FOOD AND MEANING: CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDINGS OF MUSLIM

FOOD AND FOOD WAYS IN SPAIN, 12501550

Olivia Remie Constable*
Abstract: This article argues that the discussion of food and food ways in late medieval and early modern
Spain could send powerful messages about perceptions of cultural, social, and religious identity. Foodstuffs
and eating traditions have always been complex in the ways they have the ability to build, define, and separate
communities, and this was certainly the case for Muslim and Christian populations in Spain. Taking as its
starting point the critique of king Enrique IV of Castile for eating Muslim foods while seated on the ground in
a Muslim manner, the article examines changing Christian attitudes in Iberia towards particular food stuffs
(especially milk, butter, honey, raisins, figs, and couscous); views about of sharing food with Muslims; and
the implications of sitting on the ground to eat. By the sixteenth century, influenced by emerging arguments of
both humanism and the inquisition, Christian rhetoric in Spain came to see food as a powerful tool for defining difference.
Keywords: food, Spain, Inquisition, Mudejars, Moriscos, couscous, Lozana Andaluza, Enrique IV of Castile,
Leo Africanus, Fernando and Isabel.

Character assassination only has power if the audience understands the message. Thus,
when a humanist historian in late fifteenth-century Spain wished to discredit the former
king Enrique IV of Castile, one might wonder why his critique included accusations that
this Christian king had enjoyed Arab foods, and that he ate these delicacies while seated
on the floor, in the manner of the Muslims. What were these accusations intended to
imply? Food and food ways have meanings that are well-understood in their own time
and place, though rarely explicitly stated for the benefit of later historians. In the words
of Mary Douglas, if food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in
the patterns of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees
of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries.1
The humanist chronicler, Alfonso de Palencia, penned his accusations against Enrique
at a moment when the code was long understood, but the message was shifting. Christians had lived side by side with Muslims for centuries in Iberia; they understood and
even shared many of their foods and food ways. Yet the later fifteenth century also
witnessed significant changes in the relationship between Christianity and Islam in
Spain, with the new influence of humanism, the growth of the Inquisition, Christian
military conquests in Granada (1492) and losses in Constantinople (1453), and the
desire of king Fernando and queen Isabel to play a greater political and religious role in
Europe and beyond.
This is the context in which we can better understand the thrust of Alfonso de
Palencias invective against Enrique IV, who was the half-brother of Isabel, and had
been the king of Castile before she claimed the throne in the wake of civil war. Palencia
had once worked for Enrique, then shifted sides and adopted Fernando and Isabel as
new patrons after 1468, just as they were beginning to gain political power and support.
Although he was not the only chronicler to cast aspersions on Enrique (accusing him,

Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, 715 Hesburgh Library, Notre Dame, IN 46556. My thanks to
the colleagues who have provided comments, suggestions, and corrections for earlier versions this project,
especially members of the Premodern Spanish History Association of the Midwest, the University of Chicago
Medieval Seminar, and the N.E.H. Mediterranean Seminar in Barcelona (Summer 2012).
1
Mary Douglas, Deciphering a Meal, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London 1975) 249.
Viator 44 No. 3 (2013) 199236. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103484

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

among other things, of ineptitude, homosexuality, and impiety), Palencia was the most
thoroughgoing. His comments about Enriques eating habits have often been taken as an
accusation of maurophiliaimplying that the king was much too friendly towards
Muslims.2 This may well be the case (certainly, Enrique was famous for employing a
corps of Muslim body guards), but the messages carried in these references to food and
food ways were considerably more complex than a simple accusation of maurophilia.
Instead, Alfonso de Palencias words would have evoked an array of intertwined
associations, linking Enriques eating habits with sin (both gluttony, gula, and lust,
luxuria), epicureanism and corporeal sensuality, old fashioned and unhealthful appetites, and cultural behaviors (such as sitting on the floor to eat) that inquisitors increasingly tagged as un-Christian and humanists identified as uncivilized.3 Thus, by accusing
Enrique of eating like a Muslim, Alfonso de Palencia reflected an emerging mode of
differentiation between European Christianity (us) and Islam (them) that was
becoming increasingly evident around the year 1500.4
Alfonso de Palencia wrote that Enrique enthusiastically accepted whatever Arab
foods were offered to him, in the manner of the Muhamadan sect (cibis Arabicis
secundum Machumetistarum sectam acceptis). Likewise, the king enjoyed foods
associated with the Moors (Maurorum), such as figs, raisins, butter, milk, and honey,
and he was happy to eat these sitting on the ground in the Ishmaelite fashion (more
Ismaelitico).5 The chronicler went on to describe the many outward signsin his
dress, in his food, and in his habit of reclining at the tablethrough which Enrique
supposedly indicated that he preferred the customs of the Moors to those of the

2
William Phillips, Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile 14251480 (Cambridge, MA
1978) 116, 8990; Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain
(Philadelphia 2009) 1720. Both Phillips and Fuchs point out that it is likely that many Spanish Christians, not
only kings but also their subjects, enjoyed Arab foods and shared their manner of eating, both in the 15th c.
and earlier.
3
Late medieval and early modern Castilian and Catalan treatises routinely recommended moderation in
eating, avoidance of gula and luxuria, and a healthy lifestyle. See Marta Haro Corts, Et no andedes tras
vuestra voluntad en comer ni en bever ni en fornicio. De gula et luxuria en la literatura sapiencial, tre
table au moyen ge, ed. Nelly Labre (Madrid 2010) 5162; Teresa de Castro, El gusto alimentario en la
doctrina moral de la iglesia en la baja edad media segn Hernando de Talavera, Micrologus: natura, scienze
e societ medievali 10 (2002) 379399; Paul Freedman, Medieval clichs of health and diet according to
Francesc Eiximenis, Sociedad y memoria en la edad media: Estudios en homenaje de Nilda Guglielmi
(Buenos Aires 2005) 127134.
4
New European modes of thinking about the early modern Islamic world have recently been investigated
by scholars looking at Italian humanist attitudes towards the Ottoman Turks. See Margaret Meserve, Empires
of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA 2008); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West.
Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia 2004). Many of their observations of change in
this period also hold true for visions of non-Turkish Muslims in the wider Mediterranean World and Spain.
5
Atque impudenter auideque degustanti quaeque deferrentur ex cibis Arabicis secundum Machumetistarum sectam acceptis. Itaque iam Ismaelite persuasi moribus Henrici eius vitam non ueneficio terminari sed
beneficio dilatari cupiebant; et proficiscenti Henrico preuia interpretatione praefatorum equitum Maurorum
qui eum prosequebantur obuiam procedebant caricas atque uuas passas, butirum, lac, mel afferentes, quae
rex accubans humi more Ismaelitico placide degustabat, omniaque actitabat consentanea illis. From Alfonso
de Palencia, Gesta hispaniensia ex annalibus suorum dierum, ed. Brian Tate and Jeremy Lawrance (Madrid
19981999) 113 (section 3.8, lines 158165). Throughout this article, the English word Moor will be used
only to translate the late medieval and early modern Romance noun moro or the Latin mauro. Likewise, in
most cases, Moorish for the adjective morisco. The noun morisco refers to Muslims converted to Christianity in early modern Spain.

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Christian religion, not to mention possible other secret and more indecent excesses
that he may have enjoyed in private.6 This critique is remarkable in the degree to which
it elides markers of cultural practice with those of religious belief. In other words, the
fact that Enrique ate Muslim foods, in a Muslim manner, was used to create doubts
about his allegiance to Christian faith and morality. This conflation was a relatively new
development in the later fifteenth century.
Food and food traditions are very striking in the ways in which they encompass both
explicitly religious markers of identity (for example, avoiding pork, alcohol, or shellfish; insisting on kosher or all standards of butchering; or fasting during Lent,
Ramadan, or Yom Kippur), and non-religious cultural markers associated with certain
regions or ethnic groups (for instance, sitting on the ground to eat, or enjoying particular
foods, such as couscous). In Spain, medieval Christians had long recognized that Islam
demanded particular dietary requirements, yet Christians were known to eat Muslim-type foods, to accept food from Muslims, and even to eat while seated on the floor.
Over time, however, culinary markers of religion and culture that had been understood
as separate, though related, in the thirteenth century had become fusedoften in
uncomfortable waysby the end of the fifteenth century. This is what makes the critique of Enrique IV so striking. Nothing that he was accused of, in terms of food or table
manners, linked him with formal Islamic dietary laws, an attempt to be Muslim, or
explicitly un-Christian behavior. He was not said to have avoided pork or alcohol, nor to
have demanded all meat, and he was not accused of violating Christian dietary
traditions through his food habits (all of the items that Palencia mentionedhoney,
raisins, figs, butter, and milkwere perfectly licit for Christian consumption). Indeed,
Muslim-type sweetmeats made with fruits and honey were very popular in the late
medieval Spain, and even Fernando and Isabel are said to have adored such delicacies.7
Instead, Palencias critique of Enrique provoked cultural associations with Muslim
habits, and his catalogue of the former kings transgressions combined to reinforce the
image of a man unfit to rule.
This message was agreeable to Palencias royal patrons, and must have been well
understood by his late fifteenth-century readers. Notably, we do not see similar
accusations launched against earlier kings in Spain, even if they were known to have
dealings with Muslims. Both Alfonso X of Castile (12521284) and Jaume I of Aragn
(12131276) famously interacted with Muslims and had Muslims serving at their
courts, without provoking negative comments. Later, Pedro I of Castile (13501369),
employed Muslim architects and builders to construct a lavish palace in Seville, and one
can imagine that he might have enjoyed Muslim foods and dining traditions in its
luxurious rooms that are so reminiscent of the Alhambra Palace in the neighboring
Muslim kingdom of Granada. Pedro was generally seen as a bad king; after his violent
death at the hands of his half-brother (subsequently, Enrique I) in a civil war, chroniclers had very little good to say about him and their hostile anecdotes more than justified
6

Palencia, Gesta hispaniensia, (n. 6 above) 114 (section 3.9, lines 1719).
Felipe Fernndez-Armesto, Ferdinand and Isabella (New York 1975) 60. The account books kept by
Gonzalo de Baeza, treasurer to queen Isabel, are filled with references to purchases of sugar, honey, and
candied fruit for her household. See Cuentas de Gonzalo de Baeza, Tesorero de Isabel la Catlica, ed.
Antonio de la Torre and E. A. de la Torre (Madrid 19551956) I.99, 243, 257, et al.
7

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his sobriquet Pedro the Cruel. Yet there was never a breath of critique about a possible Muslim life style or food ways.
Evidently, attitudes had changed during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
and behaviors that might have provoked little notice in the past had become meaningful
and open to censure by the period of Fernando and Isabel. These shifts were even remarked on at the time. In 1514, Iigo Lpez de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, wrote an
indignant letter protesting a recent edict against dressing in a Muslim style, and asking
what clothing did we here in Spain wear until the coming of king Enrique the Bastard
[Enrique I, in 1369], and how did we wear our hair except in the morisco style, and at
what table did we eat (en que mesa comiamos)? Did the kings stop being Christians and
saints because of this? No.8 Implicit in Tendillas final comment is the understanding
that, at the time of his writing, actions such as the wearing of Muslim clothing or eating
in a Muslim style (sitting on the ground at a low table) had indeed come to cast doubt on
the sincerity of Christian belief and moral behavior. Clearly, Alfonso de Palencias sly
accusations about food habits, made several decades earlier, had been intended to indicate that Enrique IV was neither a saint nor a good Christian.
Deciphering his message is complicated by the fact that the meaning of food can be
ambiguous, multivalent, and changeable. At one and the same time, food can have both
positive and negative significance, or both attractive and repulsive qualities (in many
cases dependent on the culture, religion, or individual tastes of the eater or observer).
Thus, by the later medieval and early modern period, we find that Christians perceptions of Muslim food and food ways had become laden with multiple, and often
conflicting, meanings. On the one hand, foods from the Muslim world had long been
perceived as luxurious, delicious, rich, and sometimes rare. Throughout much of the
medieval period, it was recognized that exotic spices and other culinary delicacies came
from the east by way of trade with the Islamic world.9 We know of western Christian
interest and adaptation of eastern foods through various sources, including merchant
documents and cookbooks that translated Arabic recipes and cooking techniques. On
the other hand, as we will see, Muslim food ways became simultaneously associated
with hedonism, epicureanism, love of luxury, gluttony, and sinful (i.e., un-Christian)
behavior.
But there was also another strand of Christian thinking about Muslim food that
gained ground in the later medieval period, when Muslims in Spain came under Christian rule as a conquered (and eventually converted) subject population. Increasingly,
Christians viewed Muslim foods and food ways as distasteful, meager, unclean, barbarous, and potentially heretical. Muslims were thought to consume strange foods (such as
8
Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 13501550 (New Brunswick 1979) 187,
239. Tendillas reference to a table (en que mesa comiamos) may either be meant literally, since by the early
16th c. the difference between eating at a high table (mesa alta) vs. a low table (mesa baja) was a distinguishing feature of a Christian vs. non-Christian lifestyle, or it may be meant more metaphorically, as in what kind
of food did we eat?
9
See Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven 2008); Olivia
Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900
1500 (Cambridge 1994); Andrew Watson, Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world (Cambridge
1983).

