Ancient Roman Apple Varieties – Modern Day Survivors?

This article is part of a short series on ancient Roman fruit varieties, specifically apples. Please see the Series Introduction for background information and a bibliography, the page on Authors and Sources for details of the documentary evidence I’ve referred to, and the Summary and Conclusions page for an overview of my findings.

‘Decio’ et ‘Court Pendu Plat’; Suntne Poma Romana?

Two modern-day apples, ‘Decio‘ and ‘Court Pendu Plat‘, have been suggested to be surviving ancient Roman apple varieties. Is this nothing more than fanciful wish-fulfilment, or can a historical link be proven in either case? Let’s take a look at the evidence.

First I’ll address the general question as to whether any apple variety could potentially survive for the centuries since the end of the ancient Roman era, through to the present day.

As we’ve seen, various Renaissance-era authors drew links between apple varieties that were well-known in their day, and some of the ones that were mentioned in those ancient Roman works. That establishes a tradition of continuation, but is such a thing possible from a practical perspective?

Well, we know the ancient Romans definitely possessed and utilised the knowledge of grafting, because there’s plenty of information on this particular method of propagation in the sources that we’ve already looked at, and elsewhere.

Grafting remains a skill that has been practised and recorded through to the present day, although whether it was a re-discovered skill that came back into use when these Roman texts were re-introduced to Europe, or was continuously used throughout the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire onwards, I’m unsure. I suspect that it would have been, because it’s so simple and useful a technique, it seems doubtful that practical-minded farming folk wouldn’t have passed it down through the generations.

Therefore, if an ancient Roman apple variety continued to be considered good enough to be worth retaining, there’s no reason for it not to have been re-grafted – at least every few decades – by the gardeners and orchardists of wealthy patrons, in the walled gardens of religious houses, or just by farmers who knew its value, thereby maintaining the viability of the variety throughout the centuries.

The question is: what is there in the way of evidence that this process not only took place but continued, uninterrupted, for the whole of the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the modern day? Or is the tradition of continuation all that exists?

Time to take a closer look at some of the sources that do make or discuss such associations, and see how strong the evidence might be in the cases of ‘Decio’ and ‘Court Pendu Plat’.

‘Decio‘

Here’s a reminder of the origin story of ‘Decio’ according to the National Fruit Collection database:

“This variety is said to date from the time of Attila (c. 450 CE) and to have been brought to England by Roman general Ezio from Latium, Italy.”

I cross-referenced the above with Muriel Smith’s National Apple Register of the United Kingdom (1971), which I happen to know is a major source of the information in the N.F.C. database entries, but only found two of the three key details mentioned, namely:

“Prv [Provinence] Italy, said to have been brought by Roman general (Ezio) from Latium
Dte [Date] Said to date from the time of Attilla (c. 450 A.D.)”

I immediately noticed that Smith doesn’t say to where the apple was brought, only that it was said to have been brought from Latium – the area around Rome – by a Roman general named Ezio. She definitely didn’t say that it had been brought to England; so that detail has clearly been added to the N.F.C. entry by someone who either sourced it elsewhere, or assumed that the introduction must have been to England.

However, the lack of an English connection would probably make more sense, because if the apple really does date from c. 450 CE, that would place it after the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, which is generally held to be around 410 CE¹. And it seems that whilst General Ezio, a.k.a. Flavius Aetius, spent a lot of his life trying to hold together the crumbling Western Roman Empire – fighting against the Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, Bagaudae and his fellow Romans, before uniting the Visigoths, Alans and Burgundians in order to fight off Attilla’s invasion of Gaul in 451 CE – he isn’t at all likely to have set foot in Britain; the Wikipedia entry for Ezio / Autius talks about him fighting in Gaul, Italy, and back in Rome, where he was assassinated in 454 CE on the orders of a distinctly paranoid-sounding Emperor Valentinian III. So it seems highly unlikely that he, or any of his soldiers, would have been in a position to plant ‘Decio’ apple trees in a Romano-British orchard.

More online research followed, and more information emerged. The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity has a page of information on their website on the ‘Belfiore Decio Apple’ that also mentions General Ezio:

“The origin of the Decio apple is thought to date back to Roman times. It was originally named after General Ezio, who landed in Adria and fought against Attila in Padua².

