the vegetative mediterranean 35
provinces of the empire is well attested. Though Britain did not quite revert to its
pre-Roman agrarian systems, most of the 50 or so Mediterranean plants that had grown
there around 100 ce no longer flourished there in 500. Everywhere, lucerne, a fodder
crop the Romans brought wherever they went, retreated and disappeared from former
imperial fields (Kingsbury, 2009: 60). Meanwhile Italy, whose privileged position in the
redistributions of the empire had made it a Wunderkammer of exotic species, also
witnessed late antique reductions in the variety of locally-cultivated plants. Fruit trees in
particular seem to have dwindled, but postclassical excavations usually turn up fewer
types of all seeds and nuts than do classical era excavations. Palynological tables tell the
same tale: even the almost-holy olive tree receded, to judge from fossil pollens.
In a few privileged byways like the Byzantine garrisons of Liguria, peaches and
plums were still raised, and their fruits eaten, through the seventh century, but else-
where there are clear signs that by then the fruits of empire no longer seemed worth
the effort it took to grow them (Arobba and Murialdo, 2001). In late antiquity, in
lockstep with imperial fortunes, apricots seem to have vanished from much of the
Mediterranean, Italy included. This suggests again how intertwined were military
power, economic patterns, and botany. During the early Middle Ages Latin writers
forgot about them, so thorough was this excellent fruit’s disappearance from
Mediterranean fields. Luckily, in the more stable eastern Roman provinces, apricots
remained known and appreciated, so that they might recolonize their former western
haunts in the second millennium, bringing with themselves in the wake of the crusades
a new Arabic name to replace the old Latin “Armenian plum” (Hasselrot, 1940–41).
In this agronomically-impoverished Mediterranean, there are some exceptions.
Rye, a weed to Roman farmers, became a popular crop by late antique times, its
resiliency appreciated enough that its diffusion across the western Mediterranean
increased, and if there were fewer species of crops grown in the medieval Mediterranean,
there were more cultivars of these, with landraces finely adapted to local conditions
(Montanari, 1992: 32; Durand, 1998: 359). More extraordinary still were the adven-
tures of the chestnut, whose seeds were rare in the classical Mediterranean, restricted
to wild, upland places like the mountains of Euboea. Both pollen studies and fossil
remains from excavations suggest that Mediterranean cultivators gradually civilized
chestnuts after the second century ce. By the turn of the first millennium chestnut
woods had begun to approach their early modern extension wherever geology
allowed. In the medieval Balkans, Italy, France, and Iberia, not to mention their
homeland in northwestern Anatolia, sophisticated arboriculture supported them with
coppiced woodlots and grafted, nut-bearing cultivars. In this Dark Age success story
several factors mattered, but the labor efficiency of maintaining chestnut woods
compared with arable agriculture, and the preservability of the nuts, were decisive.
Another, more celebrated, medieval botanical introduction involved the white
mulberry. According to the tendentious Byzantine historian Procopius, during the
reign of Justinian Christian monks managed to bring some living silkworm eggs
back to Constantinople from their Asian travels (Feltham, 2009). Procopius did not
explain whether the monks also brought saplings of the insect’s favorite food, Morus
alba, since once hatched, silkworm larvae spend about two months eating large
quantities of this fast-growing plant’s leaves, fresh and finely shredded, before they spin
their precious cocoon. It appears that white mulberry and silkworms already
coexisted in fifth-century Syria and Procopius’ tale is designed mostly to glorify