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203

camel meat and couscous), and to eat these in a dirty and uncivilized manner, sitting on
the ground, partaking from a communal dish with their hands, without using a table
cloth or napkins. They likewise drank water or milk rather than wine, and subsisted on
inexpensive dishes that contained more grains and vegetables than meat. Meanwhile,
inquisitors began to peer into new-Christian frying pans, to see if converted Muslims
(moriscos) were using olive oil or lard in their cooking; a preference for olive oil rather
than pork fat raised suspicions of residual non-Christian practice.10 These perceptions of
brutish behavior, crude poverty, and improper belief created a further rationale for why
Christians should avoid eating Muslim foods and should eschew Muslim table manners.
Alfonso de Palencias critique took on meaning within this complex and shifting matrix of ideas about Muslim food. In order to understand its message and place this within
the broader context of contemporary Christian-Muslim relations, it is helpful to analyze
the specific actions that the historian claimed that Enrique had engaged in, namely:
accepting food from Muslims, eating certain types of food that were associated with the
Muslims, avidly enjoying these items, and sitting (or reclining) on the floor while he ate
them. This paper will examine each of these accusations in detail, along with other
evidence for accepting, eating, enjoying, and sitting from the thirteenth to the early
sixteenth century. Most of the data come from within the Iberian peninsula, although
some other contemporary material is also included, especially from regions of Italy that
were under Spanish influence and thus part of the same broader thought-world. Through
a consideration of the context and cultural meaning of these actions, it becomes clearer
why Alfonso de Palencia chose to emphasize these particular details, how his readers
would have understood his words, and what this reveals about shifting Christian perceptions of the Muslim other during the reigns of Fernando and Isabel and later.
ACCEPTING AND SHARING FOOD
The issue of Christians accepting food from Muslims and Jews, or sharing food with
them, had a long history in medieval Spain and elsewhere in the Mediterranean world.11
In general, accepting food from Muslims seems to have become more problematic over
time, although context and location were critical. For example, the situation for travelers was always different from the routines of life at home. Christian pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, and diplomats traveling in the Islamic World necessarily found themselves in situations in which they had to eat food that had been cooked and served by
Muslims or, at the very least, purchased in a Muslim land. Usually, pragmatism ruled
when traveling abroad. Although the illnesses of European visitors to the Islamic world
were sometimes blamed on the fact that their bodies were fundamentally unsuited to
foreign foods, Christian travelers do not seem to have perceived any inherent problem in
accepting food from Muslims, or eating with them, even in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.12 An ambassador from Fernando and Isabel, Pedro Mrtir de Anglera,
10

The same test was also applied to converted Jews (conversos).

On legal approaches to sharing food, see David Freidenreich, Foreigners and their Food: Constructing
Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (Berkeley 2011); idem, Sharing Meals with Non-Christians
in Canon Law commentaries, circa 11601260: A Case Study in Legal Development, Medieval Encounters
14 (2008) 4177.
12
Susan Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East (Ithaca 2009) 150.
11

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

who went to Egypt in 1501, found himself at an open-air picnic, eating with both Muslims and Christians. He was offered fish and water from the Nile, and (rather to his own
astonishment) he ate and drank both of these without ill effect.13 Earlier, the Castilian
diplomat Pedro Tafur described eating street food in Cairo in the 1430s, and had nothing
negative to report about eastern food ways except for rumors that Christiansnot
Muslimsate raw meat in the lands of Prester John.14 Even in cases when travelers
found a certain food to be disgusting, the Muslim provenance per se does not necessarily seem to have presented a problem. For example, in the 1340s, when the Tuscan
pilgrim Niccol da Poggibonsi and his companions rejected a meal of camel meat, they
nevertheless understood the generosity of the offer and apparently sent it back with
courteous words. Niccol recounted how local Arabs brought us a large dish of camel
flesh, believing that we would eat; convinced of their great present and novelty; for such
they thought it would be for us; but we did not even want to see it, and we had it returned
through our interpreter, with thanks.15
Military campaigns often brought Christians into Muslim lands, but not always on
hostile terms. Bernat Desclot reported that in 1280 king Pere III of Aragn accepted
fresh bread, meat and chickens, eggs, cheese, and butter from the Muslim governor of
Minorca when he stopped in Mahon with his navy on the way to North Africa.16 Two
years later, according to Ramon Muntaner, Muslims in Collo sent ten oxen and twenty
sheep, together with bread, honey, butter, and fish to Peres troops.17 The semi-fictional
account of the exploits of the Castilian Count Pero Nio (13781453) described how his
troops were offered food in Gibraltar and Mlaga during a truce between Castile and the
Nasrids. These gifts included cows, sheep, chickens, plenty of baked bread, great flat
trays filled with couscous (atayferes llenos de alcuzcuz), and other cooked dishes.18
Within Christian lands the situation was somewhat different, since people had more
of a choice about the foods that they ate and the people from whom they accepted or
purchased food. There had long been certain situations in which Christian guests partook of meals offered by Muslim hosts, and many elite medieval Christian households
would have had Muslim cooks and servants, often slaves, preparing and serving food
for their dinner tables. Yet we see shifts in attitude over time, and choices about food

13
Pedro Mrtir de Anglera, Una embajada de los Reyes Catlicos a Egipto, ed. Luis Garca y Garca
(Valladolid 1947) 187190.
14
Pero Tafur, Andanas y viajes de un hidalgo espaol, ed. Marcos Jimnez de la Espada (Madrid 1995)
53, 63.
15
E la sera tutti vennero a vederci mangiare, e a recarci uno grande catino di carne di camello, pensando
che noi ne mangiassimo; e arecavalla per grande presente e novit; e cos credevano che fusse a noi; ma noi
nolla volemo pur vedere, e rifacemola riportare, e fare grazie al nostro interpito; Niccol da Poggibonsi,
Libro dOltremare (Jerusalem 1945) 137. Eng. trans. T. Bellorini and E. Hoade, A Voyage Beyond the Seas
(Jerusalem 1945) 117.
16
Bernat Desclot, Crnica, ed. M. Coll i Alentorn (Barcelona 1949) III.67 (chap. 79).
17
Ramon Muntaner, Crnica (Barcelona 1951) II.57 (chap. 85). In 1344, a Muslim ship (later captured by
Christian forces) that had been sent to relieve the besieged city of Algeciras was loaded with large quantities
of honey, figs, raisins, and butter (mucha miel, et muchas pasas, et muchos figos, et mucha manteca); Crnica
de D. Alfonso el Onceno (Madrid 1787) I.611612.
18
Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, El Victorial. Crnica de Don Pero Nio, Conde de Buelna (Madrid 1940)
101103. Atayfer is cognate with the Arabic ayfr, a large round tray, often slightly raised, for holding food.

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sources that seem to have been fairly insignificant in an earlier period had become
imbued with negative meaning by the fifteenth century.
Although there is no Iberian data from the eleventh and twelfth centuries on Christians employing Muslim cooks and servants, there is some suggestive evidence from
Sicily and the Crusader States. In Norman Sicily, Ibn Jubayr reported during the 1180s
that king William II had a head chef who was Muslim.19 The presence of Muslim servants in the kitchen is likewise implied in thirteenth-century descriptions of the household of emperor Frederick II, who was not only said to keep Muslim concubines, but to
enjoy an epicurean lifestyle, eating foods inspired by the Arabic culinary tradition.20 In
the middle of the twelfth century, the Syrian chronicler, Usama ibn Munqidh quoted an
elderly crusader knight living in Antioch who reassured Usama that the meal he offered
was licit for Muslim consumption, because I have Egyptian cooking-women and never
eat anything except what they cook.21 One could imagine similar situations in courts
and elite households in Spain during the same centuries.
Nevertheless, there is only limited information about service at Iberian royal tables,
even in the later medieval period. So it is difficult to know the degree to which Enrique
may have been normal or unusualfor his dayin accepting food from the hands of
Muslims, nor how routinely he might have done so. This king was famous for his corps
of Muslim guards, but we know little of his other household staff. There is some evidence that earlier Iberian rulers may have allowed Muslims to serve at the royal table.
For example, in 1337, Pope Benedict XII rebuked king Pere IV of Aragn for having
Muslim servants (mancebos sarracenos) to wait on him at his table and in his chambers,
and the pope urged him to employ Christian staff instead.22
Most accounts of royal feasts suggest that service at table for such events was an
honor reserved for members of the Christian elite. Thus, at a ceremonial dinner in
Zaragoza in 1336, shortly after Pere IVs coronation, we have a list of the princes and
other men of estate who waited on the king.23 Prescriptive texts also imply that Christians would serve at the royal table. The Siete Partidas (an extensive Castilian law code
commissioned in the thirteenth century and completed in the early fourteenth) detailed
the qualities of those who should serve the king at his meals, requiringamong other
thingsthat they be loyal, clean, prudent, of good understanding, and, first and foremost, that they must be of good lineage (de buen linage). 24 Juan Manuel outlined
similar qualifications for those who provided for and served at the royal table in his
thirteenth-century mirror for princes, the Libro de los Estados, and added that through
their loyal service to the king, these men would be able to save their souls (puede muy

19

Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, ed. William Wright and M.J. de Goeje (Leiden 1907) 324.
Anna Martellotti, I Ricettari di Federico II. Dal Meridionale al Liber de coquina (Florence 2005)
100, 107.
21
Usama ibn Munqidh, The Book of Contemplation. Islam and the Crusades, trans. Paul M. Cobb (London 2008) 153.
22
Regesta de letras pontificias del Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, ed. Francisco J. Miquel Rosell
(Madrid 1948) nos. 578, 289.
23
Chronique catalane de Pierre IV dAragon, III de Catalogne, dit le Crmonieux ou del Punyalet, ed.
Amde Gilles Pags (Toulouse 1941) 78; Pedro III, Chronicle, trans. Mary Hillgarth (Toronto 1980) I.198.
24
Las Siete Partidas del Don Rey Alfonso el Sabio (Madrid 1807) II.68 (Partida II, Title IX, Law XI); Las
Siete Partidas, Eng. trans. S. P. Scott and ed. R. I. Burns (Philadelphia 2001) II.318.
20

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

bien salvar el alma).25 Later data, on table service at the court of Fernando and Isabel,
likewise indicate that those who served the royal couple were required to come from
good families, and to be educated, courteous, honest, discreet, and well spoken.26
So aside from the criticisms of Enrique IV in Castile and Pere IV in Aragn, there is
very little indication that Muslims served food at late medieval Iberian royal tables, and
no evidence at all concerning their possible service in lesser Christian households. But
our data may be skewed to hide or ignore this service, especially if, on some level,
Christian opinion disapproved of accepting food from Muslims. Also, the pomp and
circumstance of the ceremonial banquets described in chronicles, and the prescriptive
dictates drawn from law codes and mirrors for princes, do not necessarily reflect the
realities of daily life, even at the court. So what might have been unexceptional at a
private supper, where diners may have been served by Muslim servants and perhaps sat
informally on the floor, would have been inappropriate for a formal public event.
Likewise, in a society where Muslim domestic slavery was not uncommon, at least
some Christian households must have consumed food that had been handled, cooked, or
served by Muslims or by converted Muslims. Indeed, there is evidence that this could
lead to cross-culinary misunderstandings, as when the late fourteenth-century Florentine merchant Francesco Datini complained about the difficulties of trying to teach a
Muslim Spanish slave woman in Barcelona to cook Tuscan recipes.27
Aside from Muslims cooking and serving at table, there were other (and often more
routine) ways in which Christians may have accepted food from Muslims. Local Muslim farmers produced edible crops which must have sometimes found their way into
Christian kitchens, while foodstuffs (such as the cheese and honey noted in Seville in
the 1270s) were imported from Muslim lands (de terra de moros).28 In 1286, Alfonso III
of Aragn allowed Muslims to operate food-shops in Mallorca City, though their
clientele is not specified.29 Muslim millers and bakers worked in Christian cities in the
later medieval period, and four Muslim atahoneros (millers) appear in notarial documents from Seville in the fourteenth century.30 Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, converted Muslims in Seville, Valencia, and Granada worked as bakers and
food sellers, as well as in other areas of food preparation and delivery.31 A Muslim
butter-maker (mantequero) was noted in Segovia in 1448.32 Muslims were especially
25

Don Juan Manuel, Libro de los Estados, ed. R. B. Tate and I. R. MacPherson (Oxford 1974) 203205.
lvaro Fernndez de Crdova Miralles, La corte de Isabel I. Ritos y ceremonias de una reina (1474
1504) (Madrid 2002) 142144; Jean H. Marijol, The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella (New Brunswick
1961) 239240.
27
Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (London 1984) 199.
28
Jose Damian Gonzalez Arce, Cuadernos de ordenanzas y otros documentos sevillanos del reinado de
Alfonso X, Historia, instituciones, documentos 16 (1989) 26.
29
Elena Lourie, Free Moslems in the Balearics under Christian Rule in the Thirteenth Century, Speculum 45 (1970) 635.
30
My thanks to Karen Graubart for sharing this unpublished material.
31
Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders. Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca 1972) 160161;
Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars. Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca 2009)
9395, 108111; Christophe Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress in the Renaissance (New York 1994) 44;
Raphal Carrasco, La monarchie catholique et les morisques (15201620) (Montpellier 2005) 47.
32
J. Antonio Ruiz Hernando, Historia del urbanismo en la ciudad de Segovia del siglo XII al XIX (Segovia
1982) 95.
26

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associated with making fritters (buuelos), to the point that, during the sixteenth century, inquisition records indicate that simply working as a buolero could raise suspicions of improper belief.33
As well as eating food cooked and served by their own Muslim servants and slaves,
Christians may have accepted food from Muslims in other circumstances, for instance
when they were guests of Muslim hosts. Bernat Desclot recounted how, in the midst of
the Christian siege of (Muslim) Mallorca City in 1229, a wealthy Muslim from Pollena
invited Count Nuo Snchez to attend a banquet. The count immediately accepted and
prepared to depart, telling king Jaume I that he would return in four days. However,
when he saw that this intention angered the king and caused consternation in the
Christian camp, the count changed his plans and declined the invitation. Why the
consternation? Desclot makes clear that it was Nuos departure in the middle of a
critical military action that caused the general dismay, not the fact that he was planning
to attend a Muslim feast.34 Other thirteenth-century evidence from newly-conquered
regions likewise suggests that many Christians saw nothing intrinsically wrong about
sharing a table with Muslims, especially subject Muslims. Certainly, there were occasions in which Jaume I ate with Muslim guests, as in 1266, when he invited a group of
Muslims from Murcia to dine with him.35
Texts penned by jurists and religious scholars suggest differences of opinion on the
question of Christians sharing food with non-Christians, but there was a growing
consensus of disapproval over time. The issue had long been debated in canon law, and
churchmen in thirteenth-century Spain grappled with the issue of whether it was licit to
eat with Muslims or prohibited on the grounds that Muslims had similar food restrictions as Jews (in other words, Muslims Judaized their food).36 Presumably this
was the concern behind a late thirteenth-century ordinance in Huesca, forbidding
Christians to buy meat from Muslims or Jews.37 In the 1270s, there was also concern
about converted Muslims in Seville sharing meals with their former coreligionists,
especially when attending weddings, holiday feasts, and other festive events that would
have included food.38 As with most prescriptive data, these condemnations may not
actually have prevented the acceptance and sharing of food, but the growing frequency
of their promulgation over time suggests increasing attention and disfavor.