In 1941, Primo Candioli described the variety in Sunti di frutticoltura pratica (Summary of Practical Fruit Growing) for the Agriculture Inspectorate, as: “an old Veronese variety recommended only for orchardists able to produce an annual crop of large, healthy fruit by utilizing pruning, fertilization and pest management. Such success is largely restricted to the soils of the Middle and Lower Veronese.” Over the years, cultivation of the Decio apple spread across Belfiore, and this is where the greatest quality apples are produced.”

Some added detail there; Belfiore is a town that lies between the cities of Verona and Vicenza in the Veneto region of north-eastern Italy, and isn’t all that far westwards of Padua, where General Ezio campaigned against the Huns.

A similar story appears on the Bernwode Fruit Trees website, along with the addition of another interesting detail:

“Known in Italy as Melo D’Ezio. It probably dates back to 450 A.D., and was named after the Roman general Ezio, who marched northwards to fight Attila the Hun, supposedly taking the apple with him.”

A synonym “Melo D’Ezio”, eh? That’s a thread to come back to.

The ‘Decio’ page on Pomiferous.com adds yet more detail:

“Generally considered to have originated and grown in the Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Lazio regions of Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, though there is little history to substantiate the claim. There is, however, mention of this variety in Medieval Italy. In the 1500s, Italian historian Francesco Bo [sic] stated the General Ezio brought these apples with him during his battles in the area of Padua against Attila the Hun. The Decio was apparently also regularly served at banquets in the late 1520s by the Duke of Ferrera. It was a popular apple variety in Italy during the 1930s. Either way, it is likely the oldest apple on record at this stage. Its derivation is unknown.”

There’s General Ezio again, once again fighting the Huns in Padua, and a possibility that ‘Decio’ might at one point have been quite widely grown in the regions around Venice, Bologna and Rome. I searched online for a C16th Italian historian by the name of Francesco Bo, and found Francesco Bocchi³, who apparently wrote a guide to artwork in Florence and a history of the Flemish Rebellions. I did find some of Bocchi’s works on Google Books, but none of them seemed likely to mention apples, and so without a specific source to look at, I’ve hit a dead end there.

I did have more luck tracking down those banquets held by the Duke of Ferrara though. The relevant information is in The Book of Apples (1993) by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards. On page 42, in a discussion of the Renaissance-era credenza – an ornate side-table that, during feats and banquets, would be piled high with ostentatious displays of fruits and sweetmeats – there’s this passage:

“Apples were highly useful fruits for display purposes. Their shades of red, gold and green provided greater variety of colour than any other fruit, and outlasted then in season … The great authority on the credenza was Christoforo di Messisbugo, who belonged to the court of the d’Este family, the Dukes of Ferrara. Among the apples he records serving were the ‘Paradise’ and ‘Deci’, while Scappi⁴ mentions ‘mele Appie‘ or ‘Appia’ apple, and ‘mele Rosa‘. Great value was attached to the idea that these were the same varieties that had been enjoyed in ancient Rome. The esteemed ‘Appia’ was said to be the ‘Appian’ apple mentioned by Pliny. Others considered the Paradise apple to be his ‘Petisian’ apple. The ‘Deci’ or ‘melo d’Ezio‘ was claimed to have been named after General Ezio, who had brough it north from Rome when he journeyed to battle with Atilla the Hun near Padua in about AD 450.”

Cristiforo di Messisbugo was a sixteenth century steward of the House of Este in Ferrara, cook, Master of Ceremonies and the posthumous author of Banchetti, Composizioni di Vivande e Apparecchio Generale (1549). He does indeed mention an apple called ‘Dece’, in the context of placing plates of it on banqueting tables. For instance, in one list of the foods that were served up as a collation to the Duke and Duchess of Mantua he includes:

“Pome Dece, 250. in piati. 25+”

Which I’m taking to mean something like 250 ‘Dece’ apples, served on twenty-five or more plates or dishes.⁵

As well as providing details of the Duke of Ferrara’s ‘Dece’ or ‘Deci’ apples, Morgan and Richards could also be the source for the suggestion on the Bernwode Fruit Trees website that ‘Decio’ is known as ‘melo d’Ezio’ in Italy, again in honour of the General. The source that Morgan and Richards quote for the ‘melo D’Ezio’ origin story is an article by N. Breviglieri entitled “Il melo Decio” (“the Decio apple”) in the Italian journal Rivista della Societa Toscana d’orticultura (1940), but I haven’t been able to find it online⁶ so I’ve been unable to discover whether Breviglieri provided any more detail than that.

