Early ban on alcohol

The Vulture

Banned
This is really just a moment of whimsy on my part.

WI around 1050, for whatever reason, the Pope bans the production of all alcohol aside from communion wine? Of course, there's initial resentment as monks forcibly shut down breweries and such, but after 30 years or so, people get used to it.

Where does society go, and does Martin Luther reintroduce alcohol?
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Well, we should bear in mind what a stunningly adverse effect this would have on the Christian population. One of the reasons alcohol drinking was so widespread in the Middle Ages (aside from inebriation) was that alcohol was one of the safer things one could drink.

Water was often germ-ridden and dangerous and milk wasn't particularly easy to come by (and oftentimes similarly germ-ridden). Alcohol killed off all of that nasty bacteria.

So, if the Pope bans alcohol (and he may not live very long if wine can only be drunk for communion, especially given the quality of Rome's water supply) you'll have an alarming drop in the number of Christians throughout Europe.

And hey, the Patriarch might say "bugger that edict" once the Schism occurs, so concievably you could have many Europeans convert to Orthodoxy because temperence is not only killing them, but making life far less enjoyable :p
 
Water was often germ-ridden and dangerous and milk wasn't particularly easy to come by (and oftentimes similarly germ-ridden). Alcohol killed off all of that nasty bacteria.
I've read about it too, but... How did the Muslims live without alcohol? And without tea, and even without coffee (widely consumed, AFAIK, after the 14th century at earliest)? Did they simply boil their water? If so, then the Christians (endowed, in 1050, with immense fuelwood resources, by the way) could do the same thing, and be germ-protected and sober.
Well, such reform would fail, most probably, because self-intoxicating is too pleasant to be rejected due to some Pope's freaky decision... But, on the other hand, there is at least one example of reasonably successful prohibition - in the Islamic world. Could it be repeated? I dunno...
 
Actually, its the process of boiling water necessary for brewing and distilling that kills the germs in the water, the alcohol only makes a minor contribution in keeping it somewhat germ free.

I imagien people would probably get over it in a while - and while it may have adverse effect on the populace (and later reform branches of Christianity that abandon it) the majority of christendom will probably follow
 
And hey, the Patriarch might say "bugger that edict" once the Schism occurs, so concievably you could have many Europeans convert to Orthodoxy because temperence is not only killing them, but making life far less enjoyable :p
Considering the fact that, the OP is positing a ban on alcohol right around the time of the Orthodox-Catholic split, it's entirely possible that we end up with the East not going along with this papal edict. Alternately, it occurs to me that a ban on alcohol might be more popular in the East than the West; it wouldn't be the first time the Eastern Church had co-opted bits of Islamic theology (iconoclasm springs to mind).

In either case, it's going to be difficult to gain much support for an all-out ban on alcohol; it's entirely possible that any such edict would simply be ignored, similar to edicts against all the other social ills the Church regularly denounced. The Church can certainly ban alcohol for the clergy and denounce it as much as they want, but the secular rulers won't go along with such a ban without a very good reason. Considering how important alcohol was as one of the few pleasures the average serf had, getting rid of it is going to mean a significant increase in peasant revolts.

Assuming the ban does go through, missionary activity in Scandinavia and the various pagan tribes in Eastern Europe is likely to take a hit from a ban on alcohol; relatively recent converts might turn apostate at a new major restriction, and it will hardly make Christianity more appealing to Prussians and Lithuanians.
 
No booze probably means wider spread communial diseases and intestinal parasites (among other things) as the people start drinking from rivers.
 
Why would he do this, it's so idiotic?

I mean why doesn't he just commande every christian to bash their heads against a tree for an hour every day.
 

Hendryk

Banned
WI around 1050, for whatever reason, the Pope bans the production of all alcohol aside from communion wine?
People ignore the ban and keep drinking their alcoholic beverage of choice on the sly.

Prohibition wasn't enforceable in a modern society; how is one going to enforce it in a medieval one? In an agrarian context, almost everyone has access to either fruits or cereals, which is pretty much all you need to produce alcohol.
 

Stephen

Banned
The popularity of alchohol leads to the church being abandoned with a lot of people returning to pagan religion.
 

Hendryk

Banned
But wasn't it enforced by Shari'a courts in the Middle Ages?
I'm no expert on the history of Muslim societies, but I find that claim dubious. If one takes Al-Andalus in particular, local farmers took advantage of the agronomic revolution in the 11th century to introduce varieties of grapes from Mesopotamia, and generally speaking wine production in the Iberian peninsula remained steady throughout the period.

Here's an academic article (in French) on wine-making in Al-Andalus between the 10th and 15th centuries.
 
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