The Princess and the Fork

This post was written as a Power Point presentation for a virtual A&S class I did in 2022. I will be posting this as it was presented. I have posted the presentation here.

Introduction:

• Good morning. I’m Caleb Reynolds, one of the Kingdom’s foremost experts on useless facts.
• One of my obsessions has been the history of the table fork. In my research for a paper for the CA, I looked through a couple hundred books in my research: over 90 books, on medieval eating habits, stated that no one in medieval Europe ate with table forks.
• Around half these books followed this up with one of two caveats.
• Either “Except for Piers Galveston, who owned two silver forks for green ginger.”
• Or the tale of the Byzantine princess who either married the Doge of Venice or the son of the Doge, either named Maria or Theodora, or left un-named, who ate with a golden fork and was punished by god and rotted away because of her decadence.

• A cautionary tale was told about the Byzantine wife of a Venetian Doge …The moral of it was that the good Christians of the west should beware of the decadent and sybaritic ways of the east, lest the Oronates flow into the Tiber. The Greek princess who came to Venice died a hideous death as a result of her self-indulgence. Distrusting the water supply of Venice, she had her servants collect rain water for her ablutions. Too fastidious to eat with her fingers, she carries her food to her mouth with a two-pronged golden fork. Disliking the stink of the lagoons, she filled her rooms with incense and perfumes. For such depravity and vanity she was a victim of the wrath of God, who smote her with a vile disease. Her body putrefied, her limbs withered, her bedchamber was permeated by such a stench that only one of her maids could bear it; and after a lingering illness of excruciating agony she passed away to the great relief of her friends.

• Was this true? Was there an actual Byzantine princess, in Venice, who ate with forks at a time where no one else did, who died a horrible death because of it? The story is attributed to Bishop Peter Damien, so is it true if a bishop wrote about it?
• I feel that this is a thousand year old urban legend. And like modern urban legends, it does have a grain of truth to it. While most details are blurry, enough of the core information always remains the same. Think about what you know about the urban legend of the car with the JATO:
• Regardless of what you heard or read about the story, it was always a Chevy Impala found half way up a cliff wall in Arizona. All of the other details change with the retelling.
• But, some one did strap two JATOs to a Chevy Impala, in Arizona, and crash the car when trying to film a commercial.

Princess

• So, let us take a look at the Princess and fork.
• We have to start with Peter Damien, Bishop of Ostia.
• He was born sometime between 995 and 1007 and died in 1072.
• So, were there any Byzantine princess in Venice during this time period?
• When we look at historical records we find two Byzantine princesses not only in Venice but directly connected to the then Doge.
• Maria Argyra was the granddaughter of the Byzantine emperor Romanos II, niece of the emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, and sister to the Byzantine emperor Romanos III. Married to Giovanni Orseolo, the son of Doge Pietro Orseolo.
• Theodora Doukaina: daughter of Byzantine emperor Constantine X. Wife of Domenico Selvo, Doge of Venice.
• Both Maria and Theodora were princesses, they were delicate and could pee through a mattress, and both were related, by marriage, to a doge of Venice.
• So, we have some facts for our story.
• Of the decadence of the princess, we can find contemporaneous records that both Maria and Theodora acted in prissy ways that opened themselves to criticism from the people of Venice.
• Both refused to bath in canal water.
• Both bathed almost daily.
• Both spent a lot on silk and perfume.
• Both ate with golden forks.

Back to Peter Damien

• Peter Damien wrote about the Princess several times, starting in 1059 with "Of the Venetian Doge's wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away."

"She scorned to wash with common water, so that her servants had to gather the dew of heaven for her bath. Nor would she take her food with her hand like other mortals, but her eunuchs cut it into small pieces which she then carried to her mouth with a golden instrument that had two prongs: her rooms, too, were always scented with the costliest perfumes.“
And in 1061: "Instead of eating with her fingers like other people, the princess cuts up her food into small pieces and eats them by means of little golden forks with two prongs.... God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks - his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.” “Of the Venetian Doge’s wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away.”