There are two more sources that might contain more information as well, neither of which I’ve been able to access just yet. In Smith’s National Apple Register of the United Kingdom entry there’s a reference to the report of the third Congresso Nazionale Frutticoltura, which took place in Ferrara in 1949. Apparently said report contains an illustration of ‘Decio’ and might feasibly also contain further details of the variety’s origin story⁷. Morgan and Richards also referenced a book entitled Agrumi, Frutta e uve Nella Firenze di Agrumi, frutta e uve nella Firenze di Bartolomeo Bimbi pittore mediceo (Citrus fruits, fruit and grapes in the Florence of Bartolomeo Bimbi, a Medici painter) by Cristina Bignami, which was published in 1982; it’s still very much in copyright and therefore unavailable online.

I did however manage to find a mention of a ‘Decia’ apple in a much older work: Opera Latina (1501), which seems to be a collection of miscellaneous Latin works by Renaissance poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca, a.k.a. Petrarch, which was published some 125 years after the poet’s death. This particular volume contains the following snippet:

“… Romanis ducibus, Appio & Decio, à quibus poma Appia & Decia in Italiam aduectas illa prædulcia hæc uerò subacria utraque sapidissima suorum nomina traxisse uidentur auctorum.”

A translation of which⁸ reads:

“…Under the Roman leaders Appius and Decius, from [by?] whom the apples Appia and Decia were brought to Italy, the former (Appia) being very sweet, the latter (Decia) somewhat tart, both exceptionally flavourful, [they?] seem to have derived their names from their originators.”

This suggests that Petrarch, who lived and wrote in the mid-fourteenth century, was aware of, or even familiar with⁹, a tart, flavourful ‘Decia’ – one very slight letter-change away from both ‘Decio’ and ‘Dece’ – apple, that he believed to have been named for the “Roman leader” Decius. This could have been the short-reigning (249 – 251 CE) Emperor Gaius Messius Quintus Trajanus Decius, who was a military commander before and during his time as Emperor, and who was killed in battle by the goths in 251 CE.

There’s a clear suggestion of an ancient Roman connection there, and from a source that’s earlier than any quoted so far; in fact, it’s the only pre-Renaissance source I’ve found so far that mentions what could be a name-variant of ‘Decio’. And whilst there’s no mention of General Ezio this time, it has given me an idea.

My ‘Decio’ Origin Theory

Taking all of the above into account, I’d like to put forward an idea. We’ve already seen how a number of ancient Roman apple varieties – for instance, the ‘Matio’, ‘Scaudio’ and ‘Appio’, all via Pliny – were named for notable members of various families, or gens. ‘Decius’ was also Roman family name and, as I’ve already mentioned, there was an Emperor named Decius who died fighting Rome’s barbarian enemies in 251 CE. I think it’s entirely possible that an apple variety was named ‘Decius’ in his honour, at some point after his death.

Admittedly, there’s no apple variety called ‘Decius’ in any of the sources that I looked at in the previous section, but then the only one of those sources that was written after 251 CE was that of Palladius, and of course he neglected to list the apple varieties of his day, so that might help to explain the absence.

Perhaps this same ‘Decius’ apple then became a favourite with General Ezio a.k.a. Flavius Aetius – maybe it stored particularly well, or was just cheap and plentiful – and so he took supplies of ‘Decius’ with him on his North Italian campaign of 452 CE, during which it became popular with his soldiers. Assuming some of those soldiers would have become farmers after leaving the army, which I gather was quite a common practice, perhaps they planted and grew ‘Decius’ apples on their new farms and estates, in memory of their time in service, or in honour of their commander.

In which case, the variety could easily have been grown, grafted and kept alive through the following centuries by farming families in the Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Lazio regions of North-Eastern Italy. But the descendants of those ex-soldiers remembered the name of these apples as ‘melo d’Ezio‘, “General Ezio’s apple”, rather than the original ‘Decius’. Over time the name ‘d’Ezio’ could have gradually morphed into the extremely similar-sounding ‘Decio’, possibly via ‘Dece’ and/or ‘Decia’?

