The Monk's Tale: food security part 4

To 'world build' the background of The Sefuty Chronicles I have had to trash it – these wanderings through history , which are selective I confess:) are showing how easy it is to trash a world.  We humans are past masters at the process.

When the Romans fell into nothingness so too did their great Empire – soldiers deserted when the money dried up, city folk vanished back to the land. Western Europe lost its network of trade routes, its security and its granaries. With no security on land or sea the great merchants sold up and folded their wings, no trade and the non producing cities died slowly.   Starvation and disease followed hunger, farmers eked out precarious livings on used up and mismanaged soil.  It is estimated that the population of Western Europe was halved between 200-600 AD.  So how did Europe hoist itself back up over the next few centuries to become the rampaging plunderers of the world?

Around the fourth century A.D. St Anthony rediscovered organic farming. I say rediscovered because of course before large-scale trade had changed the natural order of things all farming was pretty well organic. He was disgusted by the lawlessness and hopelessness of the world, so found himself this little bit of land, in North Africa, with a spring on it. 

Perfect. 

He tilled, sowed and lived off it in harmony with all things, taking nothing from anyone else.

Rather in the way of all these things others who wished to stop the world, get off and live simply and harmoniously, flocked to join him. This movement of St Anthony’s continued a long time. A hundred years after St Anthony had begun his simple life another churchman, Cassian, arrived on the farm so to speak. He was inspired by what he saw and decided to transplant the idea to Marseilles. His intentions may have been pure and good, but this was probably not the best place to set up his simple life. The city was large for the time, had a harbour and prospered after a fashion. Oh, but the doors to the temptation of expansion, ever present.

His community prospered and the idea of a simple life running alongside prayer and devotion caught on. A while later St Benedict, with his own version of the idea, began the Benedictine Order.  Many other orders ran monasteries but possible the Benedictines were the most well known. Saint Benedict changed the regime a little, well quite a lot actually, instead of a very simple monastic life he allowed some luxury as well.  More meals in a day, mattresses to sleep on – actually being allowed to sleep your fill was a new one.  His, were the best of reasons, if hard physical labour is required then adequate nutrition and rest was equally so. 

Good intentions! 

Now all of us can visualise that wide straight path, gleaming with bright optimistic paving, yes that one, leading straight down to hells fiery depths!

To be fair to Benedict and all other monks, their lives were a model to be emulated. The tools available at that period meant that sewing, tilling and harvesting were all backbreaking jobs. And, because of the decline in agriculture after the Romans collapsed, the land had gone back to the wild. They hacked out field after field, from grasslands, marshlands, and woodlands. To begin with it was a self-sufficiency exercise. To enable themselves to live in these communities and pray for themselves and others, they needed to be self sufficient.They worked hard and industriously.

After the first one was established then, of course, when the second one started the first would help them and send foodstuffs to them. To keep them going until they had built up supplies for themselves. The second would help the third and so forth. In a very short while they had a nice little network, complete with connecting roads,  monasteries that could be relied on to help each other out in times of need.

They became experts in farming, replacing fertility and good harvests.  They were good. The early monks. Their monasteries attracted not only the local peasantry but younger sons of the well to do.  The middle classes who had no other work to do would gravitate also.  Some good brain power and ingenuity was being harnessed within the monastery walls.

This collecting of brawn and brain was not all one sided.  Those in want were given food and shelter in return for their labour; some were taught trades or other skills.  Indeed our very own Bede, a peasant’s son, was taught his letters and became England’s leading historian and author of the time. Skills came in with these outsiders and, combined with those of the monks, modern technology advanced apace.

The Benedictines spread right across Western Europe, they became very powerful. They had two strands of power going for them. They were industrious, clever and legally keen, making sure that they retained the monopolies for anything that was likely to bring a profit.  They ended up controlling the manufacture and trading of alcohol, the mills, and therefore the staff of life! Also land rents and the trade fairs. They controlled food.

Although they had food security in their hands they had another possibly greater power.  They were in charge of everyone's immortal souls.  If those early visionaries had not set out control Western Europe their descendants certainly ended up doing so.

