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potus niger et garrulus

(‘the black and tongue-loosening drink’)

ANON.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the archaeological evidence shows that ritual coffee drinking was widespread amongst the Sufis in Yemen. What caused them to adopt a drink derived from a hitherto unknown plant from neighbouring Ethiopia? Curiously, to understand the genesis of coffee drinking, it is necessary first to look at tea; at China, where it originated; and at the trade links between China and the Middle East.

Before the fall of Rome, the Arabian Sea played an enormous role in world history, and once the Romans and Greeks sufficiently mastered the Red Sea and the monsoon (a word derived from the Arabic mawsim, meaning season) they were able to trade with India and Ceylon. After the fall of their respective empires, and with the rise of a hostile Islamic Turkish empire, which effectively blocked all the sea routes from the West to the Orient, Europeans were rarely seen east of the Red Sea. Nonetheless, the Arabian Sea was awash with trading and colonizing activity, some conducted in boats like those which, as Herodotus had observed, were made with planks sewn together with coir, and oiled with whale blubber to soften the wood in case of unforeseen encounters with coral reefs. From further afield came wakas – double outrigger canoes – in which the Waqwaqs of Indonesia braved the ocean voyage from Indonesia to Zanj (‘Land of the Negroes’ or East Africa) laden with cinnamon, and thence sailed to the previously uninhabited island of Madagascar, where they settled from the fifth century onwards. Arabian and Persian ships frequently visited Sirandib – the ‘Isle of Rubies’, now known as Sri Lanka or then known as Ceylon – and convoys sailed to China, the ‘Land of Silk’. This was the longest sea voyage then regularly undertaken by man: one Persian captain famously made the round trip seven times. The city of Chang’an on the Yellow River had two million residents by the seventh century, and was a great market for ‘western’ goods such as sandalwood from India, Persian dates, saffron and pistachios, Burmese pepper, and frankincense and myrrh from Arabia. Slaves from Africa could also be bought, and the Chinese even at this early stage had a good understanding of the peoples of Zanj, even being aware of the Somali herdsmen’s habit of drawing blood from their cattle and mixing it with milk to drink. The principal Chinese exports were silks and porcelain, the latter by this time being shipped by Persians from the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (Canton). A maritime Porcelain Route evolved that vied in importance with the better-known Silk Route across Central Asia – porcelain, for obvious reasons, being less suited to overland freight. Ports along the Porcelain Route were valued according to their use of standard weights and measures, their safety and their non-interference in commerce: a maverick sultan could jeopardize this fragile web of trading links that spanned the East. The spread of trade went hand-in-hand with the spread of Islam, which underpinned a faith-based commercial network that guaranteed probity of dealings and a community of interests. The legacy of this can be traced today in the Hawali banking system, whereby large sums of money can be ‘transferred’ internationally by no more than a letter of authority. A comparable system did not evolve in Europe until the rise of the Knights Templar. As Islam spread, Indonesia, the Spice Islands, and the Philippines fell under its sway. Only the Chinese remained completely unconverted, although substantial Muslim populations settled in Chinese cities – Guangzhou had 200,000 Arabs, Persians and other Muslim residents in the seventh century.

A little-recognized incentive to the creation of this maritime empire of faith lay in the fact that Muslims had to pray three times a day in the direction of Mecca, a prayer which for its proper execution depended, of course, on the sure knowledge of the whereabouts of that sacred city. When the first Arab traders tentatively colonized parts of the coast of Zanj, they built unsophisticated wooden mosques which frequently can be shown to have been misaligned: only later, when the ports and their trade were more secure, were stone mosques built in the Arab style with the required alignment to Mecca, achieved by use of the magnetic compass and the astrolabe and an understanding of the stars. Thus the fundamental ritual of Islam was a significant encouragement to the science of navigation, and the concomitant spread of faith and commerce. This was reinforced by the necessity for the faithful to make the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives, with the result that the Muslims were highly motivated and experienced travellers over long distances. Had Christianity evolved similar rituals in connection with Rome or Jerusalem, the necessary navigational skills and equipment might have been developed earlier. Ironically, Jerusalem had been the geospiritual target of early Islamic prayer until Mohammed made the former pagan site of Mecca (the Ka’ba having been worshipped there previously for many centuries) into the proper focus of Islamic prayers by decree in AD 624. As it was, the compass had been originally invented by the Chinese but discovered again by the Arabs: the astrolabe was their original invention, along with early clocks, theodolites, and instruments for measuring the apparent movement of a star by an observer who had himself changed position. Islam was structured in such a way that it not only encouraged science, but positively required it. By contrast it took the rise of sea-borne mercantilism in Europe in the seventeenth century to provoke intense interest in astronomy and navigation: the observatories of Paris and London were set up with the principal aim of solving the problem of longitude.