Likewise, the apples’ two origin stories might also have gradually merged. Two generals, each of whom fought a barbarian invasion, and each of whom were associated with a late Roman-era apple variety that was always popular enough to survive into the pre-Renaissance period, and beyond, to the present day. How difficult would it have been to confuse or conflate these two generals – Decius and Ezio, hence the slightly contradictory but also quite similar tales of the apple’s origin?

I don’t think that’s too far-fetched a scenario. It’s just a shame that it’s not even remotely provable without the discovery of a lot more relevant documentary evidence to back it up.

Whilst I’m theorising, I’d like to put forward another, slightly less romantic suggestion as well. The word ‘Decio’ is likely to be derived in some manner from ‘decem’, the Latin for the number ten. And, clearly visible in the N.F.C. reference image is a ring of ten dots around the core of the fruit (see below, bottom-right).

Could the name ‘Decio’ be linked to these ten dots? This same pattern of prominent dots, which isn’t shared by all apple varieties, is also clearly visible in the variety ‘Ten Commandments’, and that’s apparently how that variety got its name¹⁰. Perhaps ‘Decio’ is a close relative of ‘Ten Commandments’? Or even – bearing in mind that ‘Ten Commandments’ isn’t currently held in the National Fruit Collection, and so probably hasn’t been genetically fingerprinted, as ‘Decio’ has been – perhaps it could be the same apple? Further investigation would be required there, clearly.

I do prefer my first idea. It’s a better story, as well as a potential explanation of a means by which ‘Decio’ could, in theory, be a genuine, ancient Roman survivor. Possibly. Potentially. Perhaps.

‘Court Pendu Plat’

Onwards, to the other proposed ancient Roman survivor: ‘Court Pendu Plat’. I’m actually in the midst of writing another long-read article that traces the morphology of the numerous synonyms and sub-varieties of the ‘Court Pendu’, so I’ve decided not to go into all the same detail here; rather than examining and summarising every single source in detail, I’ve just been looking for specific references to Roman origins.

Once again here’s a reminder of the variety’s origin-story, via the N.F.C. database:

“This variety originated in Europe. It was first described in about 1613 but believed to be much older than this.”

“Much older” is intriguing, isn’t it? But how much older? H. V. Taylor had this to say in The Apples of England 3rd edtn (1946):

“Perhaps the oldest variety of apple now grown in England. It was mentioned as being an old variety in the sixteenth century … Some pomological writers hint that its origin dates back to Roman times.”

So that’s one or more hints, via sources unspecified, of an ancient Roman origin – although it seems Taylor wasn’t necessarily on-board with the theory – to add to the belief that ‘Court Pendu Plat’ is “much older” than a description that was made of it in 1613. Not much to go on so far, but Joan Morgan and Alison Richards’ The Book of Apples (1993) has more to add:

“Europe, described c.1613 by Bauhin, but believed older. Known Court Pendu Rouge in France. History much confused with Court Pendu Gris … Claimed Roman origin, but Leroy considered Court Pendu Gris had ancient associations … Some claim [Court Pendu Gris] was Roman and Cestiana of Pliny. Estienne named it Court Pendu in 1540 because it was ‘short hanged’ i.e. short stalk. ‘Capendu’ known to Parkinson in 1629, Court Pendu Plat known England by C18th.”

This is much better, particularly because it helps to establish the essential point that there’s clearly more than one ‘Court Pendu’ apple. In fact, I happen to know – via that other research project – that ‘Court Pendu Plat’ was once considered a sub-type of a much larger group of ‘Court Pendu’ apples,¹¹ the total number of which, depending on the source, ranged from four to thirteen varieties.

Another key point made by Morgan and Richards is that there is considered to be a distinction between ‘Court Pendu Plat (or Rouge)’ and ‘Court Pendu Gris’, and that these two apple varieties have been “much confused”. Therefore, it was important to be careful to distinguish between the two when examining the sources.

Speaking of which, I looked into those other authors mentioned by Morgan and Richards: Bauhin, Leroy, Estienne and Parkinson.

Johann Bauhin, writing at some point before his death in 1613, and John Parkinson, writing in 1629, mentioned a ‘Capendua’ and a ‘Capanda’ apple, respectively, but neither of them made any explicit connections with ancient Roman varieties.

