SC - Hildegard von Bingen (Long)

[Jane Waks]

> Coffee is period, although probably late period outside of Abyssinia. I
> don't know how early it reached Frangistan but it was spreading through
> al-Islam during about the last two centuries of our period. And there is
> some evidence, which I think Bear offered in a previous discussion, for at
> least medicinal use earlier.
	<snipped>

> David Friedman
> Professor of Law
> Santa Clara University
> ddfr at best.com
> http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
> 
> 
I thoroughly enjoyed your response to the article on coffee in TI.  Since
I've done a little more research and revised some of my opinions, I thought
I might add my tuppence to the commentary.  Frankly, I am still of the
opinion there was a medical trade in coffee early on, but that the origin of
coffee as a beverage is probably no earlier that the 11th Century (based on
some flimsy evidence, I admit, but it fits known facts).  I am also of the
opinion that the general drinking of coffee occurs only during the last
century and a half of the SCA period and that its use prior to 1454 was very
limited.

Here is a revised and abbreviated history:

Rhazes (900) and Avicenna (1000) both speak of the coffee plant and berry.
Neither speaks of coffee as a beverage.  Their possession of the plant and
berries suggests that there was a medical trade in coffee.  Coffee was
probably ground and used as a powder rather than infused in a beverage. 

The first references to coffee as a drink are apocryphal and, at the
earliest, date from 1258 (Mocha, Yemen).  Coffee was being used as a
beverage in Sufi rituals.  In fact until 1454, the most common use of coffee
appears to have been by the Sufis.  Since Sufism originates in Persia and
Rhazes and Avicenna were both Persians, there may be a link between the
Sufis and the physicians of Persia in the creation of coffee as a beverage,
but there are no facts currently available.

The first historical record of coffee drinking is from a treatise on coffee
written in approximately 1558.  It records a meeting between a Yemen jurist
and Shaykh Jamal al-Din Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Sa'id al-Dhabbani, an
imam, mufti, and Sufi from Aden.  As al-Dhabbani died about 1470, the
account establishes coffee as a beverage by the mid-15th Century.
Al-Dhabbani is apparently the key figure in the commercialization of coffee,
having started plantations in Yemen after being introduced to the beverage
in Abyssinia in 1454.

By 1540, coffee was a common, if not universally accepted, beverage in the
Islamic World.  Leonard Rauwolf of Augsburg was the first European to
describe coffee from a trip to the Levant in 1570.

In the last quarter of the 16th Century, the Venetians began importing
coffee into Northern Italy.  The initial importer may have been
Gianfrancesco Morosini, the city magistrate at Constantinople, who is known
to have encountered the beverage in 1585, or a major spice trader named
Mocengio.  These initial imports would most likely have been for wealthy
clients, who had developed a taste for coffee while travelling in the
Ottoman Empire.  General coffee use in Italy did not get established until
about 1645. 

One of the chief errors made about the history of coffee is placing coffee
at the gates of Vienna in 1529.  Coffee was new in Constatinople at that
time and if there was any at Vienna, there wasn't much.  The coffee which
started the first Viennese coffee house was lost by the Ottomans during the
siege of 1683.  So, no known coffee in 1529, sorry.

Until the last century of our period, coffee was largely limited to the Red
Sea area.  It then spread through Islam.  It spread from the Ottoman Empire
into Europe only in the last 25 years of our period and then only into
Northern Italy.  

Bear
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