Islam having established a bridgehead in China, it was inevitable that the Sufis should also turn up there. Indeed the Emperor invited a group of Sufi astronomers to Peking in the 1270s to assist in the setting up of an observatory. The presence of Sufis in south China seems to have influenced Japanese Buddhism, leading to Zen Buddhism, which, like Sufism, focuses on ‘masters’ and illustrative tales from their lives. The Sufis, and the Muslim population in general, would have been widely exposed to the Chinese habit of drinking tea, which had been established for at least a thousand years – it is recorded that there were over a hundred water-powered tea mills in the first century AD. Surprisingly, there is no mention of tea consumption in Middle Eastern sources until a reference in Giovanni Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550–9), citing Hajji Muhammed, a traveller in the Caspian region, who thought that if the Franks and Persians had known about tea they would have given up rhubarb. Marco Polo, usually an inveterate chronicler, made no mention of tea at all. Nonetheless, it is tempting to suppose that the Sufis, who were inclined to embrace enthusiastically anything that could bring them closer to God, would have experimented with tea drinking in China, and may have adopted it as part of their rituals.

What is certain is that the celebrated Treasure Fleets sent out by the Ming dynasty Yongle Emperor into the Indian Ocean contained, amongst silks and porcelain and other trading goods, tea. The fleets were the most impressive ever seen, with hundreds of vessels of which the largest were nine-masted, 400-feet long and 160-feet wide juggernauts. Their ostensible mission was to extract tribute and assert the hegemony of the Middle Kingdom over the known world, principally the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Envoys were brought back to Peking to pay their obeisance to the Emperor, accompanied by exotic animals such as the giraffe brought from Malindi and presented to the Emperor in 1414 and which was believed by the Chinese to be the legendary qilin, a sacred animal that would appear only in times of great prosperity. As well as putting on an awesome display of the might of the Dragon Throne and trading in Chinese goods, the Treasure Fleets (there were seven voyages between 1405 and 1433) were missions of discovery that prompted a sudden increase in the Chinese knowledge of plants and medicines, and of the lands from where they came. It seems that from the Chinese understanding of tea, which had initially been valued for its medicinal effects, the notion of infusion – the steeping of plant matter in boiling water to extract the desired essence – had developed. This deceptively simple discovery was spread through the popularization of tea.

The Treasure Fleets were led by the Admiral Zheng He, the ‘Three Jewelled Eunuch’. His father had been a Muslim soldier from Yunnan province who was caught up in the fighting at the break-up of the Mongol Empire. In 1381 he was killed, and his son was taken into captivity and castrated in the Chinese manner, an excruciating variant that also involved the removal of the penis. Eunuchs were highly prized at court, being considered not only immune to the charms of the imperial harem but also particularly loyal to the ruling Emperor. Zheng He rose rapidly to prominence in the service of the prince of Yan, Zhu Di, who was campaigning against the Mongols in the northern steppes. An able commander and an imposing figure, Zheng He stood by Zhu Di when he usurped the Dragon Throne from his nephew, and was the natural choice for leader of the Treasure Fleets, upon which most of the highest positions were held by eunuchs. Both his father and grandfather were ‘Hajji’, meaning that they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Zheng He’s religion was an asset in the Indian Ocean.

The fifth voyage under Zheng He called at Aden in 1417, then part of the Rasulid kingdom of Yemen. It was an extremely wealthy port, and the sultan grandly ordered that only those with ‘precious things’ could trade with the Chinese. Whether tea was sold to the Arabs is not recorded, but it can be reasonably assumed that Zheng He and his officers would have drunk tea either with or in the presence of visiting merchants and dignitaries. The awesome majesty of the Treasure Fleet would have given the visitors particular reason to note the customs and behaviour of their distinguished company, and the concept of infusion to create a beverage would have been dignified by association. The stimulatory effects caused by the caffeine in tea may likewise have been noted and discussed. After the sultan had presented lions, zebras, ostriches, and another qilin for the Emperor’s collection, the voyage then went on to Malindi and the coast of Zanj. It is almost certain that the Rasulid monarch in Ta’izz, having great interest in exotic plants and Chinese porcelain, would have paid attention to any reports of the Chinese drinking tea.

