06-05-2007, 05:20 AM
I found this when I was flipin' through the book "Byzantium at War" and after all the info I have learned from this forum, I thought I would share.
Quote:The men were organised in tent-groups of eight, called kontoubernia, sharing a hand-mill and basic cooking utensils as well as a small troop of pack-animals.
Soldiers were issued with two main varieties of bread: simple baked loaves, and double-baked 'hard tack', referred to in late Roman times as bucellatum and by the Byzantines as paximadion or paximation. In campaign conditions, it was normally the soldiers themselves who milled and baked this.
The hard tack was more easily preserved over a longer period, was easy to produce, and demanded fairly simple milling and baking skills. Hard tack could be baked in field ovens - klibanoi - or simply laid in the ashes of camp fires, an advantage when speed was essential, and this was the case during this expedition - although the soldiers much preferred the best such bread, baked in thin oval loaves cooked in a field-oven, and then dried in the sun. The ration per diem included two to three pounds of bread and either dried meat or cheese; wine was also issued, but it is not clear how often or in what circumstances.
The amount of meat relative to the rest of the diet was often minimal or absent altogether, but would still provide a reasonable amount of nutrition, since ancient strains of wheat and barley had considerably higher protein content than modern strains, and it has been shown that the bread ration of ancient and medieval soldiers provided adequate nutrition for the duration of a campaign season even without much meat.
