A curious history of 15th century tells about a Yemenite shepherd: while he was looking at some goats nibbling reddish berries from a strange plant, noticed that they suddenly got restless and excited. The shepherd told this to a monk who boiled the berries and got a drink bitter and dark but so strong to let the monks keep awake during the long nights of prayer. It seems that Sudan slaves, passing through Ethiopia in their journey towards Arabia, carried some coffee still contained in the cherries surethat it would have helped them to survive fatigues: that how coffee arrived in Arabia and, from there, worldwide.
Another interesting legend - beacuse of the Moslem
origin of the product - is about archangel Gabriel
who brought down from heaven a cup of coffee to
Mohammed, who was going to get asleep despite of
his heavy obligations.
The drink was so strong that Mohammed, suddenly
waken up, defeat fifty men in a single blow. Even of
the plant origin is not certain, it remains the fact that
the shrub comes from Africa, from a region of
Ethiopia called Kaffa, and from there it spread over
into Yemen, Arabia and then in Egypt, where in a
short time it entered in the popular custom and use.
While in the Arabian world the drink was known from 11th century, in the Western countries the coffee was discovered later, at the end of 17th century: it seems that some bags full of coffee were forgotten by the Turks retiring from Vienna. At the beginning in the Western countries coffee was accused to be the devil's drink, because of its pagan origin: for this reason it had some problems before the Church accepted it. Fortunately the Pope Clement VII, before giving a definitive judgement, tasted the drink and exclaimed:
"This
drink is delicious, ir is a sin to let only the misbelievers to drink it.
Let us defeat Satan blessing the drink that may without objections
become Christian".
From that time coffee spread everywhere and its popularity grew up in a special way. It seems that king Gustavo III of Sweden, unintentionally, showed the world the innocence and the genuineness of this drink. In fact the king signed a death sentence to execute giving coffee to drink, but in spite of the considerable quantity ingested, the condemned did not die and had a longe life. In spite of these legends, the diffusion of coffee in Europe during the 17th century is probably due to the main rule of the mercantile companies of that time, mainly to the famous East Indies Company. Some of its leaders stole some plants of coffee from Kaffa brought them to Java properties, where a new production started.
The ideal weather of these lands permitted Dutchmen to become, in a few years, very big producers and to condition the market price. But the same stratagem was also achieved by the other colonial countries, as France, Spain, and Portugal. A Portuguese transplanted the first coffee plant in Brazil, beginning a production that - in a century - has led this country to be and to remain the first world producer. At the end of the 17th century, in Europe the first cafés appeared: there artists, men of letters and intellectuals join together to talk, discuss and drink coffee, as it happened, a century before, in the Arabian lands. Probably Venetians have been the firsts to import coffee in Europe and, in 1645, to open the first café in the Old Continent; in a short time, other cafés opened in Vienna, Paris, London and in other main European cities.