The other two authors were much more helpful. Morgan and Richards said that Leroy considered ‘Court Pendu Gris’ to have “ancient associations”, rather than ‘Court Pendu Plat’. And indeed, André Leroy, in volume three of his Dictionnaire de Pomologie (1873) described ‘Court Pendu Gris’, and (per the Google translation from the French) also said the following of its background:

“History – This is the ancient Capendu, the oldest, the true type of the various Court Pendu apple trees. Its reputation was already very great before 1400, and almost universal; so we find it carefully described by pomologists or botanists of the 16th century … The origin of the Court-Pendu gris becomes difficult to specify since before 1500 we see this apple tree already cultivated among the French, the Italians and the Swiss. That the Romans possessed it, no one can affirm, their agronomists having made no description of the varieties Matienne, Petisienne and Sestienne, to which it has been tried, occasionally, to attach it. As for me, I believe it was born on our soil, and perhaps even in Normandy, where from 1400, thanks to the recent research of the archivist of Seine-Inférieure, Mr. Robillard de Beaurepaire, I encounter it for the first time in several localities: in 1423, in Andelys, in Anneville-sur-Seine, in Rouen; then in 1428 at the abbey of Montivilliers where the superior bought two baskets for 7 sous 6 deniers.”

Leroy clearly thought that ‘Court Pendu Gris’ was the “ancient Capendu”, which possessed a reputation “very great” and “almost universal”. But Leroy also doubted that ‘Capendu’ was an ancient Roman apple, believing that it originated in Normandy in the fifteenth century. Leroy also said that other writers had associated ‘Court Pendu Gris’ with “Matienne, Petisienne and Sestienne” – presumably the ancient Roman varieties Matiana, Petisia and Cestiana – although sadly he doesn’t say which writers had made any of those associations, and so the trail went cold at that point.

Charles Estienne was a tougher nut to crack. The 1540 text that Morgan and Richards are referring to appears to be Seminarium Sive Plantarium Earum Arborum, Quae Post Hortos Conseri Solent (A Nursery of Those Trees Which Are Usually Planted in Gardens?). In a lengthy section on apples and apple trees, Estienne covers much the same ground that I’m re-covering here, discussing the ancient Roman authors and the varieties that they named. On p.53, Estienne has the following to say:

“Pomorum omnia quæ apud nos reperiuntur longè commedatissima sunt quæ vulgò Capenduta vocantur. De courpendu: fortassis curtipendia sive curtipenda apellanda, à pediculi, è que dependent, brevitate: ut ipsi veluti arbori inhærere videantur, & è ramis sine pediculo prodire. Itali Calamila apellát, quasi omniú optima: præsertim circa Romam & Bonomiam. Nam Veneti corrupte Calamania vocant. Saporis sunt admodum iucundi, & odoris gratissimi, in táta suauitate minime sugacia, magnitudine media, colore, cum maturuerunt, luteo. Cætera petito apud Ruellium.”

ChatGPT’s translation is as follows:

“Among all the apples found here, by far the most highly esteemed are those commonly called Capenduta. The courpendu: perhaps it should be called curtipendia or curtipenda, from the shortness of the stem from which it hangs, so that it appears to cling directly to the tree, emerging from the branches without a stem. The Italians call it Calamila, as though it were the best of all, especially around Rome and Bologna. The Venetians, however, corruptly call it Calamania. It has a very pleasant flavor and an extremely delightful fragrance, which does not fade in its entire pleasantness. It is medium in size, with a yellow color when ripe. For other details, consult Ruellius.”

There’s an explicit connection there between the ‘Capenduta’ – which I think is close enough to ‘Capendua’, or rather ‘Capendula’, for it to maybe be a type-setting error rather than a deliberate synonym – and ‘courpendu’, and whilst a direct link isn’t made back to ancient Rome, there is a strong link to the regions of Italy around Rome and Bologna, where the same apple was apparently called ‘Calamila’, “as though it were the best of all”, except by the Venetians, who erroneously called it ‘Calamania’.

Again, there was a number of intriguing clues and a developing tradition of an ancient Roman ancestry, but nothing definite as yet. At this point, I decided it was time to call on Victorian Britain’s premier pomologist, and see what he had to say.