33
Mercedes Garca-Arenal, Inquisicin y moriscos: los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Mexico City
1983) 72; William Childers, Disappearing Moriscos, Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of
Otherness, ed. M. J. Rozbicki and G. O. Ndege (New York 2012) 57; Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians
and Moriscos. Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 15681614 (Baltimore 2006) 96; Juan
Aranda Doncel, Los moriscos en tierras de Crdoba (Crdoba 1984) 224225; Ana Isabel Carrasco
Manchado, De la convivencia a la exclusin: imgenes legislativas de mudjares y moriscos, siglos XIIIXVII
(Madrid 2012) 344.
34
Desclot, Crnica (n. 16 above) II.129130 (chap. 45).
35
Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona 1991) II.321 (chap. 438); The Book of
Deeds of James I, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Aldershot 2003) 316.
36
Freidenreich, Sharing Meals with Non-Christians (n. 11 above) 6667.
37
Documentos municipales de Huesca, 11001350, ed. Carlos Laliena Corbera (Huesca 1988) doc. 73,
111.
38
Gonzalez Arce, Cuadernos de ordenanzas (n. 28 above) 122. See also Ana Echevarria Arsuaga, Poltica y religin frente al Islam: La evolucin de la legislacin real castellana sobre musulmanes en el siglo
XV, Qurtuba 4 (1999) 50.

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

Prohibitions against accepting and sharing food gained traction during the fourteenth
century, although there was still some debate as to whether Muslims and Jews were
equally disapproved as dining partners. The Siete Partidas ruled that Christians should
not eat or drink with Jews, but said nothing of Muslims.39 In 1324, ordinances enacted
by the bishop of Calahorra ruled that Christians should not enter the houses of Jews or
Muslims, or eat their foods (comen de sus viandas), while later in the century, Vincent
Ferrer preached that Christians should not buy food (conprar dells vitualles) from
Muslims or Jews.40 Influenced by these admonitions, Castilian laws established for
Muslims and Jews by queen Catalina, mother of Juan II, in 1412, dealt with a variety of
similar concerns. Not only were Muslims forbidden from selling bread, butter, or anything else edible to Christians, they were also prohibited from having public shops or
stalls for dealing in any kind of foodstuffs. Especially, they could not sell olive oil,
honey, or rice to Christian buyers. Nor should Muslims visit Christians, or send them
gifts of spices, baked bread, wine, poultry, nor any other killed meat, or dead fish, or
fruits, or ... anything else to eat.41 Half a century later, in 1465, ordinances enacted
under Enrique IV himself would repeat these strictures, including a rule that Muslims
and Jews should not sell dead meat (carne muerta), nor baked bread, nor wine, nor
fish, nor any other cooked food for the sustenance of Christians.42 The Franciscan
scholar Alfonso de Espina made similar recommendations in his Fortalitium Fidei,
begun around 1459, ruling that Christians should not eat together with Muslims or
Jews.43 By the end of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition would look closely at food,
not only as a marker of cultural and religious identity, but also for the dangers of contact
over a shared dinner. Events such as wedding feasts and funerary meals were seen as
especially likely to stimulate recidivism. Whether these restrictive rules were followed
is open to debate (since there was ongoing evidence for inter-faith sharing of meals), but
their promulgation is noteworthy, especially in setting the context for understanding the
accusations made against Enrique IV. Clearly, accepting food from Muslims had become a problem by the later fifteenth century.44

39

Siete Partidas (n. 24 above) Partida VII, Title XXIV, Law VIII.; Eng. trans. 1436.
Fernando Bujanda, Documentos para la historia de la Dicesis de Calahorra, Berceo, Instituto de
Estudios Riojanos 2 (1947) 116. See also Enrique Cantera Montnegro, Los mudejares en el marco de la
sociedad riojana bajomedieval, Actas del III Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo (Teruel 1986) 32.
Vincent Ferrer, Sermons (Barcelona 19321984) III.14 (sermon 56).
41
Francisco Fernndez y Gonzlez, Estado social y poltico de los mudejares de Castilla (Madrid 1866)
400404. Queen Catalina was advised by Vincent Ferrer; see Justin K. Stearns, Infectious Ideas. Contagion in
Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore 2011) 55.
42
Memorias de Don Enrique IV de Castilla (Madrid 1913) 435.
43
Ana Echevarria, Fortress of the Faith: The Attitude towards Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden 1999) 175.
44
These common sentiments against shared eating add poignancy to an account told by a morisco in
Aragn of how, just before the conversion edict of 1526, a Carmelite friar who was a great friend of the
Moors invited him to his home for dinner. Even while serving his Muslim friend a large meal, the friar ate
nothing himself, claiming that it was a Christian fast day. See L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain 15001614
(Chicago 2005) 95.
40

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209

EATING AND ENJOYING MUSLIM FOODS

Alfonso de Palencias criticisms of Enrique were very specific about the types of food
that the king had consumed, as well as the fact that these items had been offered to him
by Muslims. He listed figs, raisins, butter, milk, and honey as though these particular
foodstuffs would be widely recognized and condemned as distinctively Islamic. And
not only did the king accept food from Muslims, and eat items that were seen as
characteristic of Muslim cuisine, but he even ate these dishes with shameless and avid
enjoyment (impudenter avideque degustanti). Since there was nothing inherently
wrong or religiously prohibited in a Christian enjoying the foods that Alfonso de
Palencia listed, his censure must have been based on their strongand increasingly
negativecultural associations with Muslim cooking and consumption. On the one
hand, there is a considerable body of evidence (in charters, chronicles, cookbooks, and
literature) to suggest that Enrique was not alone among Christians in relishing these
tasty items. Despite reiterated prohibitions against sharing foods with Muslims, and the
growing perception of connections between sin, sensuality, and the consumption of
eastern foods, many Christians undoubtedly ate and liked foods that were commonly
identified as Muslim. On the other hand, consumption of these particular foods would
later be used as evidence for the impossibility of fully assimilating the moriscos within
Christian culture. By the early seventeenth century, Jaime Bleda would list raisins, figs,
honey, milk, and other vile things (cosas viles) eaten by moriscos among his reasons
justifying their expulsion.45 The following section will examine Christian understandings of what Muslim foods were, evidence for eating these items, and shifting attitudes
regarding the enjoyment of such dishes.
Christians in Spain had long been aware of Muslim dietary traditions. Their
recognition of specific Islamic rulings about licit and illicit foodstuffs contributed to
creating a mental category of Muslim foods that would come to extend beyond the
basic requirements of Quranic legislation. By the later thirteenth century, the religious
food needs of Muslims living under Christian rule (mudejars) had come to the forefront
in the wake of territorial conquests in Castile and Aragn as Muslim communities
negotiated arrangements for a new life under Christian rule. The Quran prohibits
consumption of anything that dies by itself, and blood and pork, as well as whatever
has been consecrated to something other than God. Also any animal that has been strangled, beaten to death, trapped in a pit, gored, or what some beast of prey has begun to
eat, unless you give it the final blow ...46 The well-known prohibition against pork is
stated here, but the main emphasis is that the manner of an animals death is critical in
determining whether its meat is licit (all) or illicit (aram) for Muslim consumption.
These requirements necessitate the existence of special all butchers, who follow the
proper routines of slaughter, to the life of any Muslim community. Therefore, the rights

45
Jaime Bleda, Coronica de los moros de Espaa (Valencia 1618) 1024. Bleda may have based his
comments on the slightly earlier work of Pedro Aznar Cardona, discussed later in this article.
46
Quran, 5:3, trans. T. B. Irving (Brattleboro 1985) 54. Evidence suggests that medieval Muslim
communities adhered closely to laws concerning meat (both types and methods of slaughter), even if rules on
alcohol were less rigidly maintained. Animal bones from late medieval Ceuta include all of the licit animals
noted in Arabic texts and recipes, but no pig bones. See Jos Manuel Hita Ruiz et al., Comer en Ceuta en el
siglo XIV: La alimentacin durante la poca marin (Ceuta 2009) 54.

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to have Islamic butchers, and special shops or tables for selling all meat, were routinely granted to subject Muslim communities in both Castile and Aragn from the
thirteenth century onward. Separate communal ovens were also common, lest forbidden
items (especially items containing pork products) be cooked in proximity with licit
foods.47
Documents from the thirteenth-century reign of Jaume I illustrate awareness of the
distinctive dietary requirements for Muslim communities. One of the oldest surviving
carta puebla charters, conceded to the mudejar community of Chivert in 1234, included
provisions allowing local Muslims to fast (ieiunare) and to follow other aspects of
Muslim law.48 Later, in 1266, when Jaume invited a group of Muslims from Murcia to
eat with him, he promised a meal of chicken and goat prepared in brand new cooking
pots. Presumably, this stipulation was to assure his guests that they need have no fear
that the vessels might have previously contained pork, although no mention is made of
the method for slaughtering the chickens and goats.49 On another occasion, Jaume gave
a crane that he had captured as a gift to Muslims in the castle of Almenara, noting that
we sent it alive because we knew their custom, and [that] they would not want it
dead.50
Whereas arrangements in the thirteenth century tended to foster the continuity of
Muslim life, later records show increasingly less accommodating attitudes toward
Muslim dietary and other religious needs. Although permissions for butcher shops
continued to be granted through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the longstanding
precedent for these privileges came to clash with the realities of everyday Christian-Muslim relations. As time went on, Muslim (and Jewish) communities were still
granted special butcher shops, but the leases for these facilities were often held by
Christian butchers.51 This placed a lucrative source of revenue in Christian hands, while
it ignored Jewish and Muslim concerns about full adherence to kosher and all standards. After the conquest of Granada and the subsequent forced conversion of Muslims to
Christianity, the transition of food ways became even more of a contested issue for both
parties. Although a treaty signed in Vlez Rubio in 1501 allowed former Muslims to
have their own butchers and fishmongers as before, it nevertheless insisted that these

47

Separate ovens and concerns about possible contamination were common in many areas of the
Mediterranean in which Christians and Muslims shared urban space. See O. R. Constable, Housing the
Stranger in the Mediterranean World (Cambridge 2003) 121122.
48
Manuel Vicente Febrer Romaguera, Cartas pueblas de las moreras valencianas (Zaragoza 1991) 11
12. In fact, mention of Muslim fasting is rare in Christian documents, even when other elements of the traditional five pillars of Islamic law are cited. Possibly, this was because fasting was considered a more private
and internal matter, in contrast to prayer, alms, pilgrimage, and profession of faith (these latter touched on
issues of concern to the Christian government, including public noise, fiscal interests, and freedom of movement).
49
Llibre dels Fets (n. 35 above) chap. 438. We see similar concerns in other Christian texts, as in
recommendations offered by the 14th-c. Florentine merchant, Francesco Pegolotti, that Christian merchants
should use new barrels for shipping oil and foodstuffs to North African ports, in order to avoid Muslim
suspicions that older barrels might have been reused after containing wine or pork products. See Francesco
Balducci Pegolotti, La Pratica della Mercatura (Cambridge 1936) 130131.
50
Llibre dels Fets (n. 35 above) II.210 (chap. 244); Book of Deeds, 211.
51
Robert I. Burns, Medieval Colonialism. Postcrusade Exploitation of Medieval Valencia (Princeton
1975) 4149.

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211

butchers were to slaughter in the Christian fashion.52 Later ordinances would prohibit
moriscos from having separate butchers or slaughtering meat according to Muslim
rituals, and inquisition trials paid close attention to butchering practices.
Newly-converted moriscos lamented the circumstance in which all butchers were
prohibited and their people were compelled to eat pork and flesh not killed according
to ritual prescriptions.53 At the same time, they lived in fear of Christian inquisitors,
who probed for other food traditionsmost notably the avoidance of lard and salt
porkthat were taken to signal an imperfect adherence to Christian belief.54 One
inquisition record included a confession by a morisca from Granada, who explained that
Christians do not know how to cook a stew without using salt pork (tocino), [but] in her
land they made these dishes with olive oil.55
Muslims also continued to enjoy a number of other food items that were strongly
associated with Islam, even though there was no mention of them in Muslim dietary
law. These included the foodstuffs mentioned by Alfonso de Palenciafigs, raisins,
milk, butter, and honeyas well as a wide array of other things such as couscous, rice,
eggplants,56 squash, nuts, sugar syrup, and a variety of fresh, dried, and candied fruits.
All of these tended to be thought of as Muslim on the basis of custom and origin,
although they were also widely enjoyed by non-Muslims. Certain cooking techniques
were likewise associated with Muslim culinary tradition, even when they were shared
with Christians and began to appear in Christian cookbooks.
Nevertheless, Muslim foods carried many negative associations. On the one hand,
foods that were expensive, scarce, and perishable were often associated with an epicurean lifestyle, linked with gluttony, immorality, and religious laxity. These associations
drew on European imaginary visions of a luxurious and exotic East, where sybaritic
Muslim potentates feasted on the finest delicacies. On the other hand, many foodstuffs
associated with Muslims by the late medieval period more accurately reflected the
poverty and the simple food ways of contemporary mudejars and moriscos. People who
shared couscous and vegetables from a common dish, using their hands to eat and having only water to drink, were often described as brutish and uncivilized by Christian
authors. These double associations with both luxury and barbarity grew out of
long-standing medieval ambiguities in perceptions of Muslims and the Islamic world.57
Milk, butter, and honey were all used in Muslim cooking, and they are noted in
medieval Arabic recipes, but they also had more powerful associations with Islam in the
52

Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 15001614 (n. 44 above) 47.

