Black Gold

It happened that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when coffee drinking was first becoming established in Yemen both ritually and domestically, coincided with the first flush of the Ottoman empire. In 1517 at Cairo, having already conquered Constantinople and most of the Balkans in the previous century, the Ottomans under Selim I finally defeated the Mamelukes, who had been the rulers of Egypt and the Levant for the previous 250 years. The Ottomans had thus acquired, along with the holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina, the Caliphate – the spiritual leadership of Islam. The Mamelukes were originally a soldier-slave élite from southern Russia and the Caucasus. Driven from Egypt by the advancing Ottomans, a large number made their way to Yemen in 1516 where they settled in the Tihama, the desert coastal plain – it is said that they chose Yemen because they knew that qat was plentiful there. They finally succumbed to the Ottomans, who had taken Aden in 1538 and themselves started to occupy the Tihama, although they did not take inland San’a for another ten years.

It was during the Mameluke rule in Mecca that the spread of coffee attracted its first serious obstacle, in the form of the ban imposed on it by Kha’ir Bey, who was the Pasha of the city as well as the muhtasib, the inspector of markets. On 20 June 1511, outside the mosque, he spotted a number of men drinking what appeared to him to be alcohol in buildings resembling taverns; he made enquiries and found that it was in fact a new beverage, coffee, being drunk in rudimentary coffee houses. To confuse matters, there are some indications that it was actually qish’r coffee that had reached Mecca, not yet the roasted bean form, bun. Additionally, the dry coffee cherries which made qish’r could be lightly roasted before brewing, producing sultana coffee, and the word kafta, by which coffee was sometimes known, was applied as much to a decoction made of the leaves of qat as to one made of coffee beans. It can be seen that there was probably a reasonable requirement for an authoritative clarification of exactly what was what, and what was permissible. Clearly the habit of drinking some form of coffee-based decoction had moved up the Red Sea coast in the thirty years or so since it had become established in Yemen, but it had not until this time been subjected to the catechism, and its novelty represented something of a puzzle to Islamic orthodoxy. Because of the strict prohibition on any form of intoxication, coffee was a genuinely sticky issue which required a ruling. Kha’ir Bey was the first man to attempt to provide it.

He rapidly assembled a team of learned men, doctors, clerics and ‘men on the street’. The issues they were called upon to consider, which are reported in the mahdaf’ or minutes of the meeting of jurists at Mecca, were the application of core Islamic concepts to coffee; regarding things not expressly forbidden (sunna) in the Qur’an that were permissible unless harmful to the body; regarding khamr (wine) and the idea that ‘every intoxicant is khamr and every intoxicant is forbidden’ as it rendered men ‘incapable of distinguishing a man from a woman or the earth from the heavens’; regarding jaziri ta’ assub or a fanatical non-textual conviction based on an exaggerated sense of piety; regarding ijima, or communal acceptance; and regarding marqaha, the specific intoxication brought about by coffee. The coffee houses themselves also needed to be considered: were they, as had been suggested, centres of music, gambling, and mixing of the sexes? The fact that coffee was passed around, although ritually in a dhikr, evidently evoked the alehouse. There were many issues for discussion: even its most virulent detractors could hardly claim that the result of drinking coffee met the definition of intoxication, yet it undoubtedly had some effect. The inherent moderating influences of Islam demanded that it should not be banned on the basis of an exaggerated sense of piety, yet perhaps coffee was harmful to the body? Medical opinion was sought on the basis of the humour system and its degrees – the first representing food; the second, food and medicine; the third medicine; and the fourth, poison. Coffee, it was found, was ‘cold and dry’ and heightened melancholia.

The debate and the people who took part are usually characterized in Western coffee histories as superstitious and irrational, whereas the Western heroes of the coffee saga (de Clieu, Franz Georg Kolschitsky, and Francisco de Mello Palheta, amongst others, whom we shall meet in these pages) are treated as romantic, swashbuckling figures. We have seen that Islam had been the torch-bearer of science and culture during the European Dark Ages, but as soon as the West started to overtake it in the last five hundred years of the second millennium, history, as much as any other field of endeavour, was skewed to represent the natural superiority of European, Christian ways over those of the benighted unbelievers. Many popular historians view the genuine issues and debate surrounding the introduction of the new beverage in Islam with, at best, levity and at worst an underlying contempt. It is easy to forget that coffee is a powerful drug, and that its cultural assimilation was by no means preordained. Islam, by virtue of geography, was at the forefront of the process of weighing up its advantages and disadvantages. The intellectual approach involved theology, science, polemic, and even poetry – in Yemen a literary genre emerged that pitched coffee and qat against each other in imaginary dialogue:

Qat says: They take off your husk and crush you. They force you in the fire and pound you. I seek refuge in God from people created by fire!

