The Hungry City

The Hungry City is the story of medieval Barcelona, retold through the lens of food and famine.

Between the summer of 1333 and the spring of 1334, severe weather-related grain shortages spread throughout the Mediterranean, and Barcelona’s leaders struggled to bring food to the city as its residents grew increasingly desperate. Employing the perspectives of historical actors whose stories are drawn from the records of that catastrophic year, Marie A. Kelleher uses Barcelonans’ varied responses to crisis in the food system to present multiple ways of understanding the city – as a physical space, as the center of a network of Mediterranean commerce, as one powerful entity within a broader monarchy, as a site of religious encounter, and as a complex social body. Even as the central figure in each chapter offers their own version of the city, the separate strands of these multiple Barcelonas intertwine to reveal the fabric of the city as a whole.

The medieval city was defined by its network of human relationships – between its rulers and ruled; its merchants, artisans, and laborers; its religious and secular authorities; its insider and outsider groups – and by its overlapping local and regional geographies. Barcelona in the fourteenth century was no different, and The Hungry City draws together multiple lives and narrative strands to focus on a single point in time, what one Catalan chronicler referred to as “the first bad year,” providing a dynamic new perspective on the history of Barcelona and the medieval Mediterranean.

Written with clarity and verve, The Hungry City meticulously reconstructs the trajectory of the Barcelona famine of 1333–1334, revealing the diversity of experiences and perspectives among its populace. This accessible and engaging book will appeal to readers interested in the history of Barcelona and the medieval Mediterranean; the history of food, commerce, and seafaring; medieval women, medieval Jewish life, and urban politics. Paola Tartakoff, author of Between Christian and Jew

The Hungry City is a creative approach to studying the medieval city of Barcelona through the lens of a single year, the 1333-1334 famine, to understand how the city’s food system and its people were connected on a local, regional, and Mediterranean level. Marie Kelleher brings together a wealth of archival sources to tell a microhistory of the city’s response to famine to create a complex account of how a city, its rulers, and its residents dealt with the crisis. As a Mediterranean city, Barcelona’s quest for grain also becomes a story of the mobility of merchants, of competition between maritime powers, and the economic connectivity of the region. This book makes an important contribution to the way historians can successfully conceptualize a project that is both in and of the Mediterranean. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, author of Defiant Priests