Another advantage of the monasteries is that unlike the lands of the great and powerful when the monks died the monastery still remained. Never carved up between sons, or dispersed. Therefore over the centuries an amazing amount of money (and with it increased power) built up.

As they grew more successful, they began to force the peasantry off the land, into the cities. They began to look at specialisation; bad move, mono-culture destroys the land! For a while everyone's life was much more pleasant. Such huge surpluses of food were being produced by the very efficient monasteries that even those displaced from the land and sent to the cities could be fed. Populations began to boom. In 650 A.D. the population in Europe had dropped to about 5 1/2 million within 600 years it had risen to approximately 35 million.

Both church leaders and kings began an architectural bonanza, the wonderful cathedrals and palaces we gawk at when doing the tourist bit were financed by the wealth accrued and built by that displaced peasantry.

The old picture begins again; as the food increased, so too did the population. As the population increased the amount of food needed also increased. Whole swathes of land were deforested, tilled and planted. There was less and less time to leave them fallow between growing seasons. Land that had regained its fertility over the centuries since the Romans, purely by being left fallow for so long now began to lose that fertility and, as the soil degraded, harvests plummeted. All that expansion had happened during a warm period in  Europe, so all might well have saved if the weather had continued its kindly way.

By the 13th century Europe was in the grip of raging inflation.  Then, as it is wont to do, the financial system, that was bolstering everything, imploded.

The banks failed.

Maybe still savable? It's a never ending and familiar scenario throughout our history. The warm period that had helped it all happen ended and Europe descended into a mini ice age. A few years of torrential rain rotted harvests, combined with plunging winter temperatures and starvation took over with disease rampaging cheerfully behind. The  European population died in their millions. By the end of the 14th century it is estimated that between 25 and 45% of the population had perished.

Oh dear, but now maybe humanity had learnt their lesson?

Consumerism part of our genetic code?The Romans

Well it could be that not many of you had heard of the Sumerians and their Empire, the Bronze Age was a long time ago after all. But most people, I think, will have heard of the Roman Empire. Moving into the Iron Age they were, in fact, an incredibly successful Empire.

They began small, don't all Empires. Italy didn’t in fact have incredibly fertile land. To feed a growing population those in control looked around for new trading partners. There are some very fertile lands around the Mediterranean Sea, and the Romans decided to go to war to obtain access to them. Well it wasn't that simple of course, I am condensing decades of history into a few paragraphs, and I  am cherry- picking my arguments here. Fighting a number of wars, over a number of years against the Carpathians, Rome gained control of the Mediterranean. This included the amazing fertility of the Egyptian floodplains around the River Nile. The breadbasket of the Mediterranean, as it was to turn out to be.

Much of these years of warfare were in fact waged by the Roman Navy. We don't hear much about the Navy; it is the Roman soldiers marching across the world that lives in our imagination.  The wars were extensive and prolonged. Hundreds, probably thousands, of trees had to be felled to build the ships that were to win the new lands. We know about the dangers of felling too many trees, especially in hilly areas such as Italy!

The Romans at the end of this slaughter had access to better quality grain, wheat, which Egyptians grew well, was more nutritious than the barley that the Romans grew. Grain was the bedrock of any civilization and Rome was no exception. They also could import food from all around the Mediterranean Sea. Enough food for the populace and enough to start accumulating a surplus to strengthen their trade routes. Now speculators moved in, buying up the small scale farms around Rome, dispossessing the peasant farmers, building villas and investing in olive groves and vineyards.  Niche foods, which would obtain large profits.

The farmers migrated to the cities. At one stage, in the first century BC, the population of Rome stood at 1 million. If you consider just this one city and the population, then begin to wonder how all those people were fed. It was a logistic nightmare, but, the Romans were good at  logistics.

