“Disgusting Food, Bad Bread, and Immeasurable Drunkenness”: The Meals of the Turks, Mongols and Latins through the Eyes of Late Byzantine Authors

Abstract

This article presents the analysis of the accounts of the Late Byzantine writers about the food traditions and preferences of the Turks, Mongols, and Latins according to the works of Manuel II Palaiologos, George Pachymeres, Constantine Stilbes, and Demetrios Kydones. The aim of the investigation is to consider ethnographic accounts at Byzantine written sources as a way of food identification of the peoples and a marker of the “otherness” of “strangers” in the texts. The analysis of historical evidence of polemical, historiographical, and epistolographic works of the Byzantine intellectuals is complicated due to the nature of the kinds of Byzantine written sources. It is taken into account that the Byzantine authors often used traditional rhetorical models, imitated the language and style of ancient Greek and Roman authors and regularly used the allusions to the texts of the Holy Scriptures in their written works. The examples of the Byzantine authors’ ambiguous attitudes to joint meals with the Turks are considered in the paper. It has been shown that the judgments regarding joint meals with the Turks made by the same writer sometimes significantly vary. In some cases, the author’s estimation could be influenced by the personal attitude towards the participants in the meal, and his mood, self-awareness, as well as his taste preferences. The differences in the food habits of the Mongols, Turks, and Latins mentioned in the writings of Late Byzantine authors were often used to describe representatives of a different culture in a negative light and had little to do with historical realities, since they were a kind of inversion of Byzantine ideas about normal, “cultural” food, which should be eaten. It has been determined that these accounts often reproduced the stereotypes regarding the eating habits of the “barbarians” and nomadic peoples, which existed in Byzantine society and written tradition from the Antiquity on.