‘With a grain of sugar’: native agriculture and colonial capitalism in the Frankish Levant, c. 1100–1300

Abstract

The Biblical trope of a ‘land of milk and honey, abounding in corn, wine and oil and all material goods’ is found in medieval works describing the Holy Land and is common in crusading rhetoric. Do these statements, idyllic as they are, reflect the fact that agricultural production rates in the Levant were higher than those in contemporary Europe – and more specifically France, the original homeland of the majority of the European settlers? The article aims to cast a fresh look upon the detailed thirteenth-century account by the Venetian Marsilio Zorzi, to estimate whether crop yields achieved by local peasants were indeed higher than those attained in France, and comparable with other Mediterranean regions, around the same time. Rereading and analysing this account, together with other textual sources, as well as archaeological and palaeoclimatic data, reveals not only that thirteenth-century yields were just on a par with those attained in France, and lower compared with other Mediterranean regions around the same time, but also lower than in preceding centuries in the Levant. This was connected to larger eco-climatic changes in the region on the one hand, and to cultural and institutional factors on the other. Taken together, this paper’s analysis offers new insights into the motives that guided European immigrants settling in the Levant, the nature of their society and economy, and wider environmental changes in that region.