, their quality was guaranteed to be inferior to the lands that had already been utilized.) Given this fierce social pressure, even rich peasants would not usually try to engage in such practices. Only those higher up in society, with a much broader social gulf between them and those peasants-on-the-margin, could realistically expect to perform such practices.
Some of the enclosures were done to facilitate market agriculture but, as in England at the same time, many were for the benefit of sheep. While flax, cotton, and silk textile production were all important, the majority of Roman textiles were still made of wool. Good pasturage could be worth a great deal, even more than first-rate arable, while raising sheep had much lower labor costs than cereal or garden cultivation. Thus while most animal husbandry was done on marginal lands that could do that but couldn’t support agriculture, there was market incentive for good pasturage to consume viable arable lands. This was an increasing issue as the countryside became more commercialized from the Flowering onwards.
This exacerbated the land issue. The cities, while having masses of urban destitute, also had growing populations eager for more textiles and also meat. Those landowners connected commercially to agents in the cities, producing for the market, were thus incentivized to prioritize animal production. That could and did strain cereal production, but the cities where the money was could get cereals from their heavily-manured hinterlands, or from Thessaly, Sicily, Vlachia, Scythia, or Egypt. The ones really feeling the pinch were the rural poor, whose smaller consumption of textiles and meat were usually sustained by their own production, such as the combined village herds fed on the village green, provided they could keep said green.
Thus was created the image of nature reversed, of nature perverted, of a society and landscape where instead of men eating sheep, instead sheep ate men. The image was a powerful one, frequently referenced during social protests. But the enclosed and consolidated sheep pasture, while behind the growth in wool and thus textile production over the last century, was still a minority example. It looms large both because of its association with the market and cities, and because of its prominence as a source of social tension. However most animal husbandry in Rhomania still fell outside this example.
Animal husbandry, like agriculture, spanned the gamut. Every possible permutation likely had at least one example of it being practiced somewhere in Rhomania at some point. As mentioned, most peasants, if they had any land or access or commons, would use them to support at least a few animals, pigeons if nothing else. Chickens, pigeons, pigs, oxen, horses, donkeys, mules, camels, and the Egyptian jamusa (buffalo cow) were typically managed by their owners, whether individually or as family units. The two examples of fowl were cheap and easy enough to manage that it did not make sense to consolidate. The other examples given were instead far too valuable to risk being given over to be watched by others, except for pigs which often managed themselves. Given the lack of liquid capital, animals were often the most significant and mobile form of capital in the countryside, with their value even being split into shares which could be traded, gifted, and inherited as a form of commodity.
(Beef cattle are somewhat of an exception. Beef cattle ownership was typically of large numbers owned by a few hands and were thus managed in large herds. With the other animals, while the large landowners could own huge numbers, most ownership was of a few animals at most, but with a great number of individual owners. This included oxen, emphatically kept not for meat but for manure and especially labor.)
Sheep and goats fell into an intermediate category. While some peasants might keep a few on their own patches, especially for milk and cheese production, it was a typical village practice to consolidate herds and manage them jointly. The shepherds could either be outside hired hands or, far more often, young men of the village, who would drive the flocks from pastures and to market, with the end profit from sales being divvied up back at the village in proportion to the animals originally provided. Losses would also be assigned on the same basis.
The range of these movements could vary considerably. Sometimes there might not be much horizontal movement from winter to summer pastures, but substantial vertical movement as the herds moved up and down the mountains. For this example of animal husbandry, where the focus was on a sedentary village focusing on agriculture with husbandry on the side, this low-horizontal but high-vertical movement model was typical, a way of utilizing all available local ecological niches.
But that was not the only model. In Roman Europe, many of the shepherds were called Vlachs. Many were ethnic Vlachs originally, but not all, yet the label was applied universally to the type. These were full-time shepherds attached to no village, unlike the village shepherds who would usually do this for a few years at a particular stage in their early life before settling down as farmers. They either owned their flocks, or managed them for great landowners, trading the products of their herd or the profits from their sale to get the agricultural and other products they needed.
This was a form of nomadism, but since it was done on foot and almost exclusively with sheep and goats, this doesn’t fit the typical image of nomadism. For that, one must turn to Roman Asia.
Pastoral nomadism of the more stereotypical type had been prominent in central and eastern Anatolia at least from the arrival of the Turks, and remained so since. The Laskarid re-conquest had not altered this picture substantially. A destruction of the nomads would not have been feasible and wouldn’t have been desirable even if it were. Nomads provided valuable animal products and did so utilizing wide areas of land that would not have been suitable for agriculture anywhere. As just one example, Roman (and Ottoman) armies were accompanied by huge flocks of sheep, a mobile larder which was extremely helpful for logistics. Sheep and shepherds usually came from the nomad population, as did many of the horses for the Roman cavalry.
