Medieval Hungarians kept eating horse meat, despite Christianity’s influence
As Christianity spread across Europe in the Middle Ages, the consumption of horse meat dropped. However, archeological evidence found that people living in what is now Hungary continued to eat horses. The findings suggest that this decline of eating horsemeat–called hippophagy–was not for religious reasons, according to a study published July 14 in the journal Antiquity. Consuming horsemeat was fairly common in pre-Christian Europe. It declined over the course of the Middle Ages, and written sources point to the adoption of Christianity as the primary reason why. Eating horses was never officially forbidden by the Church, but many medieval Christian sources called the practice imp culture–or related to Satan–and linked it to the “barbaric” practices of non-Christians. “Based on documentary sources, abandoning horsemeat consumption is widely associated with the emergence of Christianity in medieval Europe,” the study’s authors write. “However, in the absence of an explicit prohibition (comparable to the ban on...