James T. Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry. A Student Anthology (Berkeley-Los Angeles 1974) 378379.
On morisco food generally, see Pedro Longs, Vida religiosa de los moriscos (Madrid 1915) 264270.
54
On the meanings of salt pork, see Amrico Castro, Sentido histrico-literario del jamn y del tocino,
Cervantes y los casticismos espaoles (Madrid 1974) 2532.
55
Garca-Arenal, Inquisicin y moriscos (n. 33 above) 71; Teresa de Castro, Lmergence dune identit
alimentaire: Musulmans et chrtiens dans le royaume de Grenade, Histoire et identits alimentaires en
Europe, ed. Martin Breugel and Bruno Laurioux (Paris 2002) 209.
56
Eggplants were characteristic of both Muslim and Jewish cuisine in medieval Spain. See Juan Gil,
Berenjeneros: The Aubergine Eaters, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed.
Kevin Ingram (Leiden 2009) I.121142.
57
Akbari, Idols in the East (n. 12 above) 5. However, at least one author, Hieronymus Mnzer, a German
traveler who went to Spain in 14941495, commented positively that morisco abstinence from alcohol promoted health, and their sobriety helped them to avoid the plague; Jernimo Mnzer, Viaje por Espaa y
Portugal (14941495) (Madrid 1991) 287.
53

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

Christian imagination. One of the images of Islam that most fascinated medieval
Christians was the vision of a sensual Muslim paradise characterized by rivers of milk
and honey and inhabited by beautiful young women.58 This combination of sweet tastes
and bodily pleasure evidently made a deep impression on the medieval Christian
imagination, for it was frequently cited with prurient interest and disapproving horror.
In about 1264, Alfonso X commissioned a Castilian translation of the Kitb al-mirj,
an Arabic text describing the Prophet Muhammads visit to Heaven, although there
were already two other vernacular versions available in Spain. The original of Alfonsos
translation has been lost, but the text spread rapidly in Latin (as the Liber scalae
Machometi) and other European languages. One thirteenth-century version, the Old
French Livre de leschiele Mahomat, describes rivers flowing with milk and honey,
abundant and delicious fruits, savory meats, and other sensual heavenly pleasures.59
Another text, commissioned by Alfonsos son, Sancho IV, described a Muslim paradise
with rivers of milk and honey, where los moros feasted on honey, milk, butter, and
fritters (bunnuelos).60 Perhaps the late fourteenth-century Catalan Franciscan,
Francesc Eiximenis, had this sort of thing in mind when he praised the devout Christian
who eschewed the sin of gluttony by avoiding honey, milk, butter, fritters (bunyols), and
all other sweet and expensive comestibles.61 Texts elaborating this vision of a sensuous
Muslim heaven would become especially popular in Spain and Italy in the later fifteenth
century, when they were used as evidence in polemical arguments against Islam.62
Figs and raisins were also strongly associated with Muslim cuisine. These fruits
could be grown in much of Spain, but the region of Muslim Granada had long been
famous for their production and export not only to other parts of the Iberian Peninsula
but also throughout the Mediterranean world and northern Europe.63 This export may be
one reason why figs and raisins were seen as such distinctive markers of Muslim identity, but it is also clear that they were a standard element in the Andalusi Muslim diet. As
such, they would become of particular interest to inquisitors, even in northern regions,
as when an early fourteenth-century inquisitorial report from the village of Montaillou
in the Pyrenees, described a meal eaten at the house of a Muslim (in domo dicti sarraceni), where his mother had offered dried figs and raisins to her Christian guests.64 A

58

The tenacity of this image of a Muslim paradise in the Christian imagination was surely bolstered by the
fact that Christians were already conditioned to such associations by biblical passages linking milk and honey
with the land of Canaan (Exod. 3.8, 13.5).
59
Reginald Hyatte, The Prophet of Islam in Old French (Leiden 1997) 144, 151, 155, 160161.
60
Castigos e documentos para bien vivir ordenados por el rey don Sancho IV, ed. Agapito Rey
(Bloomington 1952) 130, 132. As already noted (at n. 33 above), buuelos (fritters or doughnuts) were
commonly associated with morisco cooking. They also appear in this capacity in later ballads, as shown in
Julio Caro Baroja, Ciclos y temas de la historia de Espaa: Los moriscos del Reino de Granada (Madrid
1976) 146.
61
David Guixeras and Xavier Renedo, Llibres, mestres i sermons (Barcelona 2008) 238; my thanks to
Robert D. Hughes for his assistance with this reference. Notably, Eiximenis permitted raisins as a medicinal
fruit.
62
Echevarria, The Fortress of the Faith (n. 43 above) 93; John Tolan, Sons of Ishmael. Muslims through
European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville 2008) 3545.
63
Constable, Trade and Traders (n. 9 above) 183185, 220222.
64
Le Registre dInquisition de Jacques Fournier, vque de Pamiers (13181325), ed. Jean Duvernoy
(Paris 1965) III.164. My thanks to Wendy Pfeffer for drawing this citation to my attention.

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213

later case from Valldigna in 1510, noted that two new-Christians had eaten figs at the
house of a certain Ahmad el Roget, and then accepted bread in the house of a second
Muslim neighbor.65 Another sixteenth-century inquisition witness also testified that
new Christians consumed great quantities of raisins and figs.66 A century later, Pedro
Aznar Cardona and Jaime Bleda would specifically mention raisins and figs in their
treatises against the moriscos.67 At about the same period, popular Spanish ballads
portrayed Muslim women selling figs and raisins, while the playwright Lope de Vega
would likewise characterize Muslims (moros) as people who eat rice, raisins, figs, and
couscous.68
Couscous was not mentioned by Alfonso de Palencia, even though Spanish Christians came to see it as one of the most distinctive markers of cultural and culinary Islam
by the later fifteenth century. However, as will be discussed later in this paper, Christians often linked the consumption of couscous with sitting on the floor to eat, a habit
that Palencia did include in his invective. Even in the medieval Muslim world, couscous
was strongly associated with the Islamic West (Muslim Spain and North Africa), where
it was a relatively late innovation. It was never part of a Near Eastern culinary repertoire. Instead, the dish seems to have become popular in Muslim Spain during the thirteenth century, and it was certainly eaten in Granada during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.69 A Nasrid poet, Ibn al-Azraq (d. 1491), wrote a poem describing the cuisine
of Granada, including couscous and other characteristic local dishes.70 It seems that
couscous was also consumed by some contemporary Christians, despite its Muslim
associations. We have already seen Christians accepting the dish from Muslim hosts, as
when Count Pero Nio was offered great flat trays filled with couscous in early fifteenth-century Gibraltar.71 The Catalan novel, Tirant lo Blanc (published in 1490),
described splendid fictional feasts, shared by Christians and Muslims, that likewise
included couscous (cuscuss).72 A passage in Francesc Eiximeniss discussion of Christian table manners also mentions couscous (cucu) among messy foods that are
eaten greedily from a common bowl.73 Even a recipe book written by Francisco Mar-

65

M. del Carmen Barcel Torres, Minoras islmicas en el pas valenciano (Valencia 1984) 303.
Garca-Arenal, Inquisicin y moriscos (n. 33 above) 72.
67
Bleda, Coronica (n. 45 above) 1024; Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsion iustificada de los moriscos espaoles (Huesca 1612) 33rv.
68
ngel Gonzlez Palencia, ed., Romancero General (1600, 1604, 1605) (Madrid 1947) I.220; Caro Baroja, Ciclos y temas (n. 61 above) 145147; Lope de Vega, Los porceles de Murcia, in Obras completas de
Lope de Vega, ed. Jess Gmez and Paloma Cuenca (Madrid 1993) XV.663.
69
Charles Perry, Couscous and its Cousins, Medieval Arab Cookery, ed. Maxime Rodinson, A. J. Arberry, and Charles Perry (Totnes, Devon 2001) 235238; Lilia Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic
World (Berkeley-Los Angeles 2007) 4546; E. Lvi-Provenal, Histoire de lEspagne musulmane (Paris
1950) III.421; Rachel Ari, LEspagne musulmane au temps du Nasrids (Paris 1990) 378; Teresa de Castro
Martnez, La alimentacin en las crnicas castellanas bajomedievales (Granada 1996) 240241.
70
Expiracin Garca Snchez, Ibn al-Azraq: Urza sobre ciertas preferencias gastronmicas de los
Granadinos, Andaluca Islmica 1 (1980) 155, 161.
71
El Victorial. Crnica de Don Pero Nio (n. 18 above) 101103.
72
Joanot Martorell and Mart Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc, trans. David H. Rosenthal (New York 1984)
230, 260 (chaps. 137 and 148). Although the Valencian authors placed their heros travels in the eastern
Mediterranean world, in fact the menu for these feasts reflected Iberian tastes.
73
Francesc Eiximenis, Com usar b de beure e menjar. Normes morals contingudes en el Ter de
Cresti (Barcelona 1983) 112. My thanks to Michael Ryan for his assistance with this passage.
66

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

tnez Montio, the head chef to king Felipe II, contained recipes for making and cooking
couscous.74
Whether or not Christians ever enjoyed the dish, eating couscous had become a test
of religious identity by the sixteenth century. Though sometimes associated with Jews,
inquisition records clearly indicate couscous as a distinctive marker of continuing Islamic practice among moriscos. Jernima la Franca was accused of sitting with her
relatives, together with other morisca women, squatting around a tray on which they
served couscous, and eating the couscous with their hands, pinching it into little balls, as
the Moors used to do according to the tradition and custom of the sect of Muhammad.75
In 1538, a morisco man from Toledo was brought to trial for playing music at night,
dancing the zambra, and eating couscous,76 Later, in 1575, the inquisition in Granada
recorded the case of Isabel, a morisca who confessed to being a Muslim after testimony
that she had attended a wedding as a Muslim (como mora), eaten couscous, and sung
Moorish songs. A year later, another morisca, Juana, made a similar confession.77 The
Inquisition heard a longer narrative, in 1586, recounted by Francisco Pablo, a morisco
who had retaken the Arabic name of Hamete and married a Muslim woman in Mlaga,
according to Muslim law. In the words of the report, Francisco/Hamete claimed that he
had thought that this relationship was lawful, since like a beast (como bestia) he had
not been properly taught the law of Jesus Christ, nor what he ought to believe of it, and
he had eaten couscous with the Muslim men and women in Mlaga.78 There is some
material evidence to confirm this inquisitorial link between moriscos and couscous,
since pots for cooking couscous (alcozcozus) appear in wills and inventories of morisco
possessions during the sixteenth century.79
Sixteenth-century inquisitors were not alone in linking this particular foodstuff with
religious belief. Couscous also appears explicitly as a marker of identity in the Castilian
novel, Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza (published in 1527), when the heroine, Aldonza,
is asked whether she knows how to make couscous (alcuzcuz), so that the questioner
will be able to find out if she is one of us (de nobis).80 The context of this question is
complicated (see more below), and it is unclear if the answer would mark Aldonza as
74
Francisco Martnez Montio, Arte de cocina, pasteleria, vizcocheria, y conserveria (Barcelona 1763;
repr. Valencia 1997) 360364. There is also a recipe for Moorish Chicken (Gallina Morisca) 6364. The first
edition of the book was published in 1611.
75
Jernima la Franca y sus familiares con otras personas moriscas se pusieron en cuclillas y echaron
alcuzcuz en un batena [batea], y todas con sta a la redonda, coman del alcuzcuz con la mano haziendo unas
pellicas [pellizcas] como los Moros lo hazan por guarda y ceremonia de la secta de Mahoma. AHN Inq. Leg.
192, num. 23. Cited by Louis Cardaillac, Morisques et chrtiens. Un affrontement polmique (14921640)
(Paris 1977) 19. Corrections in square brackets are from Mercedes Garca-Arenal, Moriscos y cristianos. Un
enfrentamiento polmico (14921640) (Madrid 1979) 27.
76
Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Bloomington 1985) 107.
77
Jos Mara Garca Fuentes, ed., La Inquisicin en Granada en el siglo XVI. Fuentes para su estudio
(Granada 1981) 142143, 166.
78
Ibid. 352.
79
Cermica granadina: siglos XVIXX (Granada 2001) 69, 85, 112; Juan Martnez Ruiz, Inventarios de
bienes moriscos del Reino de Granada (Siglo XVI) (Madrid 1972) 46.
80
Digamos que queremos torcer hormigos o hacer alcuzcuz y, si los sabe torcer, ah veremos si es de
nobis. Francisco Delicado, La Lozana Andaluza, ed. Jacques Joset and Folke Gernert (Barcelona 2007) 34.
The particular emphasis on de nobis, marked with the odd shift from Castilian into Latin, is very striking.

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215

being of Muslim, Jewish, or merely Iberian origin, but familiarity with couscous was
undoubtedly understood here as a test of identity.
Late medieval cookbooks and recipes reveal a different aspect of Christian perceptions of and appreciation for Muslim food, with data not only on particular ingredients
but also on culinary techniques. Recipe collections were a new and developing genre in
fourteenth and fifteenth-century Europe, and some early recipe books in Spain and Italy
were translated from Arabic originals, since cooking manuals had existed in the Islamic
world from at least the Abbasid period.81 In some other cases, European collections
merely included recipes adapted from eastern originals, or they required typically Arab
ingredients and culinary methods. Many of these recipes included food items mentioned
by Alfonso de Palencia, such as milk, honey, butter, and fruits, together with other
ingredients (sugar, spices, almonds, and bright colorants, like saffron) that were typically associated with Muslim cuisine in the European mind. Some openly acknowledged Muslim origins for certain recipes, while others, like the Banquete de nobles
caballeros, a Castilian collection composed for Luis Lobera de Avila in 1530, merely
cited traditional culinary and scientific authorities, both classical (including Galen) and
Islamic (such as Avicenna).82
At the same time that preachers and law codes were increasingly urging Christians to
avoid Muslim foods, cookbook authors were writing down recipes with names that
made open reference to Muslim origins. Thus, a Castilian recipe collection (dating
14751525) included instructions for making a Moorish stew (olla morisca), containing
goat, garbanzos, onions, and spices.83 In a few cases, recipes were overtly linked with
Muslims, as in the case of directions in a fifteenth-century cookbook for making a
Saracen Sauce (salsa sarazinesca), which begins When you cook in the Saracen
style..., and ends with the instruction to prepare platters full of the sauce and serve it
to Saracens (et manda tavola de Sarazini). Yet despite this final instruction, and the
stylistic claim, the directions call for the meat to be cooked with pork fat (lardo) so even
if the recipe were based on a Muslim original, it had evidently been adapted for Christian tastes and ingredients.84 A similar Catalan recipe for Saracen-style meat (carn al
sarrenesca), from the early fourteenth-century cookbook, the Libre de Sent Sov, also
called for cooking the meat in salt pork lard (lart de carnsalada).85 In contrast, the
Catalan Libre del coch, which recorded recipes by the fifteenth-century master cook
Robert of Nola (the earliest version was published in Barcelona in 1520), allowed for
81
Translations included the Liber de ferculis et condimentis, translated in Venice ca. 1300 by Jambonino
of Cremona, from the Minhj al-bayn of Ibn Jazla (d. 1100 in Baghdad), and the Tacuinum Sanitatis, translated from the Taqwim al-Sihha of Ibn Butlan (11th c., Syria). On medieval Islamic cooking and cookbooks,
see Medieval Arab Cookery (n. 69 above); Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (n. 69 above);
Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport 2004) 115124; David Waines, Luxury Foods
in Medieval Islamic Societies, World Archaeology 34 (2003) 571580.
82
Luis Lobera de Avila, Banquete de nobles caballeros (Madrid 1952). Among other items, this texts discusses the use of honey, milk, butter, and raisins (chaps. 21, 25, and 48).
83
Manual de mugeres en el qual se contienen muchas y diversas reetas muy buenas, ed. Alicia Martnez
Crespo (Salamanca 1995) 58.
84
This is a Neapolitan recipe, from the period of Aragonese rule in Naples. Terence Scully, The
Neapolitan Recipe Collection. Cuoco Napoletano (Ann Arbor 2000) 68, 194; Martino of Como, The Art of
Cooking. The First Modern Cookbook, ed. Luigi Ballerini (Berkeley-Los Angeles 2005) 134135.
85
Libre de Sent Sov (Receptari de cuina), ed. Rudolf Grewe (Barcelona 1979) 188.

