Coffee in Europe: When and How It Arrived

Coffee reached Europe by the 17th century: Venice had it by 1615, and Marseille received its first beans in 1644. Travelers' reports came first; by the end of the 1680s, Venice, Marseille, Paris and Vienna were all selling it by the cup.

So when was coffee introduced to Europe? Any page that answers with a single year is, in my view, answering the wrong question. "Introduced" hides at least three different events: a traveler describing a drink abroad, merchants shipping beans home, and someone opening a door and charging strangers for a cup. Those happened decades apart, in different cities, and the people who made them happen were often not the people on the plaques. For the plant and the drink before Europe got involved, start with where coffee first came from. This story begins at the Ottoman edge.

Europe read about coffee before it drank it

The first European to describe coffee being prepared and drunk was Leonhard Rauwolf, a physician and botanist from Augsburg, who saw it in Aleppo. The historian Karl H. Dannenfeldt calls his account "the first such report by a European." W. H. Ukers, in All About Coffee (1922), has Rauwolf reaching Aleppo in November 1573; Dannenfeldt says the travel book came out in 1582.

Then came Prospero Alpini, a physician and botanist from Padua. According to Ukers, he traveled to Egypt in 1580 and came back with news of coffee. News, not a sack of beans: the trip is often retold as an import, and nothing I have seen supports that reading. His De plantis Aegypti (The Plants of Egypt), printed in Venice in 1592, is one of the first printed descriptions of the plant and the drink. The antiquarian bookseller Libreria Perini notes that it is best known today for containing "the first European illustration of the coffee plant."

Diplomats were watching too. Ukers reports that in 1585 the Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini told the Senate, from Constantinople, that the Turks drank a hot black drink. The Ottoman capital had been drinking it in public since its first coffeehouses opened in the mid-1550s. Europe, in other words, had coffee in its reports long before it had coffee in its cups.

Venice: the first door

By 1615, Venetian traders had brought coffee into Europe; Ukers and the National Coffee Association both give that year. Keep the "by". Other dates circulate, earlier and later; none settles the matter.

Venice also handed Europe its favorite coffee myth. The story goes that priests asked Pope Clement VIII to ban the drink, and that he tasted it, liked it and approved it, "baptizing" it as a Christian beverage. It is a lovely story. The National Catholic Register is blunt: "There is no documentation of such a decree regarding coffee." Joe Schwarcz of McGill University's Office for Science and Society tells it with a warning attached: "According to the legend, which it almost certainly is," and I agree with him.

Here is a wrinkle of my own, which no source I relied on spells out. Clement VIII died in 1605. Yet the popular version, the one on the National Coffee Association's history page, has coffee reaching Venice in 1615 and then says "Pope Clement VIII was asked to intervene." Read literally, that would have him ruling on coffee ten years after his death. The date McGill and the National Catholic Register give the legend, around 1600, at least fits his reign. Fitting a reign is not the same as fitting the record.

Where was Europe's first coffeehouse?

Nobody can name it with confidence, and I would be wary of anyone who does. Ukers writes that the first coffeehouse in Italy is "said to have been opened in 1645, but convincing confirmation is lacking." What he does treat as solid is a later date: "It is certain, however, that a coffee shop was opened in Venice in 1683 under the Procuratie Nuove." Italia.it, the official Italian tourism site, agrees that a coffee shop was operating in Piazza San Marco by the end of the 17th century. Marseille's 1671 coffeehouse, below, already predates that Venetian shop, and England has its own story, told in when England first tasted coffee.

And Caffè Florian? It opened in St. Mark's Square on December 29, 1720, under the name Alla Venezia Trionfante (Triumphant Venice). It is old and it is famous, but it came decades after the 1683 shop Ukers calls certain.

Marseille: France's southern door

Venice was not alone in taking coffee from the eastern Mediterranean. Coffee first reached France at Marseille in 1644, a date given by both Ukers and Gilles Bouvenot of the French Académie nationale de médecine. Ukers credits P. de La Roque, father of the writer Jean de La Roque.

A public room followed. In Ukers's words, "In 1671 certain private persons opened a coffee house in Marseilles, near the Exchange." The Marseille website Made in Marseille calls it the city's first public establishment for selling coffee. By its account, the owner was an Armenian called Pascali, who then sold up and moved to the Saint-Germain fair in Paris. If that is right, Marseille's Pascali and the Pascal who turns up in Paris (below) are the same man. It rests on one source, so treat it as a tempting lead rather than a settled fact.

The doctors were not amused. In 1679, according to Bouvenot, Marseille's physicians had a candidate, Claude Colomb, defend a thesis arguing that coffee harmed most of the city's inhabitants. Bouvenot says it changed little, and Ukers says the coffeehouses stayed busy. For me it is the best scene in the story: doctors against a cup, and the cup wins.

Paris before Le Procope

Paris learned coffee from two directions. Ukers, following Jean de La Roque, says the traveler Jean de Thévenot brought it privately into Paris in 1657. The fashionable push came in 1669, when Soliman Aga, the Ottoman envoy of Mehmed IV, arrived in Paris and, in Ukers's words, "introduced the coffee drink, made in Turkish style, to the French capital."

The public sale came soon after. "Pascal, an Armenian," as Ukers puts it, opened a coffee booth at the Saint-Germain fair. La Roque gives 1672; Ukers places it two years after Soliman Aga's arrival, which makes 1671. Call it the early 1670s. Le Procope, the café everyone remembers, came later, and it belongs to the wider history of the coffeehouse.

Vienna, Amsterdam and the north

Vienna's legend credits Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Polish-born siege messenger, but the City of Vienna says the first coffeehouse "was actually opened by the Armenian spy Diodato" (1683; Austria-Forum: Greek, 1685), so call it the mid-1680s. The rest of the story of Vienna coffee deserves a page of its own.

Farther north, Ukers dates regular imports of coffee from Mocha to Amsterdam to 1663, which ties Europe's early cups to the Mocha trade. He also writes that coffee drinking reached Germany about 1670, and that an English merchant opened the first coffeehouse in Hamburg in 1679 to 1680. German coffee history has many more chapters than that one line.

The outsiders who built Europe's coffeehouse

Look at the names that keep surfacing in the record. Pascal, an Armenian, in Paris, and perhaps the same man, Pascali, in Marseille. Diodato, Armenian or Greek depending on the source, in Vienna. An English merchant in Hamburg. An Ottoman envoy in Paris. The legends prefer heroes: a pope who blessed the drink and a siege messenger, though he too was born in Poland.

My read is that Europe's first coffee rooms were largely opened by people from outside the cities they served, and that the founding myths were told later to give the habit a blessing and a hero. That is an interpretation, not a finding. But it fits most of the cities in this piece better than any single date does.

So the next time someone tells you coffee arrived in Europe in a given year, ask which arrival they mean. The report, the cargo and the cup each have their own date, and their own cast.

Europe's first cups are one chapter of a longer story: browse the history and culture of coffee, or follow the room itself through the coffeehouse's own story.