I've just started to watch this series, have seen the first 2 minutes of the first episode and here you are:
8. Leonardo's master orders coffee.
Coffee didn't come to Europe until much later from the Ottoman Empire and was hardly even invented in the mid 15th century, in Yemen probably. From English Wikipedia, coffee:
The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi Muslim monasteries around Mocha in Yemen.[4] It was here in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is now prepared. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. Coffee seeds were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland and began to cultivate the seed. The first coffee smuggled out of the Middle East was by Sufi Baba Budan from Yemen to India in 1670. Before then, all exported coffee was boiled or otherwise sterilised. Portraits of Baba Budan depict him as having smuggled seven coffee seeds by strapping them to his chest. The first plants grown from these smuggled seeds were planted in Mysore.[16] Coffee then spread to Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.[17]
A Coffee can from the first half of the 20th century. From the Museo del Objeto del Objeto collection.
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 that is 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)
From the Middle East, coffee spread to Italy. The thriving trade between Venice and North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East brought many goods, including coffee, to the Venetian port. From Venice, it was introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink." The first European coffee house opened in Italy in 1645.[17]
I'm wondering if I can watch Leonardo at all, if the inaccuracies and inconsistencies are too jarring, considering that I go to IMDb after 2 minutes to see if there is a thread about them. LOL The really funny thing is that I have to watch Leonardo with Swedish voices, not original ones. In Sweden only TV-programmes with a target audience of children under age nine are dubbed like this. Can I as a thinking, highly educated adult watch this show? I can watch Merlin, even if I find it somewhat annoying.
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