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Muslim dietary requirements. A recipe for eggplants in the Moorish style (albergnies
a la morisca) instructed that eggplants be cooked in good salt pork, or else in oil because
the Moors do not eat salt pork (que los moros no mengen carnsalada). Another recipe
in the same collection, for squash in Moorish style (carabasses a la morisca), recommended simmering the squash in sheep, goat, or almond milk.86
More commonly, recipes repeated Arabic dishes and culinary techniques without
any explicit link with Muslim cuisine. For example, the Libre de Sent Sov included a
recipe for noodles, called alatria, derived from the Arabic word al-itriyya.87 Likewise, a
number of recipes for different varieties of escabeche (in Castilian) or escabeig (in
Catalan), named for a technique of pickling and marinating derived from the Arabic
term sikbj, appear in both the Libre de Sent Sov and Robert of Nolas Libre del coch.88
Many other Arabic terms and techniques are also recorded in late medieval cookbooks.
These have been extensively analyzed by modern scholars, who have shownamong
other thingsthat European versions of Muslim recipes were usually significantly
different from their eastern originals.89
We gain a particularly intriguing insight into early modern Christian perceptions of
Muslim cooking in the bawdy Castilian novel, Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza, written
by Francisco Delicado and published in Venice in 1526.90 This novel is set in early
sixteenth-century Rome, a city with many Spanish inhabitants, and it recounts the tale
of Aldonza, a young woman from Seville, who has recently arrived in Rome and is
working as a prostitute.91 Before coming to Italy, our heroine had had considerable
contact with Muslim culture, both in Spain and abroad. Delicado tells his readers that
after her fathers death, Aldonza had lived for a period in Granada (where her family
86

Mestre Robert, Libre del Coch. Tractat de cuina medieval, ed. Veronika Leimgruber (Barcelona 1977)
5658; Ruperto de Nola, Libro de guisados, ed. Dionisio Prez (Madrid 1929) 77, 79.
87
Libre de Sent Sov (n. 85 above) 182183; Johanna Maria van Winter, Arab Influences on Medieval
European Cuisine, Spices and Comfits. Collected Papers on Medieval Food (Totnes, Devon 2007) 8185;
Melitta Adamson, ed. Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe. A Book of Essays (New York 2002) 127.
88
Libre de Sent Sov (n. 85 above) 205207; Nola, Libro de guisados (n. 86 above) 122, 142; Zaouali,
Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (n. 69 above) 4445; Rafael Chabrn, Medieval Spain, Regional
Cuisines of Medieval Europe (n. 87 above) 132133.
89
Maxime Rodinson, Les influences de la civilisation musulmane sur la civilisation europenne mdivale dans les domains de la consummation et de la distraction: lalimentation, Convegno internazionale
Oriente e Occidente nel Medieoevo: filosofia e scienze (Rome 1971) 479500; Maxime Rodinson,
Mamiyya East and West, Petits propos culinaires 33 (1989) 1525; Toby Peterson, The Arab influence
on western European cooking, Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980) 317340; Freedman, Out of the East (n.
9 above) 2627; Giovanni Rebora, La cucina medievale italiana tra oriente ed occidente, Studi in onore di
Luigi Bulferetti (Genoa 19891990) III.14311578; C. B. Hieatt, How Arabic Traditions Travelled to
England, Food on the Move. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1996 (Totnes,
Devon 1997) 120126; C. Anne Wilson, The Saracen Connection: Arab Cuisine and the Medieval West, Part
I, Petits propos culinaires 7 (1981) 1322.
90
The language of this work is complex, and often reflects spoken dialect. Delicado had lived in Italy for
a number of years, and there are many Italianate expressions, while some characters speech is influenced by
Catalan, Valencian, or Portuguese. Aldonza herself speaks in an Andalusian dialect, including a number of
arabismos, according to Joaqun del Val in his preface to Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza (Madrid 1967) 25.
91
Although presented as a realistic narrative, Manuel de Costa Fontes has argued that much of this
description of Aldonzas former life may also be read allegorically; The Holy Trinity in La Lozana Andaluza, Hispanic Review 62 (1994) 249250. Certainly, Delicado intended his tale to be understood at several
levels, his language is filled with sexual double-meanings, and his apparent plain speaking is in fact highly
artful. In many places, he teases the reader with hints and asides about the identity and heritage of his heroine.

FOOD AND MEANING

217

had apparently owned property), then she traveled to Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the
eastern Mediterranean before coming to Rome to join the large community of expatriate
Spaniards (which included both conversos and moriscos).92
Even before Delicado mentions Aldonzas travels through Muslim lands or her
professional existence in Rome, he describes her early life and skills. We learn that as
well as being beautiful and quick-witted, she is also an excellent cook. Within the first
few paragraphs of the novel, Aldonza tells her aunt in Seville: When my father was
still alive, I cooked stews for him that my whole family loved. When we were prosperous, I was able to get all of the necessary ingredients, unlike now, when poverty forces
one to eat without fancy cooking. Where there were once spices, there is now only
hunger. Immediately, Aldonza goes on to enumerate the many dishes that her grandmother had taught her to prepare when she was a girl, a list that emphasizes
characteristically Muslim dishes such as sweets, vegetables, grains, and other recipes of
Arab origin (including a dish specifically cooked without salt pork). An attentive reader
might well conclude that Aldonzas grandmother was a Muslim, presumably from
Granada.93 She mentions noodles, meat pies, couscous with chickpeas (alcuzcuz con
garbanzos), rice cooked in three different ways, little round meatballs wrapped in green
coriander, breast of mutton, honey, saffron, pancakes, honeyed fritters, cakes filled with
almond paste, toasted hemp seeds and sesame seeds, nougats, fried cakes dipped in
honey, flaky pastries, twisted croquettes fried in olive oil, porridge made with almond
meal and sorghum, turnips cooked with cumin and without salt pork (sin tocino), Murcian cabbage with caraway seeds, stewed eggplants and eggplant casserole, stuffed goat
tripe, giblets, young roasted goat flavored with Ceuta lemons,94 dried fish stew with
bitter greens, marvelous Moorish casseroles (cazuelas moriscas), many fish dishes,
plain jams for the household and fancy jams with honey made from quinces, lavender,
grapes, eggplants, walnuts and walnut flowers, oregano, and mint. Aldonza finally ends
her list with the claim that I put so much fervor into these dishes that my cooking

92
James Amelang discusses the Roman context of La Lozana Andaluza, and the presence of exiled
conversos and moriscos in that city. See Exchanges between Italy and Spain: Culture and Religion, Spain in
Italy. Politics, Society, and Religion 15001700, ed. Thomas Dandelet and John Marino (Leiden 2007) 433
437.
93
Most scholars have identified Aldonza as a conversa (just as Delicado himself is often said to have been
a converso), but I think it more likely that she is intended to be understood as a morisca. In the story, she is still
a reasonably young woman when she arrives in Rome in the 1520s, so her grandmother would have been born
in the later 15th c., well before the edicts of conversion. Her language also contains Arabisms (n. 90 above),
and her family had some connection with Granada, where we are told she went to settle a law suit. Certainly,
her culinary repertoire strongly suggests a Muslim heritage. Joaqun del Val called her recipes a repertorio de
cocina y repostera popular andaluza, con las golosinas que aportaron los rabes; Retrato de la Lozana
andaluza (n. 91 above) 30. See also comments in Manuel Espadas Burgos, Aspectos sociorreligiosos de la
alimentacin Espaola, Hispania. Revista Espaola de Historia 131 (1975) 540545. Many of the things that
Aldonza mentions, such as eggplants or cooking without salt pork, could be equally indicative of Muslim or
Jewish heritage. But others, like couscous, tripe, and Moorish casseroles, were more distinctively Muslim,
though possibly also cooked by Jews. On moriscos and tripe, see David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada (Ithaca 2003) 69; on Jews and couscous, see Ariel Toaff, Manger la juive et manger kasher:
LAlimentation chez les juifs en Italie depuis la Renaissance, Histoire et identits alimentaires en Europe,
ed. Martin Bruegel and Bruno Laurioux (Paris 2002) 185197.
94
This may refer to the style of preserved lemons that are still characteristic of Moroccan cooking.

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

superceded Platina, in his De voluptatibus and Apicius Romanus, in his De re coquinaria.95

What is going on here? Why does Delicado introduce his heroine through her cooking, almost before telling the reader anything else about her? Clearly, this introduction
allows Delicado to establish an obvious parallelism between Aldonzas prowess in the
kitchen and in the bedroom, initiating an ongoing series of jokes and double-entendres
linking sex and food.96 But what were readers intended to understand from this lengthy
list of dishes and from Aldonzas final comparison of herself to Platina and Apicius
Romanus?
Delicado must have written for an audience that was sensitive to the implications of
different kinds of foodin much the same way that Alfonso de Palencia (writing several decades earlier) had assumed that his readers would understand the significance of
the foods eaten by Enrique IV. Both authors listed items associated with Muslim cooking, but Aldonzas grandiose catalogue of dishes is so long and detailed that it becomes
comic, especially in the mouth of a young woman of no social standing: a foreigner, a
prostitute, a syphilitic, and from a non-Christian (possibly Muslim) background. She
finally concludes her list with a comparison to two cookbooks that were much esteemed
in the early sixteenth century as recently published examples of a popular new style of
cooking that traced its origins back to Roman cuisine.
Platina was the pen name of Bartolomeo Sacchi (d. 1481), who worked at the papal
court of Pius II, and wrote an influential book of recipes, De honeste voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health) in the 1460s. This collection (which Delicado cites as De voluptatibus) would become the first printed cookbook in Europe,
published in Rome and Venice in 1475, with numerous later editions and translations.
Platina filled his text with references to classical authors and especially promoted his
recipes as healthful to both body and soul. As he explained in his introduction: I have
written about food in imitation of that excellent man, Cato, of Varro, the most learned of
all, of Columella, of C. Matius, and of Caelius Apicius. I would not encourage my
readers to extravagance, those whom I have always in my writing deterred from vice. I
have written to help any citizen seeking health, moderation and elegance of food rather
than debauchery.97 Despite this claim of Roman heritage, most of Platinas recipes
were drawn from the Libro de arte coquinaria of Martino of Como, a master chef who
worked for the Sforza family in Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century. Although
95
Fideos, empanadillas, alcuzcuz con garbanzos, arroz entero, seco, graso, albondiguillas redondas y
apretadas con culantro verde ... pecho de carnero ... miel ... zafrn ... hojuelas, prestios, rosquillas de
alfajor, textones de caamones y de ajonjol, nugados, xopaipas, hojaldres, hormigos torcidos con aciete,
talvinas, zahnas y nabos sin tocino y con comino, col murciana con alcaravea ... borona ... cazuela de
berenjenas mojes en perficin ... rellenos cuajarejos de cabritos, pepitorias y cabrito apedreado con limn
ceut. Y cazuelas de pescado cecial con oruga, y cazuelas moriscas por maravilla, y de otros pescados que
sera luengo de contar. Letuarios de arrope para en casa, y con miel para presentar, como eran de
membrillos, de cantueso, de uvas, de berenjenas, de nueces y de flor del nogal ... de organo y de hierbabuena
... stas y las otras pona yo tanta hemencia en ellas, que sobrepujaba a Platina, De voluptatibus, y a Apicio
Romano, De re coquinaria. Delicado, Lozana Andaluza (n. 87 above) 1516.
96
On some of the double-meanings in this passage, see the introduction by Claude Allaigre, La Lozana
Andaluza (Madrid 1985) 9394.
97
Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, ed. and trans. Mary Ellen Milham (Tempe 1998) 103.

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219

Martinos work had cited a number of earlier Aragonese and Neapolitan dishes,
including the recipe for Saracen Sauce noted earlier, Platinas collection removed any
overt taint of Muslim cooking. Instead, he claimed a purely Roman culinary legacy, and
implicitly rejected the excesses and vices of medieval cookery and its eastern imports.
The other cookbook that Delicado mentions (as does Platina) was the recipe collection
attributed to Apicius, often called De re coquinaria. This text was associated with the
first-century Roman epicure, Marcus Gavius Apicius, and it certainly contains some
material dating to the late Roman period, and probably earlier, but its actual author and
provenance are obscure. The cookbook was considered an important exemplar of Roman cuisine by the fifteenth century; there are a number of late medieval manuscripts,
and the text was first printed in Milan in 1498, with two Venetian editions shortly
thereafter in 1500 and 1503.98
Delicados citation of these two popular texts provides a capstone, and a somewhat
ambiguous comment, on Aldonzas list of culinary accomplishments. On the one hand,
it may be intended to satirize the pretensions of contemporary Roman cuisine and lifestyle. But on the other, it draws attention to a perception of two very different styles of
cooking: new and old, Italian (Roman) and Iberian, Christian and Muslim, and by extension, fresh and tainted. When Aldonza compares her own cooking to these two modern
recipe books, she draws attention to the contrast between an outdated, unhealthy, and
Arabized style of Andalusian cuisine, and the newer healthful Roman manner of cooking that had recently become popular in humanist circles. Whereas Aldonza, a foreign
prostitute with syphilis and non-Christian origins, now cooked only for the low-life of
the Roman slums, Platinas elegant recipes were popular in the kitchens of the most elite
Italian families. Readers would have immediately understood the satirical significance
of Aldonzas claim to have superceded (sobrepujaba) Platina and Apicius. But even if
her older style of cooking might still hold a certain seductive attraction, good and
health-conscious Christians ought to resist the allure of this suspect cuisinejust as
they should beware the diseased dangers of Aldonzas sexual offerings.99
The import of Alfonso de Palencias critique of Enrique IV worked in a similar way,
implying not only non-Christian associations but also sinful, dangerous, and unsuitable
indulgence. The king ate Muslim dishes with shameless and avid enjoyment, and
Palencia went on to suggest that this led Enrique into further secret and indecent excesses.100 Both Delicado and Palencia designed their narratives with an assumption that
their audiences would immediately comprehend the close connections between culinary
overindulgence, sinful gluttony, and sexual debauchery. Both, likewise, reflected Christian moralism and a humanist rejection of the medieval past. Palencia, like Delicado and
Platina, could draw a clear comparison between past and present, creating a memory of
Enriques sordid past while promulgating a contrasting image of morality and good
Christian behavior at the court of his patrons, Fernando and Isabel.

