SC - Re: beestings?

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

For coffee and tea, I would recommend Ukers and Hattox.  Ukers wrote All
About Coffee and All About Tea for the coffee and tea industry in the 20's.
The are very thorough and inclusive and far more scholarly than many more
recent text.  Hattox wrote Coffee and Coffeehouses: the history of a social
beverage in the late Medieval Middle East (if I remember the title
correctly).  

Coffee (the plant and berry) was described by Rhazi's around 900 CE and
Avicenna around 1000 CE.  As a beverage, coffee appears to have been used in
Sufi rituals and entered the mainstream through the efforts of the Mufti of
Yemen (IIRC).  The earliest evidence for coffee drink in the general
population is about 1450.  I tend to argue for a general start date of 1250,
but that is speculative argument.


> On another list in a thread on What Food to Bring to War (some folks 
> here are on it too), someone asked if coffee was period.
> 
> I blundered in and wrote:
> 
> Well, coffee is only late period, say around 1400 or 1450 and only if 
> you are a Middle Easterner (men hung out in coffee houses, no 
> kidding). But no coffee in Europe until after period.
> 
> 
> Someone responded, and i quote (with spelling corrections by me):
> >Uh, not exactly true. When Emperor Maximilian of Germany captured the
> City
> >of Verona back from the Turks in 1520?, he did so by agreement after a
> >protracted siege. He did so as King Louis of France was about a week away
> with
> >a larger army, also intent of recapturing Verona for Christianity 
> >(and political
> 
AFIK, Verona was never touched by the Turks, seeing it is in Northern Italy
west of Venice.  Vienna, on the otherhand, was subjected to two sieges by
the Turks.  The first in 1529 ended when Sulieman the Magnificent retreated
into Hungary.  This siege would have been in the time of Maximillian II.
Coffee would have only been recently introduced to Constantinople (if at
all) and supplies would have been limited.  The second siege of Vienna was
in 1683.  It was lifted by a combined force of Charles of Lorraine and John
III Sobieski.  During the second siege, the Turks left behind large
quantities of coffee which were awarded to the messenger (Kolschitsky, IIRC)
who carried dispatches between the city and the relieving forces.  He opened
the first coffeehouse in Vienna.  

One of the common errors in writing about coffee is to not realize there
were two sieges and confuse the second with the first.  This is a dead
giveaway that the author didn't do their research. 

> Any comments? suggestions? sources? quotable anecdotes?
> 
>  From the fully caffeinated
> Anahita al-shazhiya
> 
BTW, the TI article on coffee is nearly worthless as a resource.  Of the
three sources quoted in the bibliography, Tannehill is too broad scoped to
be of much use on an in depth article and the other two are extremely
questionable.  Neither of the two best sources, Ukers or Hattox, was
referenced.

You might point these people to the Florilegium where they can find some
decent information, speculation and debate about coffee.

Bear