The seventh and last voyage in 1432 had a more extensive impact in the Red Sea: Zheng He, ill and exhausted, eschewed the opportunity to make the Haj and instead sent the fleet of more than 100 ships and 27,000 men to Hormuz and beyond with his deputy, the eunuch Hong Bao. Unable to land at Aden as a result of local fighting, he secured the permission of the Emir of Mecca to sail up the Red Sea to the port of Jiddah, where the Chinese were received with due honour. As well as their usual interest in trading, a translation of an Arab text Hut yaw fang (‘The pharmaceutical prescriptions of the Muslims’) had appeared in China to intense interest there, and particular attention was paid to the acquisition of Arab drugs and medicines. The use of aloes (a purgative and tonic), myrrh (for the circulation), benzoin (a gum that aids respiration), storax (an anti-inflammatory), and momocordia seeds (for ulcers and wounds) was recorded. It is significant that at this stage there is no mention of coffee: both the Chinese and Arabs would have had good cause to have analysed its properties if it had been a known substance at the time. It seems that knowledge of coffee was still confined to the Ethiopian Highlands. Qat is likewise absent from the pharmacopoeia.

Although there are Chinese reports of Mecca and Medina, they are surprisingly cursory: with Zheng He at Calicut and in failing health, the precision of purpose seems to have left the voyage. He died on the way back to China in 1433 at the age of 63, and was buried at sea. The returning fleet carried an ambassador from Aden, and yet another giraffe, and although pleased with the outcome, Zhu Zhanj, the Emperor since 1426, who was of a more introspective Confucian turn of mind than his grandfather, never subsequently authorized another voyage. Confucius believed that a healthy Chinese state should be able to provide for all its own needs, and that active involvement in foreign trade was beneath the divinely ordained dignity of the Middle Kingdom. It was for this reason that China had remained a relatively closed nation throughout its history, and why the Treasure Fleets were such a dramatic aberration. Once Confucianism regained the high-ground, the shipyards closed down, and the country turned in on itself again.

A Sufi missionary, Shahkh Shadomer Shadhili, is reported to have introduced qat to Ta’izz in 1429, and, whether or not it is true, the date is significant, as it is at around that time that the Chinese were present in the Arabian and Red Seas – the fifth and seventh Treasure Fleets of Zheng He. If the Yemenis had been introduced to tea as a result of these visits, either by experience, by report, or possibly by purchase, and if the emerging Sufi community was already familiar with its stimulating properties by repute, then the scene is set for the necessary discovery of infusions based on dried leaf material with similar properties to tea. The Sufis were eager to embrace chemical assistance in order to get closer to God, and help was at hand.

Tea leaves in China were made in a number of ways: the three most common, green, oolong, and black teas, were produced by differing combinations of sun-drying, pan firing, rolling, fermenting, and final firing. The coffee industry today is curiously coy about the fact that the current way of preparation is one of only many ways, and that coffee can also be a tisane or tea: an infusion of dried vegetable matter in hot water. Ethiopians, as we have seen, still sometimes drink a coffee made from the leaves (as opposed to cherry or bean) of the coffee plant. For one, amertassa, green coffee leaves are allowed to dry naturally in the shade, then infused. The other, kati, is made from leaves that have been pan fired. The use of dried leaf material in this way is very similar to tea, and kafta, a drink made from the dried leaves of the qat plant, is likewise related. Furthermore, in Yemen and other parts of Arabia today it is common to find kish’r, which is an infusion of the dried coffee cherry from which the beans have been removed. These cherries are sold in the markets in open sacks alongside green coffee beans, and are as much in demand. Kish’r has a pleasant, light fruity flavour with hints of its smoky coffee origins, but has more in common with a herbal infusion such as verbena or melise. Coffee cherry has also been detected in the manufacture of a cheap instant coffee. The evolution of these coffee teas through the use of the roasted bean into the beverage we now know as coffee was slow, and these varieties continued in parallel, as indeed they still do. Coffee did not spring into the world as a fully-fledged double espresso to go.