98

Apicius. A Critical Edition with an Introduction and an English Translation of the Latin Recipe Text
Apicius, ed. Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger (Totnes, Devon 2006) 1322, 116123.
99
The connections linking sin, disease, and contagion with Muslims and Jews were already well established in 15th-c. Spain. See Stearns, Infectious Ideas (n. 41 above) 545.
100
Fuchs, Exotic Nation (n. 2 above) 1819.

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These associations between food, excess, sin, sexuality, and a Muslim lifestyle were
not new in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and this made it all the easier to
develop these connections further in early modern narratives. Not surprisingly, rich and
rare foodstuffs were frequently associated not only with Islam but also with the sin of
gluttony and other vices. Just as Christian authors associated the Islamic Paradise with
milk, honey, and virgins, so too medieval and early modern European descriptions of
the Prophet Muhammad commonly linked him with both lasciviousness and gluttony.101
Likewise, the long list of foods in the section on gluttony (gula) in the Corbacho, written by Alfonso Martnez de Toledo, the archipreste de Talavera, in 1438, has been
compared to the culinary catalogue in La Lozana Andaluza.102 Although in some ways
very different (for one thing, the Corbacho list mentions both wine and salt pork), it
does include many items of Arab origin, such as southern fruits, exotic spices, and
richly-sugared deserts.
Visual images and written descriptions of Muslims eating demonstrate similar patterns of association shared by late medieval Christian artists, authors, and audiences. A
fourteenth-century Genoese illustration of gluttony, in a treatise on the seven deadly
sins, is especially interesting in this regard. Probably painted around 1375, this image
shows three diners seated cross-legged on the floor, with dishes of food and small dogs
in front of them, eating while listening to musicians (fig. 1). The central figure, flanked
by two attendants, sits slightly raised on a dais, and his face and clothing have an eastern, even possibly Mongol, appearance. This aspect has led several scholars to suggest
that the image may have been copied from an Arabic or Persian manuscript, and there
are certainly some noteworthy similarities between this scene and depictions of banquets in thirteenth-century Maqamat manuscripts (mainly from Iraq) (fig. 2).103 Given
the Genoese provenance, and the close contacts between Genoa, Spain, and the Islamic
World, it is not impossible that the artist had seen or heard of illustrations in eastern
manuscripts, or was familiar with descriptions of Muslim table habits.
However, this picture of gluttony cannot simply be a copy of an Islamic image. If
nothing else, its explicit allegorical intention, as a depiction of gluttony, indicates that
one must look more closely. Several features clearly identify this tableau as a Christian
imaginary vision of Islamic eating, and they show the same complex patterns of duality
and opposites (luxurious but uncivilized; attractive while repulsive, delicious for the
body yet deadly for the soul) that marked broader Christian thinking about Muslims and
Muslim food. On the one hand, this image strikes the viewer with the immediacy of its
beauty and colorful gilded sumptuousness. On the other, it has a darker side in keeping
with the its being a depiction of sin. For instance, while one of the dishes of food shows
chickens or other cooked fowl (actually, a common feature in Maqamat illustrations of
dining), the other appears to be the picked-clean skull of a goat or sheep, stabbed
101

Tolan, Sons of Ishmael (n. 62 above) 3545; Akbari, Idols in the East (n. 12 above) 257258; Miguel
ngel de Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes y del norte de Africa en la Espaa de los siglos xvi y
xvii. Los caracteres de una hostilidad (Madrid 1989) 255.
102
Monique Joly, A propsito del tema culinario en La Lozana Andaluza, Journal of Hispanic Philology
13.1 (1988) 127128.
103
British Library Add 27695, fol. 13. Jonathan Riley-Smith cites this as the earliest known European
copy of a Persian painting; The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford 1997) 253.

FOOD AND MEANING

221

through the eye with a long curved knife.104 Perhaps, by implication, the diners are
equally blinded by their own sinful indulgence.
Further, the small white greyhound-like dogs are unlikely to have appeared at a real
Muslim feast, or in pictures of such, although dogs of this type are ubiquitous in late
medieval European images of feasting. But the dogs at this particular feast are not just
straightforward artistic tropes. They may parody images of Christian feasts, but they
also become part of the allegory and provide a comment on both gluttony and Muslim
food ways. The animals themselves seem to be participants in the indulgence, noise, and
unbridled behavior depicted in the scene; they are shown as begging, chewing on bones,
barking, snarling, and howling along with the musicians.
The artist was drawing on commonand disparagingmedieval Christian associations linking Muslims, dogs, and food.105 It is not hard to find references of this sort,
implying a connection between Muslim food ways (especially sitting on the floor) and
bestial, gluttonous, or uncivilized behavior. These ideas were supported in Christian
thinking by New Testament passages in which Jesus compared Gentiles to dogs eating
crumbs off the floor under the table.106 In the late thirteenth century, Sancho IV had
described the delicious and sensual delights of Muslim paradise, followed by the opinion that Muslims are nothing but dogs.107 We find similar sentiments expressed in
pilgrim narratives, as in 1384 (thus roughly contemporary with the Genoese illustration
of gluttony), when the Florentine pilgrim, Leonardo Frescobaldi, visited Damascus and
described how local people set themselves to eat ... on the ground, and they place the
food in a bowl in the center, and they sit around on the ground with legs crossed or
squatting. And when they have soiled their mouths, they lick their lips with their
tongues like the dogs that they are.108 Another pilgrim, Symon Semeonis, traveled to
Egypt in the 1320s, and made similar observations. He wrote that the Muslim sultan
always eats brutishly on the ground ... and in his dining room there is no table or chair
or cloth or napkin, but instead of a dinner table they place a round tray, worked with
silver and gold decorations, raised slightly above the ground, upon which they place
food in large ceramic bowls in front of the diners. Banishing all forms of decency, they
eat from these like dogs.109

104

Curved scimitars were characteristic elements in European visual depictions of Muslim figures.
There is extensive data, beyond food-related evidence noted here, linking Muslims with dogs in medieval Christian thought. See, for example, Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making
Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton 2003) 223224. Also, for early modern Spain, Coleman, Creating
Christian Granada (n. 93 above) 67.
106
Matthew 15.2627; Mark 7.2728.
107
Castigos e documentos (n. 60 above) 132.
108
Leonardo Frescobaldi, Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384, trans.
Theophilus Bellorini (Jerusalem 1948) 49; Nel nome di Dio facemmo vela: viaggio in Oriente di un pellegrino
medievale, ed. G. Bartolini (Rome 1991) 145.
109
Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis Ab Hybernia Ad Terram Sanctam, ed. and trans. Mario Esposito (Dublin
1960) 7981. The translation is mine. It is worth noting that the image of barbaric eating habits (eating from a
common bowl, using hands rather than spoons to scoop food) and the consequent comparison with dogs was
not unique to descriptions of Muslims. It is also found in the description of the Navarese in the Codex Calixtinus, Book 5. See The Pilgrims Guide: A Critical Edition, ed. Annie Shaver and Paula Gerson (London 1998)
29.
105

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SITTING ON THE FLOOR TO EAT

The force of these associations between sin, indecency, bestial behavior, and eating
while seated on the floor provides further insight and context for Alfonso de Palencias
final criticism of Enriques food habits, namely, that the king sat on the floor in the
Moorish fashion while he ate. There is little reason to doubt that the king actually did
eat in this fashion, since this style of dining was probably not uncommon in Castile,
even among Christians, into the fifteenth century. Palencia was not alone in his observation of Enriques habits, since an account written by a companion of the Bohemian
ambassador, Leo of Rozmital, who traveled to Castile in the 1460s, also claimed that
Enrique ate in the heathen manner and that he and his queen sat side by side on the
ground to receive their guests.110 The same author noted that another Castilian aristocrat, a count in Burgos, likewise followed heathen custom ... both in eating and drinking.111 Earlier, in the fourteenth century, the Catalan author Francesc Eiximenis had
also disparagingly associated this habit with Castile, claiming that while Catalans are
accustomed to eat seated at a raised table, Castilians sit on the ground.112
Sitting on the ground apparently remained common among Castilian aristocratic
women into the early modern period, despite the fact that by then the practice was
strongly associated with Muslims and no longer acceptable for Christian men.113 When
Pedro Mrtir de Anglera visited Egypt in 1501, as an ambassador from Fernando and
Isabel, he reported that the Mamluk Sultan sat on a dais with his feet folded under him,
as if on a chair, in the manner of our women (nostrarum feminarum more). It is the
custom among all the Muslim people to sit this way, and to eat on the ground, with their
heads bent low, like brutish animals (veluti animalia bruta).114 Although dogs were not
specifically mentioned, the association with uncivilized beasts is explicit. Thus, returning to Palencias insinuations, Enrique not only ate and sat like a Muslim, he also acted
like a brute animaland like a woman. This accusation would surely have bolstered (or
been bolstered by) other existing suspicions about the kings morality and sexuality.115
Although some Castilians, both men and women, may have preferred to eat while
seated on the floor, using a low table or raised tray for their food, there is overwhelming
evidence that this was not seen as normal Christian practice. Most medieval European
Christians, whether in Spain or elsewhere, sat on chairs at raised tables when they ate.
This is abundantly clear in Iberian artistic and written sources, which depict Christian
diners seated at tables, usually draped with a table cloth, and describe meals taken at
tables.116 Notably, illustrations in late medieval Jewish haggadah manuscripts likewise
110
The Travels of Leo of Rozmital through Germany, Flanders, England, France, Spain, Portugal, and
Italy, 14651467, trans. Malcolm Letts (Cambridge 1957) 9192.
111
Travels of Leo of Rozmital (n. 110 above) 81.
112
Eiximenis, Com usar b de beure e menjar (n. 73 above) 90.
113
Fuchs, Exotic Nation (n. 2 above) 1415. Fuchs recounts the story of an audience between Mary Tudor
and the duchess of Alba, in 1554, where both ladies began by sitting on the floor (120122).
114
Pedro Mrtir de Anglera, Una embajada de los Reyes Catlicos a Egipto (n. 13 above) 99100.
115
Phillips, Enrique IV (n. 2 above) 910, 9095. Susan Conklin Akbari notes European associations between Muslims and effeminate behavior in the early modern period; Akbari, Idols in the East (n. 12 above)
284.
116
The 13th-c. Castilian collection of illustrated songs, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, includes numerous
images of tables and people seated at them, as do many other late medieval Christian paintings and manuscript

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223

depict meals served on tables, which suggests that dining while seated on the floor was
especially associated with Islam.117
By the sixteenth century, this distinction had become explicit. One chronicler reported that Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada, had the habit of
inviting recently-converted Granadan nobles to dinner in order to teach them new ways
(tellingly, the chronicler uses the term domesticarles) and to instill a love of Christian
customs (costumbres Christianas) such as sitting in chairs and eating according to our
manners.118 In parallel, a list of prohibited Muslim superstitions and rites promulgated by the Synod of Guadix in 1554, began with the requirement that new Christians
must not eat en ataiforin other words, they must not sit on the ground around a
slightly raised tray of food (ayfr).119
But earlier medieval Iberian chronicles and other written materials also routinely
mentioned tables when they described a Christian meal. For instance, at the wedding of
King Joo of Portugal in 1387, when the king and his new queen arrived at the palace
where they were to eat, the tables were already laid out with everything necessary (as
mesas estauom ja muyto guarnidas de todo); and not only the table at which the
newly-wedded couple were to sit, but also the tables reserved for the bishops and other
persons of rank.120 Equally, when Blanca of Navarre came to Castile in 1440 to marry
Prince Enrique (later Enrique IV), she stopped in Briviesca, where a meal was prepared, supplied with such a selection of poultry, meats, fish, delicacies, and fruits that it
was a marvelous thing to see. The tables (mesas) and preparations were placed in a
manner that was suited to such great ladies.121 Evidently, delicious foods were perfectly legitimate for Christian celebratory fare so long as they were eaten in proper
fashion, seated at table.122 The account books of Gonzalo de Baeza, treasurer to Queen

illuminations. See Gonzalo Menndez Pidal, La Espaa del siglo XIII leida en imagenes (Madrid 1986) 125
127. See also Ars Hispaniae: historia universal del arte hispnico, vol. 18, Miniatura (Madrid 1962) 126,
152; Monique Closson, Us et coutumes de la table du XIIe sicle au XVe sicle a travers les miniatures,
Actes du Colloque de Nice (1517 octobre 1982) II. Cuisine, manires de table, rgimes alimentaires (Nice
1984) 2132.
117
For example, the Passover scene from the Barcelona Haggadah (c. 1350). British Library, MS Add.
14761, fol. 28v. The fact that eating on the floor was not normal for Jews is also signaled by Inquisition
records, which cite the Jewish practice of eating on the floor or at low tables specifically as part of funeral
rituals. See Haim Beinart, Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem 1974
1985) I.158, 160, 175, 308, 309, 312, 456, 545, 598; II.63; III.685, 691; Rene Levine Melammed,
Crypto-Jewish Women Facing the Spanish Inquisition: Transmitting Religious Practices, Beliefs, and
Attitudes, Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Mark Meyerson and
Edward English (Notre Dame 1999) 212 n.12; Rene Levine Melammed, Death and Mourning Customs of
Conversas, Exile and Diaspora. Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim
Beinart (Jerusalem 1991) 160161.
118
Francisco Bermudez de Pedraza, Historia eclesiastica principios y progressos de la ciudad y religion
catlica de Granada (Granada 1639) 187r.
119
Snodo de la Dicesis de Guadix y de Baza, edicin facsmil, ed. Carlos Asenjo Sedano (Granada 1994)
Appendix to Title VIII, fol. 90v.
120
Ferno Lopez, The English in Portugal, 13671387, trans. Derek Lomax and R.J. Oakley (Warminster
1988) 232233.
121
Fernn Prez de Guzmn, Crnica de Juan II, Crnicas de los reyes de Castilla II, Biblioteca de
Autores Espaoles 68 (Madrid 1875) 565.
122
On Christian food, eating habits, and table manners, see A. H. de Oliveira Marques, Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages (Madison 1971) 1635.

