A Plague of Meat: Food, Politics, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, the amount of meat available in Rome increased exponentially, with consumption reaching a pound per person per day in the 1630s. There were cultural and political reasons for this surge: in the wake of the Reformation, a series of popes sought to turn the city of Rome into a model “city on a hill,” representing the ideal of a Catholic state under a powerful ruler. However, to bring such large amounts of food from the countryside to Roman tables required enormous efforts on the part of a variety of bureaucrats and local artisans working for the papal regime. This essay will briefly examine the efforts of two of those groups that helped create Rome’s “meat moment”: the contatori who inspected and distributed animals brought from the countryside to Rome and the butchers in the city. In the end, the dramatic increase in supply was not sustainable and would result in both political and ecological upheaval.