The Byzantines relied on various basic staple crops. Garden vegetables such as lettuce, leeks, turnips, and cabbage formed an important part of the diet of the average person. Grapes were a major crop for both table and especially for wine. Just as today, there were named varieties prized for various characteristics. The major fibre crops were flax and hemp. Flax also provided oil, especially in cold areas like the Anatolian plateau where olive oil was not produced. Tree crops, including various nuts, olive, fig, pear, apple, peach, pomegranate were common. Most citrus crops (sour orange and citron being exceptions) probably made only limited headway even after the Muslim conquest, but this is uncertain. One of the major techniques known to be widely applied in everyday arboricultural practice was grafting. The Geoponica notes numerous different methods of grafting and an astonishing array of experimentation, while illustrations in mosaics and manuscripts attest to the practice throughout the Byzantine period. The advantages of grafting are numerous: superior individuals may be cloned, sick trees and vines remedied, and the time from planting to the first crop of fruit or nuts reduced. Grafting also allows hybridization and enhances the opportunities to adapt varieties from one locality to another.
New crops did arrive into Byzantium in the medieval period. Several nonindigenous species were already in place in antiquity and do not belong to any agricultural ‘revolution’, either European or Islamic. Rye was an important crop in the temperate regions of the empire, and durum wheat (today used mainly in pasta) was a commonly produced variety of great antiquity by the Byzantine period, not an Islamic introduction as has been argued. Millet was a major crop in many regions, as was barley. Among the new crop technologies available to the Byzantines in the middle period and later were sugar and cotton. Both were assuredly known in Late Antiquity, but the circumstances of their production within the empire is little known. Cotton was grown on Crete in the later medieval period and also on Cyprus (strengthening the case of widespread irrigation there), as was sugar (with the same implication) (Malamut 1988: 390). Major sugar installations were in place in Cyprus during the Venetian period, but we await archaeology to inform us of installations within the empire itself. While these crops may have had a significant economic impact in a given time and place, the repository of crop technology within Byzantium remained relatively stable: numerous garden vegetables, legumes, and common temperate orchard trees were combined with grape, olive, and cereal production to furnish the basics of the diet.
World History