Coffee says: A prize can be hidden in a trial. The diamond comes clear after fire. And fire does not alter gold. The people throw most of you away and step on you. And the bits they eat, they spit out. And the spittoon is emptied down the toilet!

Qat scoffs: You say I come out of the mouth into a spittoon. It is a better place than the one you will come out!

Hashish and tobacco were similarly scrutinized when they arrived in the Middle East at the end of the sixteenth century. Alcohol had long before been the subject of controversy: the Qur’an refers (47: 15) to ‘rivers of wine … delicious to the drinkers’ but its prohibition is based on verses 5: 90–1. The continuation of that prohibition into the present day is a recognition of the weight of the authority of the initial debate. Western laws that today license alcohol and tobacco consumption but prohibit hashish and opium use have likewise emerged from a cultural consensus, a combination of science, social pragmatism, and superstition. If coffee were to be introduced to the West today, it is hard to imagine that it would get the approval of the regulatory authorities – as it was, coffee caused fierce controversy when it was introduced to Europe during the seventeenth century, and there were doubts about its suitability in Christendom. Unsubstantiated reports have Pope Clement VIII giving coffee his blessing on the basis that such a delicious drink should not be the exclusive preserve of Muslims.

The result of the Mecca debate was that Kha’ir Bey banned the consumption of coffee in that city, and reported his action to the Mameluke Sultan in Cairo, where it appears that coffee was already well established, inevitably, amongst the Sufi community. The Sultan ordered Kha’ir Bey to rescind the ban, and eventually the hapless Pasha lost his job for unrelated reasons. The Mameluke Sultans had waged a constant battle against taverns, but for the time being the coffee house was not tainted by association. After the Ottomans took Cairo in 1517, the two doctors who had given evidence in support of the ban in Mecca were arrested and cut in two at the waist on the orders of Selim I, who died in 1520. Coffee, from being an ecstatic in the service of the Sufis, rapidly spread throughout the newly united territories, acting both as an engine of social cohesion and a valued internal trading commodity. It was adopted by the Khalwatiyya, confrères of the élite bodyguard of the Sultan, and the approval of coffee by the Court Physician to Suleiman in 1522 further secured its position. Ottoman support for coffee drinking was by no means unwavering, however: a succession of prohibitions ebbed and flowed around the Empire. Banned again at Mecca in 1526, coffee houses in Cairo were smashed up in 1535 as a result of the preachings of al-Sunbati and reinstated by the judge Ibn Ilyas. In 1539, again in Cairo, night watchmen imprisoned any coffee house customers they found, and a prohibition order arrived in Cairo from Istanbul in 1544, but was enforced only for a day.

The intense controversy provoked by the growth of coffee consumption throughout the Ottoman Empire became one of the intellectual and literary obsessions of the sixteenth century. Coffee, increasingly secularized, became a powerful social force, in that people now had a reason to be out at night other than the performance of their religious duties. Traditional patterns of hospitality were broken as the coffee house started to replace the home as a place of entertainment; strangers could meet and converse, and men of different stations in life could be found sharing the beverage. In addition, of course, coffee by its nature was a powerful aid to intellectual dispute and clarity of thought, as well as providing the means whereby debate could be prolonged into the night. These factors combined to make coffee potentially subversive in the eyes of not only the religious authorities, but the secular ones as well. The increasing assertiveness of the Ottomans in the Red Sea trade, their possession of Yemen and, in 1555, parts of coastal Ethiopia, gave them greater access to the coffee entrepôts that sustained the coffee habit that had spread throughout the empire and beyond to Persia and the Moghul empire. Coffee had truly been adopted as the drink of Islam. But it was Constantinople, capital of Suleiman the Magnificent’s eponymous empire, that witnessed the great flowering of Ottoman coffee culture.

