Legendary accounts and mythsThere are multiple anecdotal origin stories which lack evidence. Ralph S. Hattox records traditions in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have been introduced to a stimulating beverage by the Angel Gabriel, who recommended it for its restorative qualities.[13] In another commonly repeated legend, Kaldi, a 9th-century Ethiopian or Arab goatherd[14][15][16], first observed the coffee plant after seeing his flock energized by chewing on the plant.[4] This legend does not appear before 1671, indicating the story is likely apocryphal, first being related by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor of Oriental languages and author of one of the first printed treatises devoted to coffee, De Saluberrima potione Cahue seu Cafe nuncupata Discurscus (Rome, 1671), which describes a camel or goat herder in the Kingdom of Ayaman, Arabia Felix.[17][18][19][4] The herder is unnamed in the earliest account and the name Kaldi appears to be a later invention the twentieth century.[20] Another legend attributes the discovery of coffee to a Sheikh Omar. Starving after being exiled from Mokha, Omar found berries. After attempting to chew and roast them, Omar boiled them, which yielded a liquid that revitalized and sustained him.[1]
Historical transmission
A 1652 handbill advertising coffee for sale in St. Michael's Alley, LondonThe earliest possible references to the coffee bean and its qualities appear in al-Razi's 10th-century al-Hawi[a] and in Avicenna's 11th-century The Canon of Medicine[21][b] both which describe a plant component called bunchum as hot and dry[c]—with al-Razi reporting beneficial effects for the stomach and Ibn Sina also adding claims for the skin and body odor. According to later accounts, bunchum was made from a root rather than from coffee beans.[22][23] There is no confirmed evidence, either historical or archaeological, of coffee as a drink being consumed before the 15th century. The drink appears to be a relatively recent development. By the late 15th century, coffee drinking was well established among Sufi communities in Yemen.[22][24]
An early writer on coffee was Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri of Ottoman Iraq, who in 1587 compiled a work tracing the history and legal controversies of coffee in his ʿUmdat al-ṣafwa fī ḥill al-qahwa (عمدة الصفوة في حل القهوة), in which he claims that the coffee bean originated in the land of Sa'ad ad-Din, and the country of Abyssinia, and of the Jabart, and other places of the land of ‘Ajam, but the time of its first use is unknown, nor do we know the reason. Al-Jazīrī asserts that coffee was introduced to Cairo at the start of the 16th century by Sufi devotees.[25]
Coffee appears to have been likely collected from wild, with some indications that its use expanded from the 14th century among certain Islamized groups in southeastern Ethiopia, though direct evidence for early consumption remains scarce. The use of coffee is believed to have spread across the Red Sea to the Rasulid sultanate of Yemen, who maintained cultural and commercial ties with the Adal Sultanate. Its consumption first appears in Yemen, particularly in regions such as Aden, Mocha and Zabid during the 15th century.[26][27] The 16th-century scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami writes about the plant's development from a tree in the Zeila region.[28] In 1542, a Portuguese crew met with a ship from Zeila transporting clarified butter and coffee to Al-Shihr in Yemen.[29]
Coffee is an important part of Bosnian culture, and was a major part of its economy in the past.[30]Other sources of coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appear in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen,[4] where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee was used by Sufi circles to stay awake for their religious rituals.[31] Accounts differ on the origin of the coffee plant before its appearance in Yemen. Coffee may have been introduced to Yemen from Ethiopia via the Red Sea trade.[32] One account credits Muhammad Ibn Sa'd al-Dhabḥani for bringing coffee to Aden from the Somali coast,[33] other early accounts say Ali ben Omar of the Shadhili Sufi order was the first to introduce coffee to Arabia.[33][34][31] By the 16th century, coffee had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa.[35]
In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East:
A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.
— Léonard Rauwolf, Reise in die Morgenländer (in German)Within the Ottoman Empire, the first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Tahtakale, Istanbul.[36] Since Tahtakale is to the West of the Bosporus, this would likely have been the first coffee house in Europe. Thriving trade brought many goods, including coffee, from the Ottoman Empire to Venice. Coffee became more widely accepted in Europe after Pope Clement VIII declared it a Christian beverage in 1600, despite appeals to ban the Muslim drink. Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600 and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas.[37] The first European coffeehouse outside of the Ottoman Empire opened in Venice in 1647.[38]
