Dogs, vultures, horses and black pudding

Abstract

The Byzantines, influenced by the traditions of ethnographic literature, readily condemned their enemies’ real or imaginary food practices as signs of barbarism. The ethnographic literature rarely mentions the practices of foreigners without adding a negative value judgement. The differences in food habits between nomadic peoples and the Byzantines were described in almost exactly the same manner as in the sources, from Antiquity up to the Middle Ages, which renders these descriptions useless for reconstructing the diet of nomadic peoples. This article explores how the “taste for blood” of the Pechenegs, the Coumans and the Turks are described in Byzantine sources. Some neighbours of the Byzantines, such as the Bulgarians, eventually converted to the Christian faith, and when their land was incorporated into the Byzantine Empire, these converts were forced to abandon certain foods that were repellent to the Byzantine Greeks, such as horse meat and raw meat. Nomadic peoples were not alone in being denounced as bloodthirsty barbarians, so were the Latins, because they did not bleed animals before eating them. In the context of military attacks against the Byzantine Empire, the leap between consumed blood and the figure of a bloodthirsty and monstrous Latin was easily made. The food taboo on animal blood thus contributed to the creation of a specific Byzantine identity as opposed to the barbarians and the Latins, who were condemned for eating unbled animals.

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