than it did the legal approach of the mainland. *3 The design of war galleys and the idea of a state-managed arsenal were both largely derived from Byzantium. Taste in clothes, art, and food looked for inspiration to Constantinople. In Venice, Eastern styles of dress—richly brocaded and hanging loose from the shoulders—as well as Greek-inspired icons remained in favor long after the Florentines and Mantuans had turned to tight-fitting, form-revealing outfits and moved on to patronizing the likes of Botticelli and Leonardo.
Venetians not only tried to dress like the Byzantines, they aped their eating habits, too. Not that every Eastern culinary innovation was immediately embraced. The imported fork, for example, was initially demonized as “an instrument of the devil.” When the doge’s son Giovanni Orseolo returned from Constantinople around 1004 with his Byzantine bride, Maria, she immediately elicited gossip not least because of the highly suspect implements in her trousseau. “She did not touch food with her hands,” wrote a scandalized reporter years after the event, “but the food was cut up into small pieces by her servants and she would pick up these tidbits, tasting them using a golden fork with two tines.” And as if her eating habits weren’t peculiar enough, Maria had a proclivity for bathing, in perfumed water no less! Some even blamed her arrival for the plague that devastated the city at the time. (This is not as far-out as it sounds, since the plague was, in fact, as much a Byzantine export as forks and perfume.) Forks were by no means an overnight success, but by the late thirteenth century, the delicate little implements (they were about the size of today’s oyster fork) were appearing in wills and inventories. You can see them in a Botticelli painting from the mid-fifteenth century in which two young women delicately hold these tiny forks, and later Venetian banquet depictions are littered with them. Though the sources don’t mention it, Maria must have brought her cooks, too. Imagine a finely drilled brigade of Parisian chefs arriving in a Wild West frontier town and you might get some sense of the scandal and wonder engendered by the spiced aromas that now wafted from the kitchens of the doge’s palace. Eleventh-century Venice still had a long way to go to keep up with the Byzantines.
Even as western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Constantinople was the Mediterranean’s greatest and most cosmopolitan city. At its height, in the reign of the Emperor Justinian (527–565), the imperial capital likely exceeded half a million people (some estimates go as high as a million). No city in Europe would reach that figure for more than a thousand years! As late as 1204, when the Venetians were about to ravage their increasingly decrepit former mistress, one of their company was still awed by what he saw:
Those who had never seen Constantinople before were enthralled, unable to believe that such a great city could exist in the world. They gazed at its high walls, the great towers with which it was fortified all around, its great houses, its tall churches more numerous than anyone would believe who did not see them for himself; they contemplated the length and breadth of the city that is sovereign over all others.
The city at the gates of the Bosporus had always been a magnet for people from across eastern Europe and western Asia. A Western Crusader described Constantinople’s melting pot in 1096: “Greeks, Bulgarians…Italians, Venetians, Romanians [the contemporary term for mainland Greece], Dacians [from today’s Romania], English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans, Arabs and people of all nations come together here.” Not surprisingly, the local culture was inflected by all these foreign accents and the city’s cuisine seasoned by flavors from across the empire.
Byzantine kitchens largely depended on the abundant local fish and produce
Venetians not only tried to dress like the Byzantines, they aped their eating habits, too. Not that every Eastern culinary innovation was immediately embraced. The imported fork, for example, was initially demonized as “an instrument of the devil.” When the doge’s son Giovanni Orseolo returned from Constantinople around 1004 with his Byzantine bride, Maria, she immediately elicited gossip not least because of the highly suspect implements in her trousseau. “She did not touch food with her hands,” wrote a scandalized reporter years after the event, “but the food was cut up into small pieces by her servants and she would pick up these tidbits, tasting them using a golden fork with two tines.” And as if her eating habits weren’t peculiar enough, Maria had a proclivity for bathing, in perfumed water no less! Some even blamed her arrival for the plague that devastated the city at the time. (This is not as far-out as it sounds, since the plague was, in fact, as much a Byzantine export as forks and perfume.) Forks were by no means an overnight success, but by the late thirteenth century, the delicate little implements (they were about the size of today’s oyster fork) were appearing in wills and inventories. You can see them in a Botticelli painting from the mid-fifteenth century in which two young women delicately hold these tiny forks, and later Venetian banquet depictions are littered with them. Though the sources don’t mention it, Maria must have brought her cooks, too. Imagine a finely drilled brigade of Parisian chefs arriving in a Wild West frontier town and you might get some sense of the scandal and wonder engendered by the spiced aromas that now wafted from the kitchens of the doge’s palace. Eleventh-century Venice still had a long way to go to keep up with the Byzantines.
Even as western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Constantinople was the Mediterranean’s greatest and most cosmopolitan city. At its height, in the reign of the Emperor Justinian (527–565), the imperial capital likely exceeded half a million people (some estimates go as high as a million). No city in Europe would reach that figure for more than a thousand years! As late as 1204, when the Venetians were about to ravage their increasingly decrepit former mistress, one of their company was still awed by what he saw:
Those who had never seen Constantinople before were enthralled, unable to believe that such a great city could exist in the world. They gazed at its high walls, the great towers with which it was fortified all around, its great houses, its tall churches more numerous than anyone would believe who did not see them for himself; they contemplated the length and breadth of the city that is sovereign over all others.
The city at the gates of the Bosporus had always been a magnet for people from across eastern Europe and western Asia. A Western Crusader described Constantinople’s melting pot in 1096: “Greeks, Bulgarians…Italians, Venetians, Romanians [the contemporary term for mainland Greece], Dacians [from today’s Romania], English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans, Arabs and people of all nations come together here.” Not surprisingly, the local culture was inflected by all these foreign accents and the city’s cuisine seasoned by flavors from across the empire.
Byzantine kitchens largely depended on the abundant local fish and produce
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