Nomads in Anatolia were interspersed around and between agricultural zones, and varied substantially even amongst themselves. Nor were these nomadic groups entirely pastoralist and mobile. Some nomadic groups were properly agro-pastoralists, with elements of the community being sedentary and practicing agriculture while the main group managed the herds. These were a mirror image of the sedentary villagers which practiced agriculture with animal husbandry on the side, just with the emphases reversed.
As a general rule of thumb, as one moved from west to east, the significance of agricultural activity as practiced by members of the in-group (as opposed to trading for agricultural products with outsiders, which all did) decreased, while the scale of nomadic herding increased. Nomads in the west usually moved dozens of kilometers between seasonal pastures; in the east it could be hundreds of kilometers, with one end point sometimes beyond the frontier. The numerical significance of nomads also grew as one went east. Around 1600, one-sixth of Anatolia’s population was of a nomadic group, but in some eastern kephalates this proportion neared one-half. [1] The nomads were primarily of a Greco-Turkish ethnicity, with Kurds becoming significant in the eastern reaches.
There was always tensions between nomads and settled folk, the constant conflict between the desert and the sown, but there was also cooperation. Both sides needed the products of the others. Many poorer peasants depended on the manure of nomadic livestock grazing on their stubble to fertilize their fields, while the nomads needed the agriculture products and that stubble was good grazing lands.
But limited resources could cause tensions, especially as agricultural populations expanded into marginal lands. The nomads might need to graze their livestock now, but the peasants weren’t ready to have livestock clomping through their fields full of ripening crops as opposed to stubble. Land and especially water were finite resources, and naturally both groups favored the demands of their own group in priority to the other.
Authorities worked to control nomads to avoid disturbances and conflicts. Nomads didn’t wander aimlessly but had specific pastures and routes, although authorities tightened and restricted these to a point further than most nomads would’ve liked. This enabled authorities to control their movements, keep the nomads under at least some surveillance, and tax their herds.
There were efforts to settle some nomads down as farmers, but the results were mixed. The more settled nomads, those with larger proportions of the in-group already involved in agriculture, were usually the least troublesome and so left alone, meaning that the groups most likely to be faced with efforts at forced settlement were the ones least familiar with agriculture. In addition they usually got lower-quality arable land as well, as the top-quality was already claimed by earlier settled groups. Furthermore this was also done as a security measure, where the forced-settled nomads were placed as a buffer to defend regular agriculturists against other troublesome nomads. But these former-nomads no longer had the mobility to defend themselves against attackers as they had in the past. Given all these factors, it is unsurprising that most involved in these experiments elected to return to familiar nomadic ways if at all possible. As a result, most efforts to expand agriculture production and more-easily-managed (by authorities) settled life depended on the expansion of agriculturists.
Nomadism was also prominent along Rhomania’s eastern frontier, but the scale was different. While there were many nomadic groups in Anatolia, their individual size was small and efforts at combination, at forming a large tribal confederacy, would have been met with a harsh military response. While the mobility of the nomads and the ruggedness and lack of accessibility of many of their lands meant complete control was elusive, in Anatolia the nomads were at least somewhat surrounded by sedentary dwellers and imperial authorities, which allowed for this level of control. [2]
This was emphatically not the case in Syria. While political maps would draw a line, the Roman Empire really just faded out into the eastern desert…somewhere. This extremely long and open frontier was impossible to police, and the only effective way to keep out troublesome nomads was to hire a different nomad to do so. Here tribal confederacies could and did form on a scale that utterly dwarfed Anatolian groups; the Anizzah were the most prominent and illustrious (in terms of Roman rank) but hardly unique.
Nomadic groups here couldn’t be fragmented and managed as in Anatolia, but there was virtue out of necessity from the point of view of the metropole. These powerful confederacies were potent military tools, useful at guarding both against the Ottomans as well as other Bedouin groups. The likes of the Anizzah, Owais, and Haddad needed to be treated with respect, care, and a goodly amount of bribes, but they helped keep the frontier secure.
[1] In the 1500s, Ottoman Anatolia was one-quarter nomadic with some southeastern districts up to 60%. Emily Louise Hammer and Benjamin S. Arbuckle. “10,000 Years of Pastoralism in Anatolia: A Review of Evidence for Variability in Pastoral Lifeways” in Nomadic Peoples Vol. 21 No. 2 (2017), pg. 242.
[2] There was one quasi-exception to this rule, of which more later.
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