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.