Robert Hogg examined the origins of the ‘Capendua’ or ‘Capendu’ apple in British Pomology (1851). Hogg, like Leroy a couple of decades later, was clearly of the opinion that ‘Capendu’ was a different apple to ‘Court-Pendu Plat’¹²:

“This is not the Capendu of Duhamel, as quoted by Lindley and Downing ; neither is it the Court-pendu of Forsyth and De Quintinye, that variety being the Fenouillet Rouge of Duhamel … The name ‘Capendu’ or ‘Capendua’, is mentioned by the earliest authors, but applied to different varieties of apples. It is met with in Ruellius, Tragus, Curtius and Dalechamp, the latter considering it the Cestiana of Pliny.”

Another statement that ‘Court Pendu Plat’ is not the same apple as, this time, ‘Fenouillet Rouge’ – which is an accepted synonym for ‘Court Penu Gris’ – and more clues as to potential sources of information on ‘Capendu’ / ‘Capendua’.

The first five authors that Hogg mentioned are George Lindley, author of A Guide to the Orchard and Kitchen Garden (1831); Andrew Jackson Downing, author of The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845); William Forsyth snr., author of A Treatise on the Culture and Management of Fruit Trees (1802); Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinye, author of Instructions Pour les Jardins Fruitiers et Potagers (1690), and Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau, author of Traité des Arbres Fruitiers (Treatise on Fruit Trees) (1768).

All five authors do mention variations on ‘Court Pendu’, or ‘Capendu’ apples, but none of them discuss any potential ancient Roman links or origins, and so I’ll leave the detail of their contributions to my other article. Hogg then briefly mentioned another four, much earlier, potential sources; let’s see which, if any, of them might turn out to be useful.

“Ruellius” is Jean Ruel – whose Latin prose has already defeated me once, although I did have another go – and in De Nature Stirpium Libri Tres (1536) whilst he did indeed mention the ‘Capendua’ apple it’s seems to be mainly to sing its praises as the finest apple in France at the time, an apple that was so good it was even exported, because it kept its flavour and aroma in the process. But he didn’t specifically link it to any ancient Roman varieties, as far as I can tell.

“Tragus” is apparently the Latinised name of German botanist Heironymus Bock whose Kreutterbuch (Herbal) of 1546 includes an entry for ‘Apfelbaum’ (apple tree). I’ve scanned the entry in the 1560 edition as best I can and can’t find a mention of ‘Capendua’ or anything else that seems relevant, so perhaps Hogg had a different volume in mind.

Likewise “Curtius”, the nickname of sixteenth century author Benedicto Curtio (a.k.a. Benoît de Court), whose Hortorum Libri Triginta was published in 1560. This volume does contain, from p. 520, a section on Malus and once again, he signs the praises of an apple called “capendina” or “curpendina, deriving the name from their form, as they hang on short stalks”, but there doesn’t seem to be a link back to any older varieties.

Finally, “Dalechamp” would of course be Jacques Daléchamps, whose Historia Generalis Plantarum (1586) we’ve already looked at in the previous section. And as we’ve seen, that volume does mention of a number of apples, one of which is:

“… Cestióque (unde Cestiana quibusda Pommes de Capandu)”

Google Translate struggled with this one, but the gist seems to be:

“Cestióque (from which comes Cestiana, to some Pommes de Capendu)”

Later on the same page, Daléchamps mentions a very similarly-named apple:

“Capendula, sive Curtipendula, vulgo dicta”

Which translates to something along the lines of:

“Capendula, or Curtipendula, commonly called”

Although he doesn’t specifically link the two varieties, Daléchamps’s ‘Capendula’ is only a syllable away from ‘Capendu’, so I think it could potentially be the same variety. The suggestion by Daléchamps that ‘Capendula’ is also known as ‘Curtipendula’, meaning ‘short hanging’ – from curtus, “shortened”, and pendulus, “hanging” – also seems to imply that it had a particularly short stem. If so, that echoes Curtius’ link between ‘capendina’ or ‘curpendina’, and also links ‘Capendula’, or ‘Pommes de Capendu’ to ‘Court Pendu’ because the latter, when translated from the French, means “short hanged”, or in Hogg’s words “suspended short”. Therefore, ‘Court Pendu’ could logically be said to be the same apple as ‘Cestiana’ or ‘Cestióque’.

I do have a minor quibble with Hogg’s analysis though: there is no “Cestiana of Pliny”. According to both the Rackham and the Bostock editions of Naturalis Historia, Pliny didn’t mention a ‘Cestiana’ apple, he listed a ‘Cestióque’, which Daléchamps subsequently said became known as ‘Cestiana’ and then ‘Pommes de Capendu’ in due course.