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OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE

Isabel, also record costs for items such as knives, silver dishes, and tablecloths for the
royal table (para la mesa).123
The idea of eating without a table or a tablecloth was seen as so distasteful that it
became a trope of self-denial in Castilian literature, along with other oaths of abstinence
such as refusing to cut ones beard or hair, or to put on clean clothes. Romance poetry
features Christian heroes vowing not to eat with a table cloth or to sit at a table (de no
comer a manteles, ni a la mesa me asentar) until some desired goal is achieved.124 We
find a similar thing in an account of the visit of the Byzantine empress, Marie de
Brienne, to the thirteenth-century court of Alfonso X of Castile. Although Alfonso and
his queen received the empress in Burgos, and invited her to seat herself at the table to
eat (se posase a la mesa a comer), Marie refused to sit at a table, or to eat with a
tablecloth (nunca comera en manteles), until Alfonso had promised to help pay the
ransom for her husband, who was being held captive by an unnamed Muslim sultan.125
In reality, it was Maries son, not her husband, who was held captive, and by Venetians
rather than Muslims, so it is noteworthy that the Castilian chronicler chose to change the
story.126 By shifting to a tale of imprisonment in Muslim hands, for an Iberian audience,
Maries vow becomes an act of solidarity with her suffering husbandwho presumably
would have been eating on the floor in a Muslim manner while in captivity. At the same
time, her refusal to eat at a table was seen as sufficiently inappropriate and humiliating
that (we are told) Alfonso quickly ceded to her pressure and donated fifty quintals of
silver towards the required ransom.
In contrast with Christian practice, medieval Muslims normally ate without a table,
using fingers to grasp food, while seated on the ground with bowls or trays of food,
sometimes on low tables, set in front of them. Arabic texts and manuscript illustrations
(such as fig. 2) leave no doubt about this custom throughout the Near East, North Africa, and al-Andalus.127 Likewise, Christian pilgrim accounts frequently observed this
habit in Egypt and Syria, as those noted above, or as when Arnold von Harff wrote in the
1490s that the local people sat kneeling or cross-legged on carpets, like tailors do with
us, and eat and drink.128 Another German pilgrim, Felix Fabri, who traveled a decade
earlier, described a meal in Jerusalem, and how in those lands it is not the custom to sit

123

Cuentas de Gonzalo de Baeza (n. 7 above) I.23, 72, 433, and elsewhere.
Emilio Garca Gmez, No comer pan a manteles ... ni con la condesa holgar, Al-Andalus 32.1 (1967)
211215.
125
Crnica de Alfonso X, ed. Manuel Gonzlez Jimnez (Murcia 1998) 47.
126
On this incident, see Joseph OCallaghan, The Learned King. The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile
(Philadelphia 1993) 204205.
127
Medieval Arabic sources often refer to a ayfr or mida (table). But latter term does not usually mean
a table in the modern western sense. Instead, it could be a flat or slightly raised piece of cloth or metal which
diners sat around, and on which food was placed. See E.W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon VII (London 1885)
2746; and M. M. Ahsan, Social Life under the Abbasids (London 1979) 157164. This is probably the sense of
the word in Ibn Bassams description of a feast at the 11th-c. Taifa court of al-Mamn in Toledo; Ibn Bassam,
Dhakhrah f mahsin ahl al-jazrah, ed. Ihsn Abbs (Beirut 1997) VII.131. On Arabic table manners, see
Paulina Lewicka, When a shared meal is formalized. Observations on Arabic table manners manuals of the
Middle Ages, Studia Arabistyczne i Islamistyczne 11 (2003) 100, 105; Karl Stowasser, Manners and Customs at the Mamluk Court, Muqarnas 2 (1984) 18; Amalia Levanoni, Food and Cooking during the Mamluk Era: Social and Political Implications, Mamluk Studies Review 9 (2005) 219220.
128
Arnold von Harff, The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, trans. Malcolm Letts (London 1946) 112.
124

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225

on benches, or upon stools or chairs, but all recline on the ground; and if they be rich and
great men, carpets are laid down for them.129 Erhard Reuwich, an artist who journeyed
at the same time as Felix Fabri, later published a wood cut showing Syrians eating
together while seated on the ground (fig. 3).
Late medieval and early modern Spanish chroniclers and travelers to Egypt and
North Africa, like Pedro Mrtir de Anglera (cited above), had also remarked on Muslims eating with their hands while seated on the ground, and frequently associated these
food habits with greed, lack of hygiene, and barbarism.130 The associations between
eating with ones fingers, gluttony, uncleanliness, bad manners, and bestial behavior
had a long history in Castilian thinking, going back at least to the thirteenth century. The
Siete Partidas particularly recommended that diners should wipe their fingers on
towels and nothing else; for they should not wipe them on their clothes, like some people do who do not know anything about cleanliness or politeness.131 Later, the chronicler Luis de Mrmol Carvajal (born in Granada in 1520), noted that Muslims always
eat while seated on the ground, both men and women, and their law forbids spoons and
only allows them to eat with their right hand, after which they lick their fingers or wipe
them on their sleeves because they have neither table cloths or napkins.132 Another
sixteenth-century observer, Diego de Torres, remarked that they eat all kinds of food
with their hands, even things that need a spoon, and in place of a table and cloth, the
floor is covered with a mat or piece of leather that they call a Taifor. Instead of napkins,
they use their tongues to lick their fingers, which is the dirtiest thing in the world.133
The emphasis on licking is noteworthy in these accounts, recalling not only Christian
associations of Muslim food habits with dogs but also late medieval linkages of licking
with both gluttony and lust.134
In many cases, these table habits were particularly linked with eating couscous, leading early modern Christians to view the consumption of this foodstuff with special
distaste. Before describing the table manners of Muslims, Mrmol Carvajal noted that
couscous (alcuzcuu) was their most common food.135 San Juan del Puerto, writing in
1708, reported how meals in Morocco invariably began with a plate of couscous
(alcuzcuz), which diners ate with their hands, keeping their arms bare so that they could
129
Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem ed. Konrad Dieterich
Hassler (Stuttgart 18431849) II.114; The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London 1893)
II.112.
130
Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes (n. 101 above) 255260.
131
In the Siete Partidas, there are also instructions that one should eat neatly with ones fingers, not taking
too much food at once, lest the eaters show themselves to be gluttons, which is characteristic of beasts. It
went on to stress the importance of washing the hands both before and after eating. Partida II, Title VII, Law
V; Siete Partidas (1807) 47; Eng. trans. 303.
132
Quando an de comer se assientan todos en el suelo, assi hombres como mugeres, y puesto en medio el
librillo, cada uno mete la mano por su parte, y tienen por gran peccado comer con la mano yzquierda...No les
permite su ley que coman con cucharas, sino con la mano derecha. Y des que han comido se lamen los dedos
y friegen las manos una con otra y en los braos, y desta manera se limpian, porque no acostumbran manteles
ni paizuelos ...; Luis de Mrmol Carvajal, Descripcion general de Africa (Granada 1573) III.4v.
133
Comen con la mano todo gnero de comidas, aunque tengan necessidad de cuchara, la mesa y los manteles es el suelo con una estera o cuero que llaman Taifor. Los pauelos son las lenguas con que lamen las
manos, que es la mas suzia cosa del mundo. Diego de Torres, Relacin del origen y suceso de los xarifes y del
estado de los reinos de Marruecos, Fez, y Tarudante, ed. Mercedes Garca-Arenal (Madrid 1980) 207.
134
William Ian Miller, Gluttony, Representations 60 (1997) 95.
135
Mrmol Carvajal, Descripcion general de Africa (n. 132 above) III.4v

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dip up to the elbow in the deep serving dishes. After the meal, they did not wash their
hands, but licked their arms instead. The king of Morocco, rather than using a napkin,
wiped his hands in the hair of two black serving boys, saying: these napkins are better,
because they are more valuable and more durable than those used by Christian
kings.136 This comparative assessment is striking, although it is obvious that the
Christian author included the quotation in order to make a point about Christian rather
than Muslim superiority. As with earlier comparisons of Christian and Muslim table
manners, it was focused on the particular issues of sitting on the floor, using hands to
eat, and the lack of availability of napkins and utensils.
We have another description and comparison of western Muslim eating habits in the
account written in 1526 by Yuhanna al-Asad, better known as Leo Africanus, a converted Muslim living in Rome. Leo (originally named asan al-Wazzn) had been born
in Granada in about 1490, and his family emigrated to North Africa after their citys
conquest by Fernando and Isabel in 1492. Later, Leo was captured by pirates and
brought to Rome in 1520, where he became a protg of Pope Leo X. His book, the
Cosmografia, written in Italian in 1526, described the geography and people of his
native land for a Christian audience in Rome. This work was later published in Venice,
in the 1550s, in a collection edited by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. For centuries, it was
assumed that Ramusios edition was a faithful rendering of Leos original, until the
1526 version was discovered and it became clear that Ramusios text was more of a
paraphrase than an edition. Particularly important is that at numerous points Ramusio
shifted the emphasis and added an extra pro-Christian spin to Leos original wording.
This is certainly true for the brief section in which Leo describes Muslim food and
table manners in Feza passage which has been made famous by its mention of couscous. Already in Leos original text, the comparative aspect is striking, presumably
because he was writing as a recent convert and for an audience of Christian Italian and
probably Spanish readers who would already have been familiar with couscous as a
distinctively Muslim dish. Keep in mind that Francisco Delicado mentioned couscous
as an identity test for Alzonza, another new Christian with connections to Granada, at
almost exactly the same time, also in Rome.
More noteworthy than his mention of couscous, however, is Leo Africanus careful
description of how Muslims ate this dish, sharing a common bowl and seated on the
ground, and his explicit comparison between Christian and Muslim manners. Leo states
that in comparison to men in Europe, the life of those in Africa seems lowly and mean,
not for a lack of material things, but because of the lack of orderliness in their habits and
because they eat on the ground at low tables without any cloth or napkins for their
hands. When they eat couscous or any other food, they eat it all together in one dish, and
they eat with their hands without using a spoon ... Although educated men and nobles
live more politely, an Italian gentleman lives more politely than anybody in Africa.137
136
El Rey en lugar de servilletas, se suele limpiar en las cabezas de dos Negrillos, diziendo: Que
aquellas servilletas son mejores, porque valen mas, y no se rompen, que las que usan los Reyes Christianos.
Francisco Jess Mara de San Juan del Puerto, Mission historial de Marruecos (Seville 1708) 51.
137
In comparatione de li signori de la Europa pare quella vita de Affrica cosa vile & misera non per la
parvita de la Robba ma per lo desordine in li coustumi per che magnano in terra sopra certe tavole basse

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227

In Ramusios paraphrased text, the negative comparison between African and European table manners becomes much more pronounced. In the parallel passage, he writes:
in comparison to the usual way of living among the nobles of Europe, life among the
Africans is truly mean and lowly, not for lack of the means to live, but because of the
rough and disorderly habits that they follow while eating. They eat on the ground at low
tables without any table cloth or napkin of any sort, and they use no utensils except their
hands. When they eat couscous, all of the guests serve themselves from one dish and
they eat without a spoon ... In conclusion, the most lowly gentleman in Italy lives more
sumptuously than the greatest man in Africa.138
Both versions mention the same basic facts, that people in Fez eat couscous using
their hands, while seated on the ground at low tables, without cloths or napkins, and
helping themselves from a common platter. But in Ramusios redaction, these habits
become truly mean and lowly, and they are rough as well as disorderly. And while Leo
concludes that an Italian gentleman lives more politely than anybody in Africa, Ramusio intensifies the negative comparison by stating that the most lowly gentleman in
Italy lives more sumptuously than the greatest man in Africa. Here, differences in table
manners become a frame for broader comparative judgments about levels of civility
between Christians and Muslims in the early modern world.
Ramusio was not the only Christian to think in these terms, for contemporary Iberian
authors would use almost identical language to make comparative judgments about
Christian and Muslim lifestyles and food ways. In the 1570s, Antonio de Sosa wrote a
description of life in Algiers, observed while he was held captive in that city. Later
published by Diego de Haedo in 1612, Sosas text included the remark that the staple
food, common to all [people in the city], whether noble, rich, or poor, is couscous, with
some meat or fruit cooked in a sauce ... or a bit of meat cooked with chickpeas and
squash ... So that for the most part, the most miserable shoemaker or tailor in Christendom treats himself better than the richest Moor or Turk in Algiers.139
By the time that Leo Africanus had composed his text in the early sixteenth century,
the image of eating on the ground, sharing from a common bowl, using ones hands to
senza tovaglie & nisuno hanno sarvietta in mano & quando magnano el cuscusu o qualche vivanda lo magnano in siema in un Piatto & magnano con le mano senza cochiaro ... [165v] ... Ma li Doctori & li homini de
qualita vivono piu politamente. Ma uno gentilhomo Italiano vive piu politamente che nisuno signore de
Affrica. asan al-Wazzn (Leo Africanus), Libro de la Cosmogrophia et Geographia de Affrica, V.E. MS
953, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, fol.165rv. My thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis, who very kindly
provided copies of the relevant pages from the 1526 manuscript.
138
... a comparatione del vivere che usa fra nobili nella Europa, il viver de gli Africani veramente misero
& vile, non per la poca quantita della vivande: ma per lo costume rozzo & disordinato che essi tregono nel
mangiare. Il quale in terra sopra certe tavole basse senza mantile o drappo di niuna sorte, & non si adopera
altro strumento che le mani. & quando mangiano il cuscusu, tutti I convitati si servono dun piatto solo, & lo
mangiano senza cucchiaio...Ma per conchiudere, il piu vil gentilhuomo dItalia vive piu suntuosamente
cheil maggior signor dAfrica. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Primo volume, & seconda editione delle
Navigationi et viaggi (Venice 1554) 40v41r.
139
La comida general y ordinario de todos, grandes, ricos, y pobres es cuscusi, con alguna fruta o alguna
carne en adobo medio cocida...o una poca de carne cocida con garbanzos y calabaza ... Demanera que por la
mayor parte, el ms triste zapatero o sastre en la cristianidad se trata mejor que el moro y turco ms rico de
Argel. Diego de Haedo, Topografa e historia general de Argel (Madrid 19271929) I.141. On Antonio de
Sosa, see Mara Antonia Garcs, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captives Tale (Nashville 2002) 6970; and An
Early Modern Dialogue with Islam. Antonio de Sosas Topography of Algiers (1612), ed. Mara Antonia
Garcs (Notre Dame 2011).