At the time of the visits of the Treasure Fleets, the Ethiopian Highlands were within the trading range of the merchants of Aden and Mocha, and Sufi missionaries also ventured across the Red Sea. It would seem perfectly plausible for a Sufi, inspired by what he had seen of tea drinking amongst the Chinese visitors, to learn what he could of the manufacturing process from them. Aware from his own learning that none of the plants in the conventional Arab pharmacopoeia had the characteristics he sought, he may have taken the opportunity of a missionary trip to Ethiopia to experiment with various endemic plant types there, and settled on coffee and qat as the most interesting. At this stage, in imitation of the Chinese, only the leaves of the coffee plant were used for the infusion, but as they contain less than 1 per cent caffeine, they might not have been sufficient for his ecstatic purpose. However, these things vary considerably according to brewing method and quantities used. Weight for weight, tea contains twice the quantity of caffeine as Arabica coffee, but as the volume of vegetable matter used is much less than half, the net effect is less caffeine in the final beverage. Coffee leaves could thus have been brewed ‘strong’ to provide a high caffeine yield, but this would have made the drink itself unpalatable. It is significant that qat loses much of its potency when its leaves are dried; thus as a tea it does not have a particularly interesting effect. This is why Yemenis today favour the chewing of the fresh green leaves, and perhaps also explains why qat has only recently started to find a wider public with the invention of airfreight.

It is at this point in coffee’s history that a number of real people finally begin to peer from behind the purdah screen. When the first European merchants came to Yemen in the early seventeenth century, they were naturally very curious about the origins of the coffee that they had come so far to buy. Amongst the stories they were told by the local traders were many that were obviously fantastic, including those of fabulous multi-coloured coffee birds and plague-ravaged princesses. Interestingly, the story of Kaldi and his dancing goats was not amongst the stories recorded by the Europeans. This tale of the discovery of coffee is so favoured in our times that it has assumed the status of established fact. It involves a goatherd, Kaldi, who sees his flock eating coffee cherries and then dancing. Kaldi likewise eats and dances, and then tells the abbot of a nearby monastery of his discovery. Angered by what he regards as a diabolical substance, the abbot throws some cherries on a fire; the resulting aroma, however, convinces him that they must be of divine origin, and he makes an infusion of the beans which he gives to his monks to help to keep them awake during night prayers. The omission of the Kaldi story from those told to the earliest Europeans is a clear indication that it was probably the later invention of a coffee house storyteller. Some of the stories, however, concerned genuine historical Sufi leaders, of whom sufficient is known to be able to evaluate whether they could have instigated the hypothetical scenario of the Sufi missionary in Ethiopia outlined above.

The first candidate is one dear to the heart of the coffee trade, ‘Ali Ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, patron saint of the coffee port of Mocha. As an English sailor named William Revett reported in 1609: ‘Shaomer Shadli was the fyrst inventour for drynking of coffe, and therefore had in esteemation’. It is understandable that the town which owed much of its wealth in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to coffee should seek to associate its prosperity with its pet saint, whose tomb is one of the few fine buildings that remains there. However, he died in 1418, and while it is conceivable that he may have been in Aden when Zheng He visited the year before, it is unlikely that he would have been able to make a trip to Ethiopia, returning with the newly invented tea substitute, before he died. In addition, the earliest descriptions by the historians Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad al-Shardji and Mohammed al-Sakhawi of the life of Shaykh ‘Umar fail to mention his discovery of coffee, which after all would have been a very distinguished addition to his curriculum vitae. Finally the Shadhilaya Sufi order from which he derived his name was founded in the thirteenth century and was known for its orthodoxy and sobriety, and the writings of the order make no mention of coffee.

The second contestant is Mohammed bin Sa’id al-Dhabhani, also known as Gemaleddin, who was both a Sufi and a mufti (religious leader) in Aden. Although he died in 1470, somewhat late to have met Zheng He in 1417, he would have been alive in 1433 when the seventh voyage picked up an envoy from Aden who, upon his return from China, may have furnished the necessary details concerning tea production. Alternatively, tea drinking may have been a recognized practice in Arabia using precisely the tea which it is recorded that the Treasure Fleet carried for trading purposes. Upon the cessation of the Chinese visits after 1433, tea would have been impossible to obtain, and a substitute could have been sought. The most intriguing thing about the al-Dhabhani story as recorded by al-Djaziri is that it specifically refers to the fact that he had visited Ethiopia as a missionary and had learnt about the benefits of coffee drinking there. As well as being a religious leader, Gemaleddin was also a renowned man of science. There is some speculation in early European writings, unsupported by primary sources, that Gemaleddin gave coffee his mufti’s seal of approval in 1454, and that his endorsement led to the rapid spread of coffee drinking in the Sufi community.

