Cultural history: it was rye that made Europe the Occident

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Rye is considered to be the ultimate grain.

For dark breads that are baked with him, unsophisticated warriors advertise, who are interested in hearty taste and not in the light crumb of decadent, civilized white bread eaters.

Rye stands for strength and health, for times when bread was still made from whole grain and not from whitish, tasteless flour, which was made into cakes at the court of Versailles and thus recommended as a remedy for hunger.

What a misunderstanding!

Because rye is the grain of the Old World that was the last to reach Europe.

Hansjörg Küster traced their story in his book “In the beginning was the grain”.

In it, the well-known plant ecologist from the University of Hanover tells “a different story of mankind”, which is not based on their written evidence, but on the cultures of the plants that made human civilization possible in the first place.

Küster's focal point is that “setting the course of a special kind”, which was achieved in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago.

There, on the mountain slopes of Anatolia and the foothills of Syria and Mesopotamia, it was possible for the first time to cultivate plants and domesticate animals at the same time.

This enabled people to settle down and use the excess food to organize their society based on the division of labor.

Rye, of all things, should play a late but decisive role.

Because he founded a European special way.

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The fact that people were interested in rye (Secale cereale) long after wheat, barley, einkorn or emmer is due to its special biological position.

In contrast to the early cultivated cereals, rye is a cross-pollinating plant.

But this meant that its wild forms were subjected to natural selection much more than the other grasses with nutritious grains that are self-pollinators.

Amazing career of a weed

While these made it easy for the early farmers to specifically collect specimens for further sowing, the grains of which were not distributed on the ground immediately after ripening, but remained in the ear cluster and could therefore be easily harvested, the wild form of rye remained much stronger exposed to natural selection.

At very few excavation sites in the Middle East, says Küster, larger collections of rye grains have been found;

For a short time it was possible to select and also to cultivate rye plants in which the grain associations were preserved until harvest.

That only changed when rye grains ended up as an undesirable addition to regions that were far from the range of the wild plant.

There, the genetic exchange was so reduced that farmers began to be interested in individual plants of the supposed weeds that grew in their grain fields.

Especially north of the Alps, they soon came to appreciate Secale cereale, as it made little demands on the soil and climate.

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A technical innovation promoted the triumph of rye: the introduction of the iron sickle.

Because with it the near-ground selection was lost, which had been valid under the aegis of the stone sickle.

You no longer paid so much attention to what you were harvesting.

And after a few generations, rye had established itself as the main grain in some areas.

Rye became the best-known secondary cultivated plant, accompanied by oats, which had a similar career to help alleviate hunger around the same time as rye at the beginning of the early Middle Ages in Europe.

Unfortunately, this is where Küster's manual is broken.

The cultural consequences of his heroic stories are not his subject.

Process of "defection"

These gaps are closed by a book whose programmatic title “Why Europe?

Medieval foundations of a special route ”already suggests that the rise of the two types of grain was more than a footnote in world history.

The thesis of its author, the Viennese historian Michael Mitterauer, is condensed: Rye and oats not only made it possible for post-Roman societies in Europe to survive, but they also shaped them in a way that pioneered developments that were unique in the world history.

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Mitterauer's book, first published in 2003 and awarded the Prize of the Historisches Kolleg, describes the agricultural revolution that changed the countries north of the Alps in particular after the fall of Western Rome.

Already in the first millennium BC

Germanic farmers discovered rye, which proved to be extremely resistant to cold, wet and dry conditions.

In the Roman "villae rusticae", from which the legions obtained their food, wheat and other Mediterranean grain suppliers and legumes played the main role.

They were supplemented with deliveries of olive oil, wine and other products from the Mediterranean region.

With the collapse of the border defense and Rome's retreat behind the Alps, this “global” system collapsed.

The wandering Germanic peoples and their warlords had to accept what they knew.

And that was primarily the rye.

A process of "defecation" began which was quickly reflected in the food.

Since rye has excellent baking properties, but can hardly be processed into porridge, the much more durable bread became the most important source of calories.

In combination with wheat or barley and fallow it was planted as winter grain in the three-field system or - in Westphalia, for example - as "eternal rye cultivation" on fields that were fertilized with grass plumes on which the cattle had stood in the barn during the winter.

Watermills promoted various trades

The cultural changes that rye drove were not limited to bread consumption.

Rye is a naked grain, which means that, as with wheat, there is no need to laboriously free the grains from the husk, which is necessary with spelled.

The rye grain, on the other hand, has to be ground in order to be processed further.

The power that was necessary for this was available in large quantities in Gaul and Germania: water.

As early as the 6th century, watermills were widely known in the Franconian Empire.

The English Doomsday Book names no fewer than 5624 mills in 3080 parishes in 1086.

However, these mills did not function horizontally according to the Mediterranean model, but - after all, water was available all year round - vertically.

It did not take long before this technology was also used in trades that were closely connected to agriculture: tanners, saddlers, shoemakers and blacksmiths.

In any case, these trades were close to peasant work, as they created the tools without which the fields could not be worked.

Because the heavy and moist soils of the northern Alpine countries required plows that reached deeper than the Mediterranean plows.

These heavy reversible plows required manual know-how in the villages as well as suitable draft animals such as oxen or horses, whose dishes were in turn made by blacksmiths or saddlers.

The large animals in turn proved to be ideal suppliers of fertilizer.

With the oats, the farmers got a sustainable food resource for their cattle.

However, this meant that draft animals were available across the board, which not only pulled the plows, but were also able to connect the numerous small and medium-sized settlements that were characteristic of medieval Europe.

Effects on the social system

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This integration of large-scale animal husbandry into agriculture in turn refers to the specific form of manorial rule that has developed in Europe: the dichotomy between manors and their central economic institutions and the dependent farms whose farmers had to provide services and taxes.

The maintenance of mills, trades or herds of cattle was the responsibility of the landlord, who lived in close proximity to his farmers.

According to Max Weber, Mitterauer diagnosed a "chain of circumstances" that only occurred in this form in the Occident.

In no other world civilization were the means for a high-performance landscape structure developed in a decentralized manner, which also enabled large-scale clearing, if you will, sustainable landscape development.

Technical and commercial innovations did not emerge only at distant rulers' seats, but on site, where the water mill provided an almost proto-industrial mechanical support.

Wagons, as slowly as they were drawn by oxen, drove across the country, and the landlords were involved in the development of their countries.

The difference to the camel caravans and oasis plantations of the Islamic world or the wet rice cultivation and the metropolises of China is obvious.

A central component of this special European route was a weed that had only found its way onto the fields of the early farmers by chance: rye.

This article was first published in 2014.