How did Crusaders feel about chicken?
Historic records show that in Europe, the knights adored pork, and also doted on geese and catfish. None are commonly consumed in Middle Eastern circles today, and they weren't in the medieval period either. So the burning question is, what did the Crusaders eat in the Holy Land?
Now we have some idea, at least for the late Crusader period in Apollonia, based on analysis of their bodily wastes and trash published recently in the Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.
Archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological analysis of Crusader sediments in the southern Levant is scanty. Andrea Orendi, Elisabeth Yehuda, Annette Zeischka-Kenzler and Prof. Oren Tal of Tel Aviv University aimed to remedy this deficit with sediment analysis at 10 spots in the town and castle at Apollonia, aka Arsuf or Arsur, on the Mediterranean coast in today's central Israel.
Most of the samples were taken from 12th- or 13th-century cesspit because by nature a garbage dump-cum-toilet would be likelier to produce finds than a floor or even a sewage pipe, Tal explains by phone.
The First Crusade began in 1096. The first generations of Crusaders are believed to have preferred foods familiar from Europe, insofar as possible, Tal explains. But they had acclimatized by the 12th or 13th century. "By the sixth or seventh generation of Crusaders in the Holy Land, their culinary preferences had adapted," Tal says. Based on their finds and other work, the Crusaders ate the same diet as the locals – plus pigs.
What pigs? Separate work has indicated that the Philistines sailed to what is today Israel with pigs almost 3,000 years ago. The Crusaders may well have brought pigs with them too, the study's consulting zooarchaeologist, Miri Pines, tells Haaretz. Israel's boars all have European ancestry, and if there had been a local lineage, it's gone.
Eat like a Crusader
Today, Arsuf is a high-end hamlet perched on crumbling calcareous-limestone cliffs over the Mediterranean Sea, about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of Tel Aviv.
It began as a small settlement 2,500 years ago. In 1101, it was conquered by Crusaders led by King Baldwin I. Come 1187, Muslim forces wrested it back and four years later, the Crusaders would reconquer it at the "Battle of Arsuf" led by Richard I, the alleged "Lion-Heart."
In 1192, the seesawing Crusaders and Islamic forces would reach a treaty that left the town in Crusader hands. In 1241, its fortifications and castle were rebuilt, but in 1265 the town was razed by the Mamluks and that was that.
Actually, the precise location of the Battle of Arsuf hadn't been known until 2020, when Israeli landscape archaeologist Rafi Lewis identified it based on medieval sources and reconstruction of the local landscape and environmental conditions.
In the new work, the team sampled 10 spots but mainly a particular cesspit associated with a large 13th-century building from the late Crusader period. The archaeologists suspect that the pit began its life as a vaulted water cistern and was repurposed in the 13th century. In it, they found pottery, animal bones, glass, and seeds and plant remains that survived Crusader digestion. The finds represent everyday foods that reached the cesspit as garbage or fecal matter, the team says.
So what did the Crusaders eat in the 12th and 13th centuries? Regarding plants, the same as the locals. Wheat and barley (though they weren't found in the cesspit, only in other samples – it's technical). Legumes, chiefly the lentil, which may have been a local mania; no such favoritism among legumes was observed in other Crusader dietary analyses. Their range of legumes also included broad bean, chickpea, grass pea (aka pea vetch), common vetch and, a favorite to this day, the sweet green pea.
Vetches are members of the pea family that are fed mainly to animals, who hate it when fresh but may be induced to eat it when dried. There is a snag in that its seeds are toxic, but vetch is convenient to grow because it is relatively drought-resistant. Other studies show vetch was processed and eaten by early humans and Neanderthals.
There was one anomaly from local fare. The team detected white mulberry – a plant indigenous to northern China, not the southern Levant. White mulberry hasn't been observed in digs in the Southern Levant before, the team says, adding that it wasn't a black mulberry (not that the black variant is indigenous here either).
The beagle and the fig
Moving onto fruits, the Crusaders seem to have been mad for the fig, based on the prevalence of fig seeds in their toilet.
"The sheer number of thousands of mineralized fig remains from the Crusader cesspit strata is impressive," the team says, adding that the botanically bizarre false fruit may have been cultivated and/or may have grown wild. "Feral fig trees mainly occupy habitats of farmed land, like terrace walls, edges of plantations, or on stony ground of abandoned settlements or collapsed cisterns," the team notes. Indeed, a lonely fig tree grows out of the cistern at Yodfat in the Galilee.
Like us, the Crusaders ate figs fresh or dried, and may have consumed the fig – which unlike the mulberry is endemic to the Mediterranean region – for "medicinal purposes" as well.