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transport food, eschewing table cloths and napkins, and enjoying couscous were all
already well-established negative tropes of Muslim identity in Spain. Contemporary
Inquisitorial attention further solidified a perceived relationship between particular
foods, table manners, and improperly-Christian behavior. Although some culinary
accusations against moriscos were similar to those leveled at conversosfor instance,
that they avoided pork products and cooked with olive oilthe inquisitorial interest in
consuming couscous, sitting on the ground, eating with ones hands, following all
rituals, observing Ramadan, and avoiding alcohol were all aimed at identifying residual
practices specifically associated with Islam.140 We have already noted the accusation
against Jernima la Franca who sat with her relatives, together with other morisca
women, squatting around a tray on which they served couscous.141 In Toledo, another
morisco, Juan de Flores, was condemned on the evidence that he ordinarily did not sit
in a chair, nor did he eat at a table, according to the custom and ceremony of the said sect
of Muhammad.142 Yet another group of moriscos in Arcos confessed to eating in the
house of Beatriz de Padilla, reclining on the floor, without tables, as is the custom of
the Moors.143
Muslims were expelled from Spain in the early sixteenth century, and a century later,
all Muslim converts were also required to leave the Peninsula. Early seventeenth-century treatises on the moriscos catalogued the ways in which their dress,
customs, habits, and foods (trage, costumbres, usos, y comidas) had made it impossible to assimilate these people within Christian Spanish society.144 In 1612, the Aragonese priest, Pedro Aznar de Cardona, wrote a lengthy treatise justifying the expulsion of
the moriscos which included a section on their iniquitous food ways. These observations drew on many earlier themes, yet now with a new rationale. According to Aznar de
Cardona, moriscos are brutish at their meals (eran brutos en sus comidas), always
eating on the ground (as is suited to their station) without a table...they eat vile things
(for they are already suffering in this life according to the judgment of heaven) such as
potages made from various grains,145 vegetables, lentils, sorghum, broad beans, millet,
and bread made of the same. Along with this bread, those that are able [to afford it] eat
raisins, figs, honey, syrup, milk, and seasonal fruits such as melons, although these are

140

Garca-Arenal, Inquisicin y moriscos (n. 33 above) 131140; Deborah Root, Speaking Christian:
Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Representations 23 (1988) 118134; Mara Jos
Marn, La alimentacin mudjar en Aragn, VII Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo (Teruel 1999)
143154.
141
Cardaillac, Morisques et chrtiens (n. 75 above) 19; Garca Arenal, Moriscos y cristianos (n. 75 above)
27.
142
Ordinariamente no se sentava en silla ni coma de mesa, por guarda y cerimonia de la dicha secta de
Mahoma. A.H.N., Inq. Leg. 192, num. 22. Cardaillac, Morisques et chrtiens (n. 75 above) 19. Less explicitly,
another record, from 1487, cites a witness who claimed that the accused prayed like a Muslim and observed
Ramadan, as well as eating Muslim food in the manner of Muslims at the table of Muslims (comer de las
viandas de moros como moro a la mesa de los moros). Cited in Mara Luisa Ledesma, Vidas mudjares
(aspectos sociales de una minora religiosa en Aragn) (Zaragoza 1994) 91.
143
Garca-Arenal, Inquisicin y moriscos (n. 75 above) 73.
144
Pedro de Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de Espaa (Manuscrito del siglo VII), ed. Joaqun
Gil Sanjun (Mlaga 1997) 76, 78.
145
Although Aznar de Cardona does not mention couscous, he may be thinking here of the stews traditionally served with couscous.

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229

green and no bigger than a fist, cucumbers, peaches, and whatever else... and only
water, because they drink no wine, and they do not buy meat ... or eat it, unless they
have killed it according to the rite of Muhammad.146
Cardonas words sound strikingly familiar. They not only note Quranic dietary
requirements, but they also summarize the catalogue of foods and food-ways that Christians had increasingly associated with Muslim life in the period from the fourteenth
through the sixteenth century. Not only their brutish habits (recall Pedro Mrtir de
Angleras report that it is the custom among all the Muslim people to sit this way, and
to eat on the ground, with their heads bent low, like brutish animals), but also the
specific items eaten (such as the figs, raisins, milk, and honey that Enrique IV enjoyed
while sitting on the ground in the Muslim fashion). By the early seventeenth century,
these food ways were no longer merely frowned upon, but they had become evidencein early-modern Christian eyesof the complete incompatibility between
Christians and Muslims, and part of a justification for the morisco expulsion from
Spain.
CONCLUSION
Close analysis of Christian perceptions of Muslim foods and food ways goes a long way
towards unpacking the layers of meaning in Alfonso de Palencias invective against
Enrique IV. However, the rationale and significance of Palencias text only emerge
through setting his critique within a broader context of late medieval politics, Christian
views of Islam, the growing interest in combating heresy, and the rise of humanist
thought. Palencias negatively charged description of the kings eating habits represents
just one among many contemporary signals of a slow change in the orientation of Christian-Muslim relations in the later medieval and early modern period. Shifting Christian
Spanish attitudes towards Muslim food and food ways mirrored broader changes in
thinking about Islam, and reflected growing intolerance in the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
When and why did these changes take place? It is worth recalling the words of the
Count of Tendilla in 1514 (noted above), who had perceived striking social changes
taking place in the second half of the fourteenth century, in the wake of the violent death
of Pedro I in 1369 (and the coming of king Enrique the Bastard). Certainly this fraternal civil war brought chaos and political changes in Spain, and resulted in the rise of the
Trastmara dynasty (the family line of both Fernando and Isabel). However, this period
also saw other important events that probably had an even greater impact on perceptions
of cultural Islam than those cited by the Count of Tendilla. The arrival of plague in the
146
Eran brutos en sus comidas, comiendo siempre en tierra (como quienes eran) sin mesa ... Comian cosas vilas (que hasta en esto han padecido en esta vida por juyzio del cielo) como son fresas de diversas
harinas de legumbres lentejas, panizo habas, mijo, y pan de lo mismo. Con este pan, los que podian, juntaban,
pasas, higos, miel, arrope, leche, y frutas a su tiempo como melones, aunque fuesen verdes o no mayores que
un puo, pepinos, duraznos, y ortras cualesquiera ... y de agua sola, porque ni bebian vino ni compravan
carne...ni las comian, sino que ellos las matassen segun el rito de su Mahoma. Aznar Cardona, Expulsion
iustificada de los moriscos (n. 67 above) 33rv. Cardona also comments on avoiding salt pork (tocino) (34r).
This passage is also translated by Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 15001614 (n. 44 above) 413416. On Cardonas views of moriscos, see Julio Caro Baroja, Los moriscos aragoneses segun un autor de comienzos del
siglo XVII, Razas, Pueblos, y Linajes (Madrid 1957) 8198.

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middle of the fourteenth century, and its devastating reoccurrences over the next three
hundred years, created strong new anxieties about health, diet, disease, contact with
strangers, contamination, and mans relationship with God.147 Plague also brought
economic changes and population decline, followed by social unrest. By the end of the
fourteenth century, these stresses and anxieties are thought to have contributed to the
increasing persecution of non-Christians in Spain, most notably expressed in the wave
of anti-Jewish pogroms in the summer of 1391. This was the same period in which we
see increasing legal and religious prohibitions against the sharing of food between
Christians, Muslims, and Jews, whether at social gatherings or in the market place. As
Christians became more worried about their health, both physical and spiritual,
interreligious contact and possible contamination became an increasingly hazardous
prospect. Exposure to Muslims and their food had already carried some spiritual risks
before this point (consider earlier canon law texts, and Pope Benedict XIIs
condemnation of Peres IVs household arrangements in 1337, a decade before the
outbreak of plague), but these dangers appeared much more immediately pressing by
the second half of the fourteenth century. Foods associated with non-Christians became
suspect as a category, even while individual food items (including things such as raisins,
honey, or milk) may still have been considered healthful.
Further tensions appeared in the fifteenth century, with the rise of the Ottoman Turks
and their capture of Constantinople in 1453. This event shocked Christians in Europe,
and provoked new and more pressing discussions of crusade, an idea that had remained
alive but dormant for the past century and a half. A renewed military struggle against
Islam would prove a useful rallying emblem for Fernando and Isabel, who were working to solidify rule in their own kingdoms in the wake of disputes over royal succession.
Starting in 1482, they spent the next ten years pursuing an intermittent campaign against
the Kingdom of Granada, capturing Muslim towns one by one, and eventually seizing
Granada itself in 1492. This conquest brought the last outpost of Spanish Islam into
Christian hands, and it profoundly changed the lives of Muslims in the Peninsula: many
left the country (like the family of Leo Africanus), many converted to Christianity
(becoming moriscos), and some tried openly to continue life as Muslims under
Christian rule (until this became impossible after the 1520s). From a Christian point of
view, it also created an unprecedented situation for Muslim-Christian relations in the
Peninsula. With no independent Muslim political presence in Spain after 1492, it soon
became clear that it was no longer necessary to accommodate the religious needs,
including food ways, of subject Muslims. Christian control of the entire Peninsula also
opened the way for the implementation of large-scale policies of expulsion and
conversion. At the same time, Christian control largely relegated moriscos to an
underclass existence, and in consequence, Christians increasingly viewed them as poor,
powerless, uncivilized, and without access to the good things in life. Notably, the new
dominance of Christianity, and waves of forced conversion, may have encouraged
moriscos to preserve and even enhance certain elements of their social and cultural
147
Much has been written on the impact of the Black Death on European thought and actions. In regard to
minority populations in late medieval Spain, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of
Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton 1996) 231249.

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identity. Continuing to eat like a Moor (como moro) while safely behind closed doors,
enjoying couscous and relaxing on the floor, was one way to resist Christian
domination.148
Meanwhile, Fernando and Isabel were also struggling with the assimilation of Jewish
converts to Christianity (conversos), whose numbers had burgeoned in the period
following the pogroms of 1391, and to a lesser extent, moriscos (the assimilation of
Muslim converts would become a major challenge in the following century). It was seen
as a growing problem that many new Christians continued to pursue cultural practicesdiet, food habits, clothing, music, daily ritualsthat were holdovers from their
Jewish and Muslim pasts. In order to combat this slippage in religious identity, the
Spanish Inquisition was established under royal control in 1478, and inquisitors began
to pay close attention to a host of practices that had hardly been considered worthy of
note previously. Although earlier medieval canon lawyers had discussed the religious
implications of eating or not eating certain types of foods,149 by 1500 it had become a
matter of potentially deadly importance whether one cooked with olive oil or lard,
whether one ate salt pork or couscous, and if one sat on the ground to eat. The new
inquisitorial interest in food ways, together with other aspects of cultural Islam and
Judaism, drew on longstanding Christian ideas about these practices, but certain activities now emerged as important and distinctive signifiers of non-Christian identity.
Eradicating these practices was seen as a way to promote religious and social
conformity.
While Fernando and Isabel were solidifying their political and religious control
within their kingdoms, they were also looking beyond their borders and seeking to
integrate Spanish politics and intellectual life within a broader European sphere. Fernando already had close ties with southern Italy, where his cousin was king of Naples,
and both Fernando and Isabel had become generous patrons of churches in Sicily and
Rome. The election of a Spanish pope, Alexander VI, in 1492, helped to confirm
Spanish connections in Rome. Although Spaniards would often be unpopular in Italy,
Spanish monarchs continued to pursue a role as patrons and protectors of Rome in the
sixteenth century.150 This special relationship fostered an ongoing exchange of ideas
and intellectual traditions between Italy and Spain, not only about politics and religion,
but also about visions of humanism, history, science, culinary traditions, and
considerations of the proper relationship between Christians and Muslims. Authors like
Francisco Delicado and Leo Africanus, both originally from Spain, found themselves in
Rome in the midst of this activity, and their writings reflect the interests and beliefs of
their age.
At this time, humanist scholars thrived in Italy and Spain, and men and ideas traveled
back and forth between the two regions. It is easy to see humanist patterns of thought in
the works of many of the Spanish and Italian authors who mentioned Muslim foods and
food ways, including Alfonso de Palencia, Pedro Martr de Anglera, Giovanni Battista
Ramusio, Pedro Aznar de Cardona, and Pedro de Valencia. These men and many other
148
Christians were well aware of this possible evasion, and issued edicts requiring that moriscos keep their
doors open at certain times.
149
Freidenreich, Sharing Meals with non-Christians(n. 11 above) 6061.
150
Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 15001700 (New Haven 2001) 152.

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contemporary humanists believed that the foods that Muslims ate, and the manner in
which they ate them, were among the ways in which Muslims marked themselves as
definitively other and inferior to Christians, set apart by being uncivilized, unhygienic, un-modern, and un-European.151 The criticisms leveled against Enrique IV need
to be read against this background, with attention to the implications that would have
been understood by a contemporary audience. Fernando and Isabel are often credited
for their efforts to establish a new age, intellectually, religiously, and politically by
cutting ties with the medieval and non-Christian Iberian past. At the same time, they
worked to align their Spanish kingdoms within a broader sphere of influence in Europe,
the Mediterranean world, and the Atlantic. This narrative of the ambitions of the
Catholic Monarchs was supported, fostered, and disseminated in the texts of Iberian
chroniclers, churchmen, and others who worked at their court or wrote in later centuries.
For Alfonso de Palencia, one smallbut tellingelement in this variegated program
for propagating a vision of a new Christian era included the defamation of Isabels
predecessor, who may have enjoyed eating Muslim food.

151

Charges concerning uncivilized table manners were not unique to the Christian-Muslim encounter. Italians in the 16th c. sometimes accused Spaniards of similarly uncouth behavior; see Amelang, Exchanges
between Italy and Spain (n. 92 above) 446446. Indeed, knowledge of these Italian opinions may have
spurred Spaniards to reject Muslim food ways even more stridently.

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FIG. 1. Image of Gluttony, from De septem vitiis (Genoa, late 14th c.). British Library,
Add. 27695, fol. 13. Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

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FIG. 2. Banquet scene from the Maqmt of al-Harr, Iraq, 12251235. Russian Academy of Sciences, Petersburg, MS S 23, fol. 205. Reproduced with permission from the
Russian Academy of Sciences.

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235

FIG. 3. Woodcut by Erhard Reuwich showing Syrians eating, from Bernhard Breydenbachs Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Mainz 1486). University of Kansas, Spencer
Library, Pryce E2 (no fol.). Reproduced with permission from the University of Kansas
Spencer Library.