Agricultural economies are forever driven to increase production when trade and improved birth rates lead to larger urban populations. Farmers are continually confronted with managing water, and men (and women) discover and rediscover techniques for adding or removing it.
The methods developed by the Romans were lost, but when textile centers and the great trade fairs began developing in Bruges and Ghent by 1000, demand for wool brought sheep raising parts of England and Scotland into their economic sphere. Severe storms beginning in 1216 destroyed coastal communities, forcing counts in Flanders and Holland to begin protecting their existing land, then reclaiming more.
Wind driven mills appeared in the early 1200's, which D. G. Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen think may have been introduced by men returning from the Crusades against the Arabs in the near east. However, they say they didn’t become important drainage pumps until larger populations and increased storm problems led to technological innovations in 1570.
Skilled Dutchmen were lured by their neighbors to Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, then Rochefort and LaRochelle in France. Charles I encouraged Francis, the Duke of Bedford, to drain the fens of southeast England in 1630's, a project continued by Cromwell and Francis’ son William under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden with Dutch laborers. More projects were undertaken after William of Orange was crowned in 1680.
When Flanders was the center of the textile industry, Dinis of Portugal, who ruled between 1279 and 1325, encouraged trade with the area to create an alternative to the markets of Castile and the Moors. To secure his borders, he introduced new patterns of land ownership and encouraged men to drain the marshes and swamps, where rice was eventually grown. He also cemented a naval alliance with Genoa, who was revolutionizing trade in Bruges.
In northern Italy, landowners of the Po valley began building canals in 1127 that fostered drainage and irrigation schemes. In 1475, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, sent the first recorded rice from the area to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.
According to Fernand Braudel, the crop was encouraged in Lombardy in the 1500's. They were exporting their surplus to Genoa by 1570.
In 1517, the Ottomans of Turkey had conquered Egypt and demanded rice be sent to Constantinople as part of their annual tribute. It was adopted by the elite, and used by the military on campaigns. In 1600, Venice was eating rice, which they probably bought from the Turks, along with the more traditional wheat, millet and rye.
It takes little for farmers to extrapolate solutions from fragments of information. Portugal introduced reclamation after contact with Flanders. Italy introduced rice after contacts with the levant. In Africa and Madagascar, new varieties of rice were tried, new processing technologies adopted, and new methods for dealing with water created.
When allusions and imagination weren’t enough, men took steps to import knowledge. The Abbasids went from absorbing what the Persians knew to actively saving everything they could from the ancient world. Portugal exploited its contact with Genoa to explore Africa and the world. Everyone hired Dutch engineers and laborers.
Population growth, both natural and from new market towns, created necessity. Trade simplified finding solutions because it revitalized cultures grown comfortable in isolation. Rice and the techniques to grow it expanded when dynamic responses to life replaced static ones.
Notes:
Adshead, Samuel Adrian Miles. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism, 1997.
Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerrane et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Euopque de Philippe II, 1966 edition, translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Sian Reynolds, 1972.
Dutra, Francis A. "Dinis, King of Portugal" in E. Michael Gerli and Samuel G. Armistead, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, 2003.
Kirby, D. G. and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen. The Baltic and the North Seas, 2000. The major innovation was the movable cap that allowed the mill’s sails to follow changes in the direction of the wind.
Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkma. Landscapes in History: Design and Planning in the Eastern and Western Traditions, 1999.
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