• Now, Bishop Peter might have started preaching against the princess prior to 1059, but the fact remains that Theodora was born in 1058, so Peter could not possibly have been referring to her.
• Also, Peter died in 1072. Theodora did not marry Domenico until 1075, so we can ignore Theodora, for now. Peter could not possibly be an eye-witness to anything Theodora might have done while in Venice.
• What about Maria?
• Peter was born sometime between 995 and 1007. Maria and Giovanni were married in Constantinople in 1004. Had a child who might have been named Basil, then came to Venice at the end of 1006 only to die in 1007 of a plague that wiped out ¼ of Venice. Maria, Giovanni, and their child died within days of each other and were laid to rest in the Orseolo crypts.
• Peter would have been, at most, ten or eleven when this happened.
• Peter was from a minor noble house, but it was a poor house and most likely the family would not have had anything to do with the high mucky-mucks of the city and most likely not have been in Constantinople in 1004 to witness the wedding or been at any of the court functions in Venice in 1007.
• So, why the hate?
• First of all, Bishop Peter was one of history’s biggest misogynists. Most of his surviving sermons were focused on his hatred of women.

• “The sins of a single woman out weigh all of the sins of all of the men around the world.”

• He petitioned Pope Leo IX that any woman who “associated” with priests should, as punishment, become slaves of the church.
• Argued that Eve’s greatest sin was negotiating with God over how many children she would bear instead of how ever many Adam wanted.
• Woman hating aside, while Peter came from a poor and un-important house, he was fostered in a more influential one. One that sponsored his education and his early service in the church.
• While Peter had no first hand knowledge of Maria, it is most likely that he was influenced by the adults talking about Maria.

Reality

• There was some major criticism about the marriage of Maria and Giovani. The office of the Doge was not hereditary and there is plenty of surviving documentation that the people of Venice thought that Pietro was making the connection with Constantinople, and the Emperor's family and wealth, in order to set up his own dynasty. There was some political back lash against Pietro, as there was against Doge Domenico, 70 years later.
• It may, also, have been backlash due to the schism between the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches: the Princess becoming a physical symbol of the more complicated divide between the two churches.
• There was also conflict between Constantinople and Venice involving trade. Venice wanted a bigger cut of the trade routes and Constantinople wanted full control.
• There is also the conflict between the Byzantine Emperor, in reality the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, and Western Roman Empire which technically, no longer had an all powerful emperor. Byzantine emperors often issued decrees for all of Christendom.
• There was also a huge difference between upper class norms in Constantinople and in Venice. Constantinople had access to every luxury found on the silk road and a Princess would have expected to have the best of everything. Both Maria and Theodora were heavily criticized for their decadence.
• The exact same criticisms were made of Princess Theophano, who married the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II in 972, including the use of table forks (silver rather than golden). Her decadence scandalized the Francs and the Germans. I was unable to discover the cause of death of Theophano, she outlived her husband and served as regent to her son Otto III. She died in 991, the information I have said that she died of "illness" that began in 988.

Finally

• So, we have three Byzantine princesses, two in Venice and one in what would be modern day Germany who ate with table forks and who were “punished by god” for doing so. But were they the only ones to use a fork?
• No. The fact that every contemporaneous mention of their eating habits use the word “fork” (furca in Latin) means that the people who wrote about it, knew what forks were. They weren’t unknown objects, they were just seen by some as unnecessary items of luxury.
Finally
• A traveler, Jacques Lesaige, speaks thus of it, not without astonishment, in describing a feast given by the Doge [Pietro]: ‘These lords, when they desire to eat, take the food with a silver fork.’
• The writer Sabba da Castiglione mentions the use of forks a la Vénitienne to avoid seizing the food with the fingers.
• Clearly, the use of table forks was well known in Venice and that our princesses were just the target of criticism rather than eating any differently than their peers.