Introduced by two Syrian merchants, Hakim and Shams, in 1555, coffee drinking in Constantinople took off so quickly that by 1566 there were six hundred establishments selling coffee, from splendid coffee houses to the humblest kiosk. The best were located in tree-shaded gardens overlooking the Bosporus, with fountains and plentiful flowers, and provided with divans, hookahs, carpets, women singers hidden behind screens, storytellers, and conspicuously beautiful ‘boyes to serve as stales [prostitutes] to procure them customers’. The coffee was brewed in large cauldrons, and might be flavoured with saffron, cardamom, opium, hashish, or ambergris, or combinations thereof. Opium and hash were also smoked widely, along with tobacco. As there was no restaurant culture at the time in ‘unhospitall Turkie’, the coffee house was, other than the reviled tavern, the only place to meet friends outside the home, discuss politics and literature, play backgammon or chess and perhaps gamble. Foreign merchants seeking trade, newlyqualified lawyers seeking clients, and provincial politicians seeking advancement would all congregate there. The coffee house was an integral part of the imperial system, providing a forum for the coming together and dissemination of news and ideas, just as it was to do later in Europe. On the domestic level, the Sultan and other wealthy householders employed a special official, the kaveghi, to take care of all coffee matters. The Sultan’s coffee service (both animate and inanimate) was naturally the most sumptuous: golden pots on golden braziers were held on golden chains by slave girls, one of whom gracefully passed the finest porcelain cup of coffee to the Sultan’s lips. While the cares of state were thus soothed in the seraglio, wives of lesser mortals could legitimately claim that the lack of coffee in the household was grounds for divorce.

Other cities of the empire did not necessarily emulate the splendid coffee houses of the capital. Those of Cairo quickly attracted a low-life reputation, as they were filled with ‘dissolute persons and opium eaters’, and were used for the procurement of boys. Which is to say that they were in essence very similar to the coffee houses of Constantinople, but less beautiful and the clientele more conspicuously seedy. Because of their vicious reputation, the knives came out for the Constantinople coffee houses in 1570, with the clerics taking the lead role, spurred on by the fact that the mosques were emptying. The same issues were dusted down: whether coffee was an intoxicant, whether it was charcoal and thus forbidden, and whether the coffee houses were dens of iniquity. As it happened, the coffee houses were prohibited, but merely went underground. In the meantime, street coffee vendors continued to ply their trade. The interplay between secular laws imposed by the Sultan and the religious law of Shariah left scope for intervention by both sides in the coffee debate according to their particular needs at any time. Even when it was classed with wine by decree in 1580, its consumption was so widespread that there was no alternative but for the authorities to turn a blind eye, and eventually religious opposition was countermanded.

More serious was the secular threat under Amurath IV. The Grand Vizier Kuprili determined that the coffee houses were hotbeds of sedition, hosting political opponents to his unpopular war with Candia. He banned them outright, with offenders punished first by a severe beating and then, if caught again, by being sewn up in a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus. Even this picturesque fate was not enough to deter hardened coffee drinkers, and eventually Kuprili was forced to relent. It is noteworthy that the taverns, which technically were forbidden under Islam, were allowed to remain open during the time of Kuprili’s ban. This underlines the very different nature of the effect of wine and coffee on the human mind. On the face of it, taverns and coffee houses were both potentially places where political dissent could arise, being meeting places where open debate between strangers was inevitable. However, it is in the nature of coffee to clarify and order thought, and in the nature of alcohol to blur and confuse it. A tavern might generate heated discussions, but it is likely that the content of that debate would have been forgotten by the following day. The violence and disorderliness that frequently accompanies communal alcohol consumption is of an anti-social, rather than an anti-establishment, nature and represents no real threat to the status quo. Coffee house discussions could, and frequently did, lead to tangible results, whether commercial, intellectual, or political. Kuprili was the first to identify the revolutionary threat posed by the very nature of the substance imbibed combined with the location where it was consumed.

Under Suleiman – who, later in life, decided to throw himself into the soft bosom of the seraglio instead of the viper’s nest of statecraft – the Grand Vizier became the foremost officer of the Ottoman Empire, with the absolute authority of the Sultan. However, the harem, full of machinating wives and jealous princelings, became the power behind the throne, and the result was the onset of the lengthy decline of the Ottoman Empire, a process only completed after the First World War. Under Murad IV, who ruled from 1623 until 1640, power was returned to the Sultan’s hands. He achieved this through a ruthless force of personality, and amongst the many who attracted his ire were coffee drinkers and tobacco smokers. The old leather-sack-into-the-Bosporus routine for recidivists was reinstated and, if he found any of his soldiers smoking or drinking coffee on the eve of battle, he would execute them or have their limbs crushed.