They have left their trace in every country they conquered. It was almost a ‘do it by numbers’ operation. They definitely came, saw and conquered. They set up an amazing network of  overland, as well as sea, routes, to facilitate their trading partners. But this was the Iron Age not the steam age. Road haulage was done by oxen and cart, it was slow and dangerous.  Sea transport was totally dependent on prevailing winds and clement weather.   Over land were thieves and bandits, on the seas the danger came from piracy; the problem of bandits and pirates is an age old one. If you can take your food and your luxury goods without any effort, apart from killing a few people, why not?

Another problem Rome had, from the beginning, was that the water approach was very shallow, so the large ships required to bring in huge shipments of grain had to stop at a place Ostia, which is 15 miles from Rome. The large granary ships would stop there, transfer cargo to a flotilla of smaller craft, to finish the journey to the city.  To unload a shipment of a years worth of grain for the city required 4,500 return trips of three days of these smaller boats.

And harvests only occurred once a year, so a  whole years worth of grain had to be brought in and stored.  One of the large granaries indicates that it had 225,000 ft.² of storage space, the Coliseum only had 29,000 ft.² This particular granary was not the only one that the city possessed. Building a granary of this size, which would keep your grain in good condition for an entire year, was in fact quite a feat which for a long time the Romans managed very well. The granary had to be weatherproof, rodent proof, dry and cool, well ventilated and well protected from thieves. Our ancestors from long ago were very clever people.

Of course with the Empire, demand for luxury goods grew. I am almost convinced that consumerism is inbuilt into our genetic code! At one stage Italy was importing more than it was exporting. An imbalance was building up, and a steady stream of silver was trickling outwards paying for goods and reducing the roman treasury.

One of the most desired luxury goods was pepper. As one reads about the history of food exchange and trade one finds these enticing little spices and herbs, that we all use so casually, caused more trouble than you would think they could possibly be worth.

So ships left Rome using wine and timber and olive oil for ballast and returned loaded with pepper. This spice attracted the speculators; huge fortunes were made and destroyed on the back of it. I have a Roman cookery book, I collect cookery books, and pepper seems to be in almost every recipe. I can only think that the normal Roman fare back then was very bland. Nowadays people invest in the banking/financial system – or maybe they don’t after this last fiasco! Back then they invested in olives, wine and pepper.

Rome almost starved many times, at one stage pirates launched an all-out attack at  Ostia, sinking the ships and looting the warehouses, Rome tottering almost to it’s knees from starvation and riot, caused the Senate to pass new immediate laws regarding the control of piracy, not an easy decision as the laws went against the grain of their principles, but what would you do when the city was rioting; more of them then there are of you! These periodic starvations instead of teaching the Romans a valuable lesson in not congregating too many people in one place if you couldn't feed them, just made them march out to conquer more lands.

The collapse of food security was not what brought Rome to its knees. But it was part of the problem. A succession of bad rulers, corruption and unwise decisions. An increasing financial shortfall, all helped as well. Because of their Empire the land around Rome had become heavily degraded, not helped by the stripping of all those trees. This in itself might not have been so disastrous if the farming was still small-scale and the climate was with them. At the height of their power the Romans were living through a very benign warm period of climatic history. During their decline the climate was also declining its pleasantness. The weather became cooler, the growing season became shorter, rainfall decreased. Then if the land had been in good heart, and didn't have the task of feeding millions, disaster might still have been staved off.

When those at the top, who are meant to lead and to organise, would rather play with expensive toys and over indulge on the good life, when the money system goes skew whiff, then the essentials of life soon cease. Armies need paying or they vanish into the mist, the population needs feeding or they drift back to the countryside. Road routes need constant repair, security needs to keep thievery of the highways or the peasants will not risk their lives taking food to the markets. When the markets fail, trade routes crumble.  Those who can, return to the land to scratch out an uncertain future. Empires don't fail overnight it takes time. They grow, they overextend, and then they are ripe for defeat and chaos . . .

Here come the dark ages. . .

Recommended books:

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G.Fraser & Andrew Rimas 

A Splendid Exchange; How Trade Shaped the World by William Bernstein

Did it all begin in the Bronze Age?

Food Security part two.