While it is true that the Emperor Augustus of Rome was reportedly poisoned by figs, or rather by his wife using figs, it was from a noxious substance smeared on the skin of the fruit, not the plant itself. Figs were reputed from at least Classic times to resolve constipation and erectile dysfunction, among other things.
The proof that fig or its products work for either of the above is not out there. At least in humans.
One 2015 study claimed to observe some aphrodisiac influence stemming from bark of fig, and two other plants, in rats. The researchers claim to have observed a roughly equal increase in mounting behavior that was more or less the same for all three plants and suggest maybe they do have an aphrodisiac effect. On rats.
As for the fig as laxative, a 2011 study induced constipation in 15 beagles and found that administering fig paste for three weeks "significantly increased fecal quantity in constipated dogs."
Good to know. How much fig paste? Twelve grams a day per kilo of canid. That is a LOT of fig paste – imagine you're a 65-kilogram (143-pound) beagleperson, that's almost 800 grams a day.
"Fig pastes may be useful as a complementary medicine in humans suffering from chronic constipation," that team concluded.
Maybe the figs helped the Crusaders digest and pass their meat-heavy meals, which by coincidence is exactly how constipation was induced in those beagles.
Like the fig, grapes have been associated with fertility and aphrodisiac effects that are similarly unproven, and wine has been an industry in the Levant since its emergence in the Neolithic (and possibly before). The Crusaders revived the industry.
No question, the Crusaders grew grapes intensely and produced wine in our region, mainly on the Mediterranean coast from Ashkelon to Tyre – and Arsur lies right between the two. But while enormous Crusader wine production facilities have been found before, including in the northern town of Mi'ilya, the archaeologists found no wine presses at Arsur. They did find grape pips in the cesspit, but think the Crusaders of Arsur simply liked to eat grapes.
"There was wine production in the seigneurity of Arsur," qualifies co-author Orendi by WhatsApp. One aspect of Crusader life in the southern Levant was indeed an increase and administrative organization of viticulture, she says.
Growing olives and making oil from them was also a major industry in Crusader times and the archaeologists did find olive oil production installations, and telltale crushed olive stones, in Arsur, Orendi adds.
The team could even identify the Crusaders' condiments in their cesspit, including seeds of fennel and carrot.
Chicken con Crusader
Truth is, in both Europe and the Holy Land, the evidence indicates that the knights didn't eat much grain or legumes. What the Crusaders liked, given their druthers, was meat. Pig pig pig, and they ate a lot of beef too, Tal observes. They also consumed mutton, goat – local staples in the Middle East – as well as gazelle and deer. Going by the bone finds, possibly they did not cavil at consuming camels and donkeys.
They may also have eaten dogs and cats, though Tal clarifies that they don't know about the cats and dogs for sure. The team wasn't looking for signs on the bones that the micropredators had been cooked, he elaborates.
But they may not have been fans of the chicken, as indicated by signs of dietary constraints when the Mamluks were besieging Arsur.
In March 1265, Mamluks led by Sultan Baybars himself, according to the historical record, besieged Arsuf for 40 days (and 40 nights too, presumably). Separate work by Tal with Pines and Lidar Sapir-Hen analyzed Crusader meatstuffs in an ordinary home in Arsuf (indicative of usual life in a Christian Crusader family) and in the besieged castle.
"There was a drastic change in diet in the castle," Tal says: from chiefly pork and beef to, suddenly, 90 percent chicken. In the home, chicken comprised 30 percent of animal bones, he adds.
Also, analysis of the chicken bones in the castle show the Crusaders were eating laying hens, depriving themselves of eggs, and chicks too, depriving themselves of future laying hens.
The implication is that the hungry knights ate the birds because they had to, but Pines suspects the rationale was otherwise. The siege was during Lent, she says.
A period of abstention observed by some churches and not by others, Lent emerged in the fourth century. Generally speaking, on certain days the faithful are not supposed to eat meat for their protei, or poultry either, only fish. But her research into medieval writings indicates leniency in times of extremis, so possibly Crusaders besieged in their castle during Lent decided the deity would not be overly judgy if they ate their chickens.
Also indicative of dietary stress at the under-siege castle was a shift from freshwater fish, such as their beloved catfish, to seafish. Although the castle is right over the sea, when they had their druthers, the Crusaders referred the fatty, oily, eely freshwater fish, a taste they brought from European homelands. Catfish are locally despised – lacking scales, they're not even kosher. "They're like the pigs of the river," an Israeli asked about them sniffed.
The bottom line seems to be that the Crusaders did adapt to the cuisine of the Levant – even regarding the dread swine.
Comparison with zooarchaeological revelations in medieval Europe indicates that our local knights were positively parsimonious in their consumption of pork compared with their European peers, Pines says. In her mind, that was the main acclimatization: exchanging some pork for herbivorous quadrupeds. But not all of it.
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