Considering the widespread use of coffee throughout the Ottoman empire from the sixteenth century onwards, it is surprising how slowly the habit caught on in Europe. Even in Venice, a city that had every reason to be familiar with the customs of the Levant, coffee was initially sold in small quantities for medicinal purposes, and the first coffee house opened as late as 1683. It has been suggested that the city’s aquacedratajo or lemonade-sellers traditionally included coffee in their portfolio of refreshing drinks, but there is no concrete evidence that this was the case. The more or less continuous enmity between Christian and Muslim could explain the slow transfer of new habits between the near East and Europe, but the dilatoriness of the Venetians is less comprehensible, as the city, even when at war with the Turks, was the vital commercial link between East and West. That the first coffee house in Venice opened some thirty years after the first one opened in England is an unexplained historical anomaly.

Coffee was introduced into Europe by the Ottomans during the seventeenth century via two channels: diplomacy and war. In the former case, it was the Turkish ambassador who brought coffee to the attention of the French, and in a manner befitting a meeting of the most powerful empires of East and West. In 1669, the Court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, at Versailles was nearing its magnificent zenith when news arrived that Sultan Muhammed IV had sent Soliman Aga to Paris for an audience with the young King. Whilst the prospect of an alliance between the Christian monarch and the Muslim Sultan seemed remote, both were concerned that the ambitions of the Habsburgs be kept in check. Statecraft aside, the chance to impress the ambassador from the orient was not one that Louis could easily ignore, and so he commissioned a new suit of clothes specifically for the audience, encrusted with diamonds and precious stones and costing 14 million livres. It was topped by a feather head-dress of surpassing beauty. The other noblemen of the Court were fitted out to complement Louis’s suit.

Evidently the costumes took some time to make, for although Soliman Aga came to Paris in July, he was not received by the King at Versailles until December. Leaving his attendants behind, he presented himself in the audience hall dressed in a plain woollen robe – itself an interesting echo of the origins of Sufism – and seemed not the slightest dazzled by the magnificence that surrounded him, which was not unduly surprising considering the style that the Sultans themselves maintained. He further put the King’s nose out of joint by failing to prostrate himself in a suitably abject manner before the throne, contenting himself with a slight bow and handing Louis a letter from the Sultan. It was then the turn of Soliman Aga to be mortified when the King glanced at the letter and suggested that, as it was rather long, he would look at it later. Soliman protested when Louis did not rise to his feet when he saw the Sultan’s name at the foot of the letter. Louis replied that His Majesty would do as He chose. Impasse. The ambassador was dismissed, both parties seething with indignation. When his interpreter finally got around to reading the letter, Louis discovered that Soliman was not given the title ‘ambassador’ by the Sultan, and thus felt further insulted that he had gone to all this trouble for a man of doubtful status. To turn the tables, he ordered the Court composer, Lully, to write ‘un ballet Turc ridicule’, with a scenario by Molière. The ‘Cérémonie des Turcs’ received its première in front of the King at Chambord the following October. Evidently the humiliation still rankled, for the King did not congratulate Molère after the performance, and the courtiers were universal in their condemnation – which swiftly turned to praise when Louis saw it again a few days later and told Molière that he had been seduced into silence on the previous occasion.

While these elaborate insults were being devised, Soliman Aga himself was not idle. If plain wool had been his style for his first encounter with the King, his diplomatic offensive continued in an altogether more voluptuous vein. He had rented one of Paris’s finest palaces and proceeded to remodel it à la Turque. Fountains trilled in courtyards, recesses were filled with emerald and turquoise Iznik tiles, and domes were softly illumined by stained glass. Divans, carpets, and cushions were spread sumptuously about. Soliman Aga did not need to go again to Court, for the Court, intrigued, came to him – particularly the women, countless countesses and duchesses, who lolled in oriental luxury and were served unfamiliar coffee by Nubian slave girls. The coffee was bitter to their taste, and Soliman Aga quickly realized that the addition of sugar made the new beverage more palatable to his visitors – a simple addition to the recipe that has proved remarkably enduring. While he regaled them with innocuous stories concerning the origins of the drink, the coffee unlocked their tongues, and soon Soliman knew what he needed to know: that the King was really concerned only that his border with the Habsburg Empire remained intact, and what happened to the east was of no concern to him.

