Ceramics and Frankish-Late Byzantine Society

Already from the MB era onwards, cultural interactions between Italy, the Aegean, and the Islamic Near East had given rise to shared technologies and styles in fine-ware production, although the initiative until the Italian Renaissance remained with Islamic manufacturers, who in turn were often inspired by Persian and Chinese ceramics. The lively trade around the East Mediterranean encouraged by the establishment of the Frankish principalities, and especially stimulated by Italian merchants, was enhanced by the close political links forged between them, which included the new Frankish-Crusader polities throughout the Aegean. Nonetheless because this stylistic network-

Table 19.1 Better-quality tableware on typical Italian rural sites (after Blake), for comparison with the Greek evidence.

Ing around the Eastern Mediterranean had already been shared from preceding centuries, in many respects the early Frankish levels at the town of Corinth show much similarity in pottery to the underlying MB ones (Williams and Zervos 1993). Although functional analysis of Frankish period rural sites is still in its infancy, most studied so far show access to wider interregional trade in ceramics, although the bulk of pots were locally made. Suiting Hugo Blake’s (1980) generalizations for Italian rural life (Table 19.1) during the same High Medieval period, so also the Greek rural world possessed good but not highest-quality table wares. The latter are found in numbers in major towns with significant international trade connections, such as Thebes, Corinth, and the Venetian colonies.

However a different aspect of social history relates to the story of dining habits in Europe. Our medieval assemblages are comparable to those not only of the preceding Middle Byzantine era, but also to other South European countries such as Italy and Spain during the period 1000-1400 AD. People of all classes ate seated on chairs or benches, and consumed their various dishes from wide, open serving dishes shared by several adjacent diners. Only at the very end of the Middle Ages, during the fifteenth century, did it become common in Italy to introduce individual bowls and plates for each diner. Whilst however this tendency in Western Europe was to develop further in association with the rise of Capitalism and individualism, resulting in a full suite of personal ceramics, glasses, and table cutlery (Gaimster 1994), Greece shifted during Ottoman times into Oriental eating (both in culinary terms and in table manners), as we shall see, and still focused on central shared dishes. Nonetheless some changes are visible in the ceramics of the Frankish period in the Aegean (Vionis 2001a,

2009). Dishes become deeper, which in Western Europe has been linked with a growing tendency to stew main meals in their juices, rather than rely on roasted meat. More dishes seem to appear on some scenes of dining in this period, which might be the first signs of catering to some extent to the individual diner, but could equally mark a wider range of side-dishes to supplement the main item on the menu, placed centrally in the largest dish on the table. Contemporary sources tell us that the Byzantines disapproved of Frankish cuisine, where greasy spitted or stewed meat dishes were the most desired, themselves favoring a more varied diet including salads and vegetables. Could the occasional scenes of mixed dishes mark a merger ofWestern and Eastern tastes?

In the LB-Frankish period glazed wares rise in their share of assemblages (Sanders 2000) and spread wider from tableware and into domestic shapes (see Color Plate 19.2a—b for tableware variants). The thirteenth-century innovation of tripod-stilts (to allow easier stacking in the kiln) and other improvements to production seem to have increased the supply to markets. But social dining seems to have been very important even in rural hamlets, to judge by the remarkably high levels of decorated tableware on Boeotian deserted villages (Vionis 2008). Sgraffito (incision-decorated) wares continue to be very popular (Vionis 2001a), some ofthem traded around the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the finely-made Zeuxippos Ware (Color Plate 19.2a) and a thicker version called Aegean Ware (both primarily thirteenth-century). A common difference to MB Sgraffito is a rise in deeply grooved designs (gouged), including wares where large areas of the surface have been cut away to leave designs in relief (champleve). But most pots were locally made, especially in the style called Brown and Green, or Late, Sgraffito, which continues from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries (Color Plate 19.2a). This tends to be rather carelessly decorated with incised squiggles, wavy lines, and rarer flowers or animals, with added random splashes of green and brown paint. For details and fine illustrations of Frankish-era Sgraffito products see Ministry of Culture (1995), Papanikola-Bakirtzi (1999), and Papanikola-Bakirtzi et al. (1999).

Especially in the towns with good commercial links to the West, such as Corinth, more exotic imports are common (Vionis 2001a, MacKay 2003,

Sanders 2003, Ince and Ballantyne 2007). These include the polychrome RMR ware from Southern Italy (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), the early tin-glazed wares such as South Italian Proto-Majolica (late twelfth to fifteenth centuries) (Color Plate 19.2b), and North Italian Archaic Majolica (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries). The taste of the Frankish colonizers will often have been met by their Western merchants in this way, although some of these wares are met occasionally on indigenous settlements too. Nonetheless case studies suggest that the Italian imports are generally found on colonial sites, and inside these are associated with the foreign elite quarters, while local wares typify the Greek domestic zones (Vionis 2006, Ince and Ballantyne 2007). Athens seems to have little of such Western wares and is more provincial (MacKay 2003).