It was actually Columella who first mentioned the the ‘Cestina’, or ‘Cestine’, prior to Pliny. Could that be the same variety as the ‘Cestiana’ / ‘Cestióque’? I think it’s probably close enough to assume so. In which case, Hogg could have assumed the same association, or mixed up his Pliny and Columella references, or simply referred to another, un-named source that had previously made the link between ‘Cestióque’ and ‘Cestina’ / ‘Cestiana’, and assumed that said source was correct.

It’s also important to note that whilst Daléchamps implied a link between ‘Pommes de Capendu’ and Pliny’s ‘Cestióque’, via ‘Cestiana’ he didn’t say who, exactly, considered ‘Pommes de Capendu’ to be equivalent to ‘Cestiana’. It’s another un-sourced reference, which means that Daléchamps too was, in effect, passing on hearsay, rather than providing a fact; the trail had gone cold again. The best we can therefore conclude is that, at some point prior to 1586, someone, somewhere, thought that the association might hold true. Possibly. Maybe. But neither definitively, nor demonstrably.

There’s one last suggestion of a Roman origin for a ‘Court Pendu’ apple to be checked, and it can be found in the footnotes of Bostock’s translation of Pliny. Here Bostock said that both the Matian and the Cestian were thought by Daléchamps to be “the French ‘court-pendu” or ‘short stalk’. However, if we expand the previously-quoted passage from Daléchamps we find it reads:

“Ni fallor apparebit ex eo ingenium inferendi : nihilque tam paruum esse, quod non gloriam parete possit. Ergo habent originem a Matio, Cestioque (unde Cestiana quibusda Pommes de Capandu) & Manlio, item Claudio.”

Here, Daléchamps is echoing Pliny’s comment that seemingly all it takes to become famous is to discover a new variety of apple, which is how the varieties Matio, Cestioque / Cestiana, Manlio and Claudio got their names; they were named for the Roman citizens who discovered them. I don’t think though that this means Daléchamps thought ‘Matio’ was also called ‘Pommes de Capandu’, it’s fairly clear that he was referring only to the ‘Cestioque’ / ‘Cestiana’ when making that association.

However, Bostock also mentioned that another apple, the ‘Petisian’ – which Pliny said was, in his day, the most recently introduced to Italy, and described as “a small one with a most agreeable flavour” – was considered to be ‘Court-pendu’ by another writer, by the name of Adrian Junius.

Junius was the author of The Nomenclator, or Remembrancer of Adrianus Junius (1583), a sort of proto-encyclopaedia or dictionary that collected together and defined loose groups of terms and phrases. Beginning on page 96 of that volume we find a selection of fruit-related terms, and discover that what he said was:

“Mala petisia … Pommes de carpendu, capendu. Pippins.”

That’s another unreferenced source, therefore it’s hearsay again, rather than strong evidence. And technically, Junius didn’t actually refer to ‘Court Pendu’, but ‘Capendu’, although as we’ve seen, ‘Capendu’ was considered by both Hogg and Leroy to be another name for ‘Court Pendu Gris’, in which case Bostock, via Junius, would be correct by inference.

After all that deep-diving into the sources, where does it leave us? Well, as far as I can make out, there are two varieties of Roman-era apples – the ‘Cestióque’ / ‘Cestian’ / ‘Cestina’ / ‘Cestine’ / ‘Cestiana’, and the ‘Petisia’ / ‘Petisian’ – that were considered to be earlier names for ‘Court Pendu Gris‘, via its alternate guises of ‘Pomme de Capendu’, ‘Capendua’, ‘Capendula’, ‘Curtipendula’, etc.

Neither link seems to have a particularly stronger case than the other, as they’re both based on sources that don’t in turn reference earlier sources, and so the trail ends with them. Likewise, they both involve a linguistic jump, from either ‘Cestioque’ / ‘Cestiana’ or ‘Petisian’, to ‘Capendu’ / ‘Court Pendu’. There doesn’t appear to be a clear link in either case.

We’re therefore left with an apple variety which may have originally been known as ‘Cestiana’ or ‘Petisiana’, which then somehow became ‘Capendu’, and maybe ‘Capendula’, or ‘Curtipendula’ – a name that has the same essential meaning as ‘Court Pendu’ – which later came to be called ‘Court Pendu Gris’; the preferred name of which, according to The National Fruit Collection is now ‘Fenouillet Rouge’. But there’s no clear trail of evidence for any of the above, we only have a tradition that has been passed down by various pomological writers over several centuries.