In the meantime, Paris society became besotted with the Ottoman style, and coffee was the fashionable beverage that accompanied it. One of Soliman Aga’s retinue, Pascal, remained in Paris after his master had left and opened a stall selling coffee at the market of Saint-Germain. The bourgeoisie, drawn by the aroma wafting through the air, flocked to try what the aristocracy had endorsed, and thus coffee slowly became established in France. When the market closed, Pascal opened the first coffee house decorated in an oriental manner on the Quai de l’École near the Pont Neuf, and other immigrants from Crete, Armenia, and the Levant followed his lead. However, the vogue for all things Ottoman was short lived, and it was not until the establishment of the Café de Procope in 1689 that coffee found a truly Parisian expression.

While, on the face of it, Soliman Aga’s diplomatic mission may have been a failure, the intelligence that he had gleaned concerning French attitudes to their eastern frontier certainly influenced subsequent Ottoman policy. Evidently feeling the need to counterbalance their indulgence in the coffee houses of Istanbul with expansionist militarism, the Ottomans decided to conquer Europe. Sultan Muhammed IV put his Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, in charge of an army of 300,000 men with strict instructions not to return until the infidel had been utterly annihilated; he further suggested that Vienna would make a suitable starting point, since that was where his illustrious forbear, Suleiman the Magnificent, had been halted in 1529. The resultant Siege of Vienna in 1683 is regarded as a critical event in the history of Europe – for most people because it was the high-water mark of Islamic expansion, but for coffee historians because the dark stain left by its retreat was that of coffee. In common with much of coffee’s history, a hero had to be found in whom these momentous events could be personified; and so it is that one Franz Georg Kolschitsky is the acknowledged man of the hour, saviour of the city, honoured with statutes and credited with being the first man to open a coffee house in Vienna. That the man who saved Vienna from the Muslim hordes also made coffee the favourite beverage of the city makes a romantic tale, and one that is exploited to the full by Vienna’s Guild of Coffee Makers. It has in turn been further embroidered by Ukrainian nationalists, who claim Kolschitsky as one of that country’s more illustrious sons and who clearly like the idea that enfeebled Western Europeans required the intervention of a Ukrainian Cossack to save them from the ravages of the Muslim hordes.

According to a loose amalgam of the stories put around by these special interest groups, the Emperor, Leopold, having fled the city, left a mere 17,000 citizens to face the Grand Vizier’s vast army. It was evident that without the help of the small army of the Prince of Lorraine, camped near the city on Mount Kahlenburg, Vienna must surely fall. The Turks were already digging ‘workings, trenchings and minings’ by the city walls, and preparing to swarm through the breaches that subsequent explosions would make. Only one man in Vienna could save the day – Kolschitsky, who had been a coffee house keeper in Istanbul and knew the customs and language of the Turks well. He volunteered to slip through the Turkish lines in disguise to carry messages to and from the Prince of Lorraine. This, in the more elaborate versions of the tale, also involved heroically swimming across four channels of the Danube. He managed the round trip four times, doing much to boost the morale of the beleaguered city. On his final outing, when he took the alarming news that the Turks were about to blow a significant breach in the city walls, Kolschitsky found that the Prince of Lorraine had been joined by the warrior-king Jan Sobieski of Poland, at the head of an army of 30,000 men. Kolschitsky was given crucial information about the attack signal, which would enable the Viennese garrison to make a diversionary sortie. On his way back through the Turkish lines, Kolschitsky joined a group of soldiers drinking coffee around a campfire. He listened as they spoke wistfully of their Anatolian homes, of their Fatimas and little Mohammeds, and was so convinced that the morale of the Turks was at an all-time low that, when he regained the city, he rushed unannounced into the chamber of the garrison commander, Count Rudiger von Staremburgh. The Count awoke to find what appeared to be a Turk gabbling excitedly at him, and understandably summoned the guard. They were about to kill the assassin when the Count recognized Kolschitsky. Had the sword fallen, it is said, then so too would have Europe, for the diversionary sortie from Vienna proved crucial to the success of the joint army of Poland and Lorraine in the battle the following day, 12 September 1683.