Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Hezārfenn and the Coffee: Texts, Documents and Translations

Abstract

In 1683 Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili volunteered for the troops that Leopold I of Habsburg was recruiting against the army of Mehmet IV, who was about to besiege Vienna. Marsili, though, during the skirmishes preceding the siege, was wounded, captured and brought as a slave to the Ottoman camp where he learned how to prepare coffee and served as a kahveci (coffee maker). After his ransom, in 1685, he sent to press in Vienna a short treatise entitled Historia medica del cavé (‘Medical history of coffee’). In this work, entirely dedicated to coffee, he combined, according to the empirical spirit of his time, the knowledge of scholarship, with his own personal observations and firsthand experience he had gained during his slavery. In the central part of his work, Marsili entrusts the task of scientifically explaining the origins, the characteristics and the virtues of the coffee to the Ottoman man of letters Ḥusayn Efendi (Hezārfenn) who Marsili had meet during his stay in Constantinople in 1679. In the Historia Medica, Marsili not only recognizes the authority of Hezārfenn on coffee, but also includes in his text the entire treatise that Hezārfenn had wrote on the subject with a parallel Italian translation. This paper will compare the multiple contexts of interaction between these two texts and their authors. In particular, it will analyze the way through which Marsili presents and uses the authority of the Ottoman text and inserts it, in its original script, into the core his treatise. By examining Marsili’s interest in Hezārfenn’s works, this paper will also emphasize his role as a cross-boundary mediator who moving back and forth from one culture to the other, as a diplomat as well as a slave, contributed significantly to building those cultural bridges through which the Muslim and the Christian world never stopped learning from each other, even in a setting of constant conflict.