It began a long time ago - humans began this cycle way- way- way back when.  It is a fact that food security actually depends upon a surplus of food. Some of my favourite Neolithic peoples are the Sumerians, from ancient Mesopotamia.  They, at about the same time as the Chinese, developed, what is thought to be, the first stable agricultural system. Around 3500 BC the Sumerians constructed a mesh of dykes/ditches through the swamps of what was to be Mesopotamia. And turned the area into a land of agricultural surpluses.

Agriculture had begun in this area before 7000 BC, in the uplands of the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. After that first ditch had been dug, there were great wheat fields across the land and the first cities that we know off had started to be built such By 3000 BC it was a city of great stone walls temples, and palaces. Ruled by priests and kings. Don't forget, this was way back in Neolithic times.

Growing grains, setting up a network of roads, conquering the sea and establishing trade routes made the area very wealthy indeed. Good on them, you may think. They only had land, water and agriculture and became Empire builders because of it, and because they lacked other vital resources needed for power.  They used their best resource for trade, and did so in an arc which is believed to have encompassed 3,000 miles.  Reaching from Anatolia to near the Indian Ocean and to the present day Indus Valley.

The area became enormously wealthy by trading their food surplus to other areas by their trade routes in exchange for all the pleasures that could be had in the Bronze Age. Such as vital textiles and semiprecious metals, stone and weapons. Records written approximately 2100 BC show that there were shipments of as much as 20,000 litres of grain at a time. That's a lot of grain! With this trading the coastal towns grew, populations increasing, the inland towns became richer. The Mesopotamians had to look after those fields.

A food surplus depends on:

Reliable water sources

Fertile ground: and in those days

Intensive farming with backbreaking work.

That last task very soon fell to the lowest of the low in society and to slaves.

This very early agricultural revolution produced not healthier living as one would suppose but a dip in the quality of the diet compared to that of the hunter gatherers they had been, causing:

Tooth decay

Deficiencies

And stunted growth.

Also in the increasingly crowded towns and cities that sprang up all along the trade routes

Diseases such as TB

Joints and bone disorders, due to the long hours of hard labour

Another consequence of this agricultural revolution was an increase in warfare, as populations grew so more land was needed.  For the defence of land already possesed

  

Standing armies were formed

they could be used to gain more land - by invasion

Empire building began

An underclass was formed as inequalities between the wealthy and the poor, the well fed and the underfed became more common

To control the empires, the armies, the underclass, the slaves, strong dictatorial governments became the norm.

More and more hunter gatherers became agriculturalists, probably because they had no choice. Because the farming communities became aggressive and territorial, gathering food surplus, and invading new lands, enclosing these lands, they either joined or died.

Climate change helped to fuel this revolution as well as destroy it.

Until 8,000 BC this area had been cold and not that promising. Small scale agriculture had been practised here. Then there was a period of wet warmer climate which encouraged excessive growth.

The downfall was caused by various reasons some of which included

Over grazing livestock on the hills

De-forestation on the hills

These two resulted in loosening top soil which was washed down into the canals silting them up. When the rainwater went through this denuded hillside soil it left high sodium levels which dried out in the sunshine of the Middle East into salt deposits on the earth, which blocked vital minerals from being absorbed into the soil.

Between 3000 and 2350 BC Mesopotamia was achieving 2,000 litres per hectare. In 2,000 BC this had dropped to 1,130 litres per hectare. 300 years later it was 370 litres per hectare. The bottom had dropped out of this particular market.

Climate again had helped this fall, between 3,100 BC and 1,200 BC it had suddenly become very hot and dry.

The Sumerians apparently were the first people in history to come to blows over irrigation structures, although we only believe they were the first because they left written records of disputes.  Who knows what was going on before. A series of tablets have been dug up which record the story of clashes over boundary marking canals. The owners and their followers waged war over this dispute, slaughtering and vandalising in an ever increasing vendetta.

The intensive farming, deforestation, and vandalization of the fertility of the soil all led to the Sumerians downfall. They had a good innings, but once food supplies began to dry up they lost their power, began to lose their riches, and were ripe for a takeover by someone else more powerful.