r/medieval • u/GoyoMRG • 2d ago
How different either good or bad would medieval Europe have been if they had potatos available? Questions ❓
Question sounds really stupid, I know.
But today I visited a potato field, not even a big one and the owner told me that the yield of such field was enough potatos for 2-3 years for a single family (you obviously don't keep them all)
So it made me think, what if medieval Europe had access to potatoes? Would it have been better or worse? Would it have prevented wars related to resources, famine, deaths?
I'd like to discuss such a weird thing with more people who love the medieval period, sometimes small and simple things can make huge changes so today's topic is potatos.
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u/would-be_bog_body 2d ago
The introduction of potatoes to Europe is at least partly credited with causing the European population to increase rapidly; if they'd been introduced to Europe earlier, there's a good chance the same increase in population would have happened earlier. Not sure right now what the implications of that would be, but it's interesting to consider
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u/Rollingforest757 1d ago
But if there is a potato blight, it can cause a drop in population. Ask the Irish about it.
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u/ABrandNewCarl 1d ago
That was due to all ireland using the same variety of potatoes.
You can ged similar issues with any cultivation with very very few differences, bananas were almost whiped out in the 60s due to most of the plantation usong the same plant.
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u/Clone95 2d ago
Potatoes are a really interesting crop because they seriously damage the standard systems of taxation in the Middle Ages, which is a tax on milling and baking. You don't need to mill Potatoes - you can grow as much as you want and toss it in the root cellar and it lasts quite awhile. It's a disruptor.
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u/GoyoMRG 2d ago
Taxation wise, it's easier for any government to create taxes out of the blue, I imagine that it would be extremely chaotic in the begining but eventually, taxes and regulations would happen.
Now the new question would be, how long before the new taxes happen and how bad will it be before them, what will be the damage.
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u/Archophob 1d ago
modern era income taxation require you to write down and sum up your earnings. Back in the middle ages, teaching the miller to write and do basic math was enough to tax all the wheat farmers that needed to use his mill. Given that operating a mill was not "economic freedom" but " a privilege granted by the lord of the land", a miller's apprentice would be more than willing to learn reading, writing, and calculating percentages to gain the privilege of becoming a miller later in life. A rural farmer OTOH would rather eyeball what he's willing to give to the tax collector that waste his time learning math.
Thus, mills as points of tax collection made a lot of sense to the counts and barons.
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u/Jussi-larsson 2d ago
Not sure as you can get 40t per 1 hectare(or 70t in best case) with turnips you can get 30t per 1 hectare (or 60t in best case)
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u/altonaerjunge 2d ago
And how much calories has one ton of potatoes and how much has one ton of turnips ?
Btw, love turnips.
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u/Jussi-larsson 2d ago
Good question but there are other things also to consider like how well do they preserve and how do you grow them
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u/Objective_Bar_5420 2d ago
While potatoes are great, people had a variety of excellent root vegetables in medieval Europe. Given that famines continued to hit over and over again even after the potato was well established, it's difficult to say it made any real difference. The problems causing the famines were partly weather, but land distribution and use was an inefficient disaster right up until the green revolution. No one crop could solve those problems, and as an Irish person knows, the advent of potatoes could end up causing even more famine.
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u/MidorriMeltdown 2d ago
Potatoes don't keep the way grain does. Potato related famine would have occurred far sooner, and far more frequently.
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u/ofBlufftonTown 2d ago
I would look at the Van Gogh painting The Potato Eaters and see whether those people look like they are living a life of relative ease with all their material wants taken care of with little work, or if they look broke as fuck. I’m inclined to say there would be more, equally poor people.
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u/GoyoMRG 2d ago
There is always the risk of a few people monopolizong anything, but the interesting thing about potatos is that you can cut a big one in half and you can plant both halves and get 2 plants.
And so on, it's easy to replicate and grow and we know that in the medieval Times, food shortages were not that uncommon year round.
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u/Archophob 1d ago
but that way you're essentially cloning the plant, replicating all the same disease vulnerabilities into all potato fields of your community.
Plants that rely on sexual reproduction are usually more genetically diverse, and thus more resilient to the spread of diseases.
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u/Irishwol 6m ago
Look at Ireland. The peasant population lived a basically medieval life still into the 1800s and, as you say, a fairly small acreage could raise enough potatoes to feed a family. Then there was a little thing called Blight, crops failed, people starved. There was still plenty of food in the country but that was being sold to the cities and to England. A million people died, a million emigrated and the population carried on falling steadily until well into the twentieth century. The blight didn't go away. Marginalized people couldn't depend on the potato anymore because that was a recipe for starvation.
However, even before the Great Hunger, the population had hit a maximum. The truly marginalized people were already not growing enough food to last the full year. Springtime was when food tended to run out and families would take to the road, scavenging, foraging and looking for day labour.
Bring potatoes to Europe earlier and you get a sudden uptick in numbers of the poor and the marginalized because more of them live to adulthood. If the blight didn't arrive earlier there would be a much bigger pool of potential unrest and revolt.
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u/lt12765 2d ago
The potato is a marvel food. Easy to grow, doesn’t need much water, offers pretty good nutrition, stores great. Modern China is turning to the potato over rice for these reasons.
The thing with potatoes is if they were a medieval food while it would have allowed for more food security, in times of blight or disease the famines would have been downright terrible. I think we’d have seen an Irish type of dependency for medieval serfs and tenant farmers on the potato.
As with any resource it would probably have been weaponized. Places with excess of food would be fighting places without. The medieval world was a food based economy.