Soft Grains

Wheat had other and more significant associates.  Barley, for example, which was used to feed horses in the south.  ‘No barley harvest, no war’, was said in the sixteenth century and later, of the long Hungarian frontier where battles between Turks and Christians were unthinkable without cavalry.  Toward the north, hard grains gave way to soft grains, barley to oats, and more especially rye, which came late to the north.  Most likely not before the great invasions of the fifth century.  After this, it seems to have become well-known and spread there at the same time as triennial rotation.  Ships from the Baltic, soon drawn farther and farther from home by hungry Europe, carried as much rye as wheat.  First, they came as far as the North Sea and the Channel, then to the Iberian ports on the Atlantic and finally, on a grand scale at the time of the crisis of 1590, as far as the Mediterranean.  All these cereals were used to make bread, even in the eighteenth century, whenever wheat was in short supply.  Louis Lemery wrote in 1702: ‘Rye bread is not as nourishing as wheat and loosens the bowels a little.  Barley bread is refreshing but less nourishing than wheat or rye bread.   The northern peoples make bread from oats, which suits them very well.’  
 
Another expedient was rice, which had been imported from the Indian Ocean since ancient times.  Traders in the Middle Ages rediscovered it in the mercantile ports of the Levant, and in Spain where the Arabs had established the crop early on.  Rice from Majorca was sold at fairs in Champagne in the fourteenth century.  Rice from Valencia was exported as far afield as the Netherlands.  From the fifteenth century onward, it was grown in Italy and sold at a low price on the market at Ferrara.  A person who laughed easily was said to have eaten rice soup.  Che aveva mangiato la minestra di riso.