RAUWOLF, Leonhard. igentliche beschreibung der Raiß so er vor diser zeit gegen Auffgang inn die Morgenlaender fürnemlich Syriam, Iudaeam, Arabiam, Mesopotamiam, Babyloniam, Assyriam, Armeniam &c. … Alles in drey vnderschidliche Thail mit sonderem fleiß a…

The First European Eyewitness Description of Coffee

RAUWOLF, Leonhard. igentliche beschreibung der Raiß so er vor diser zeit gegen Auffgang inn die Morgenlaender fürnemlich Syriam, Iudaeam, Arabiam, Mesopotamiam, Babyloniam, Assyriam, Armeniam &c. … Alles in drey vnderschidliche Thail mit sonderem fleiß abgethailet … [Lauingen: Leonhard Reinmichel.] 1582.

4to. Early nineteenth-century German marbled boards with contrasting orange and pale blue gilt lettering- and numbering-pieces to spine, edges stained yellow, green place-marker; pp. [15], [1 (blank)], 487; title printed in red and black with woodcut vignette, within typographic border, two part-titles likewise within typographic borders and with woodcut vignettes; light wear to extremities; sporadic light marginal spotting, light browning to a few quires, old marginal repairs to wormtracks on ff. O3–P4 touching the odd character, wormtrack to last two quires touching a few words but not affecting sense; else a good copy; 1830s bibliographical notes to endpapers; upper outer corner of rear endpaper cut away, 1861 Cyrillic collector’s stamp to final blank verso.

First edition of the earliest firsthand European account of the preparation and consumption of coffee, a landmark travelogue of the Levant and Mesopotamia by physician, botanist, and pioneering traveller Leonhard Rauwolf (1535–1596).

Rauwolf (also Rauwolff) here describes his 1573–75 expedition as physician and commercial agent, funded by his brother-in-law, the Augsburg merchant Melchior Manlich, who hoped that Rauwolf would return with profitable medicinal herbs. Manlich’s close trade relationship with the Levant involved the export of Nuremberg-made hardware, mechanical goods, and textiles, as well as the import of spices, pearls, precious stones, and silk.

After nine months in Aleppo, Rauwolf – who had a keen interest in early botanical sources in Arabic and Greek – travelled through Mesopotamia, descending the Euphrates to the ruins of Babylon and Baghdad. His plans to continue to India were abandoned when news arrived of the bankruptcy of the Manlich trading house, forcing his return westwards through Kurdish territory. He reached Tripoli in May 1575, travelling through Lebanon before making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Rauwolf’s observations combine natural history with vivid descriptions of the people, customs and commercial life of the Levantine world. His account is particularly celebrated for its description of coffee: whilst in Aleppo he describes the coffee berry as well as the beverage, making him the ‘first modern botanist to collect and describe the preparation and consumption of coffee’ (Hünersdorff and Hasenkamp, Coffee, p. 1221). His is also the earliest firsthand description of coffee by a European, and the second European description of coffee in any capacity, second only to that of botanist Carolus Clusius (Charles de l’Écluse, 1526–1609), whose 1574 description of the coffee plant – rather than the beverage – was based solely on seed samples received from an Italian correspondent; Rauwolf had incidentally visited Clusius ten years earlier. Rauwolf calls the beverage – then unknown to European readers – as chaube, ‘almost as black as ink, and very beneficial for illnesses, especially those of the stomach. They drink it early in the morning, also in open places, before everyone [...] from earthenware and porcelain bowls, as hot as they can endure; they often put [the bowls] to their lips, but take little sips, and immediately pass them on’ (trans.).

The work is also notable as the first modern European account of the route from Baghdad to Mosul, and for Rauwolf’s descriptions of Jerusalem and religious life in the Near East, written from the perspective of an early Protestant pilgrim. His botanical observations were pioneering: the tropical genus Rauwolfia was later named in his honour. Rauwolf was ‘the first modern botanist to collect and describe the flora of the Near East. [The present work] provides a fascinating illustration of the difficulties and dangers of early scientific field trips. Not for another two hundred years did other botanists identify and more fully describe the plants of the areas which Rauwolf visited’ (Dannenfeldt).

Rauwolf expanded on his botanical discoveries in a fourth part added to the 1583 edition, featuring forty-two full-page woodcuts of Middle and Near Eastern plants.

OCLC finds nine copies in the US (Boston Athenaeum, BPL, Chicago, Harvard, LoC, NLM, NYPL, Princeton, Yale) and four in the UK (Aberdeen, BL, CUL, Glasgow).

BM STC German, p. 727; USTC 672364; VD16 R 430; Brunet IV, cols 1122–23. Wellcome I 5346. Not in Atabey or Blackmer; for the 1583 edition, see Linda Hall, One Hundred Herbals 92; Pritzel 8373. See ‘Dannenfeldt, Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-century Physician, Botanist, and Traveler’ (1968).

SKU: 2103801