‘Court-Pendu Plat’, or ‘Court-Pendu Rouge’, on the other hand, seems to have been considered by at least two strong authorities on the subject – Hogg and Leroy – to be a different apple to ‘Court Pendu Gris’ rather than a synonym, and Hogg for one categorically stated that ‘Court Pendu Plat’ was not the same ‘Court Pendu’ that was equated with ‘Capendu’.

We can therefore conclude that ‘Court Pendu Plat’ is most likely not a modern-day version of the ancient Roman ‘Cestióque’, which has been identified with ‘Pommes de Capendu’, and can probably rule out the likelihood of an ancient Roman connection as a result.

Something else to consider: if, in theory, we accept that both ‘Decio’ and ‘Court Pendu Gris’ (a.k.a ‘Capendu’, ‘Capendua’ or ‘Capendula’) could have originally been ancient Roman-era apple varieties that survived the intervening centuries; and do so on the basis that the suggested associations made by the likes of Petrarch, Junius, Daléchamps and other Renaissance-era writers provide strong enough evidence of a link to draw that conclusion, then surely any similar associations between mid-sixteenth century apples and ancient Roman varieties should be considered equally correct.

So if we also accept the validity of the associations between the Renaissance-era and ancient Roman-era varieties on the list put forward by Daléchamps, then means there could be around a dozen ancient Roman apple varieties that have survived into the Renaissance era, some of which might still be available today.

Once again, the problem is that there just isn’t enough strong evidence of a definite chain of transmission of scion material from ancient Rome to the Renaissance, never mind from the Renaissance to the present day, and so the hypothesis, unfortunately, cannot be conclusively proven.

It’s time to attempt to pull everything together. If you head on over to Ancient Roman Apple Varieties – Summary and Conclusions, you’ll find a list of ancient Roman apple (and “apple”) varieties from the ancient Roman sources that I’ve referenced, along with a summarised version of the discussions above.

Footnotes

1. Not that the Romans all left en masse at that exact point; I do know there was more of a gradual diminishing of the Roman presence once the Legions had been recalled to the continent. ↩︎
2. The Sack of Padua was carried out in 452 CE by Atilla the Hun, following the complete destruction of the Roman city of Aquileia, but according to Wikipedia, General Ezio (Flavius Aetius) continued to attack the Hunnic armies in what sounds like a guerrilla campaign and this constant harassment may eventually have forced Atilla to retreat from northern Italy, although some historians think that “Aetius was unable to offer a meaningful resistance and his authority was greatly damaged.” (via Wikipedia). ↩︎
3. I suspect there was a hyphenated split at the end of a line of print – Bo-cchi – and the second syllable was missed during the copy and paste procedure. ↩︎
4. Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance chef and author of Dell’Arte del Cucinare (1570), a 1610 edition of which is available via Google Books. ↩︎
5. That’s a lot of apples for two people, so presumably the intention was to feed their entire retinue? ↩︎
6. The Societa Toscana d’Orticultura is in the process of archiving their old journals and making them available online, but sadly it seems they’ve only reached 1938 so far, which means that 1940 article isn’t available to double-check just yet. ↩︎
7. The report doesn’t seem to be available online and any print copies that are offered for sale are around the $110 mark; far too pricey for me. I therefore have no means to verify its contents and check whether an older, authoritative source is quoted for ‘Decio’. But if you happen to have a copy of said report, and can read it, and can find any relevant information within, please do let me know, via the comments. ↩︎
8. Helpfully provided by ChatGPT after Google Translate choked on it. ↩︎
9. It does sound to me as if he was speaking from experience when he described the flavour of both apples. ↩︎
10. Sadly, I can’t place the source of that information, but I’ve definitely read it somewhere. If I do find the reference, I’ll update this footnote. ↩︎
11. Again, I’ll go into more detail in that other article. For now, it is sufficient to note that there’s more than one ‘Court Pendu’ apple, and they’re not all ‘Plat’. ↩︎
12. Hogg preferred ‘Court Pendu Plat’ as the principle name, with Court-Pendu Rouge’ as a synonym ↩︎