The third candidate is Abu Bakr al-’Aydarus, another Sufi who was patron saint of Aden. However, he died in 1508, which would appear to be quite long after coffee drinking had become established amongst the Sufis, as can safely be determined from the historical and archaeological record.

The persistence of such legends identifying the first coffee drinker as a Sufi master in the era shortly after the arrival of the Chinese Treasure Fleet bearing tea, the mutual interest in the materia medica of the Arabs and the Chinese, and the active presence of Sufism in the region all suggest that there may be a new, compelling version of the tale of the discovery of coffee to replace the time-worn myth of Kaldi. Although it is conjecture, the story is extrapolated from known facts and involves historical figures, all of which is a distinct improvement on that of the goatherd. Its hero is the Mufti of Aden, Gemaleddin, to whom we will ascribe the not unreasonable age of three score years and ten at his death in 1470.

As a young man, Gemaleddin was in Aden when the Treasure Fleet of Zhe Heng arrived at the port in 1417. He was struck by the description of the Chinese drinking an infusion they found refreshing called tea, made with dried leaves mixed with hot water. Gemaleddin later became a Sufi and a scholar respected in matters of both science and religion. In his early thirties he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he met a Sufi who described how he had seen the Sufis drink tea in China to help them stay awake during night prayers. Gemaleddin heard that another Treasure Fleet from China was at that moment on its way to Jiddah, the nearest port to Mecca, and so he hurried to meet it. As he was by now a man of great distinction, he was welcomed aboard the flagship by the fleet’s commander, Hong Bao, where he drank tea with the dignitaries, noted its stimulating effect, and questioned them closely about the origins of the tea plant and the methods of drying the leaves. The description of the tea plant did not correspond with that of any plant he knew of in Arabia, and it appeared that the growing conditions required for tea would make it ill suited to the region. Gemaleddin wondered whether he might somewhere find a plant with similar properties if it could be infused in the same way. Having previously decided to go on a missionary expedition to Abyssinia, he began to look out for any as yet undiscovered plants which might have the desired effect. From Arab slave traders bringing captives from the Oromo tribe in the west of Abyssinia he learnt of a plant there called bun, which was supposed to make goats very lively when they ate it. He went to the Oromo, discovered coffee, and tasted infusions of the leaves, which he dried in the manner described to him by the Chinese. He noted that the stimulatory effect of the drink was very similar to that of Chinese tea. He also took samples of the cherries of the coffee bush back with him to Aden. The flesh of the cherry made a more palatable and stimulating drink than the leaves, and so Gemaleddin developed the drink called qish’r, which is still widely drunk in Yemen today, often flavoured with ginger. Gemaleddin encouraged his disciples to drink qish’r and it became a part of Sufi ritual; but, versed as he was in the mysterious science of alchemy, he continued to experiment and was struck by the enormous changes that took place in the rejected stones at the heart of the coffee cherry when they were roasted on a pan. These pale green, tasteless, and unpromising beans transformed into brown polished nuggets with an overwhelmingly delicious aroma and a bitter but alluring flavour when ground and boiled. The change to the coffee bean represented on a physical level the transformations that Sufism wrought upon the human soul, and the fact that coffee enabled adherents to remain awake during their night prayers was further proof of its spiritual qualities. The drink was also as black as the Ka’ba, the sacred black stone at Mecca to which all Muslims must make the Haj. Gemaleddin’s learning and piety had uncovered a mysterious substance that assisted the Sufis in their communion with God.

Hence coffee stands before us finally unveiled, discovered by an alchemist who identified in its transformation the means of bringing men closer to God, in the same way that the use of communion wine, which is variously forbidden and allowed in different branches of the Christian ritual, has underlying it much of the same transformational thinking. That the Sufis should have adopted a similar ritual use of a communal drink is not surprising, and the fact that coffee is known as the ‘Wine of Araby’ also takes on another dimension of meaning in this context.

The way in which coffee was eagerly adopted by Sufism illumines the alchemical element in the new myth. We have seen that ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold.’ Even those who do not like the flavour of coffee usually concede that it has a peculiarly seductive aroma when freshly roasted, and when the beans are broken up by grinding or pulverizing they release a new set of aromas that are if anything even more beguiling. The transformation of coffee from dull, sublunary vegetable matter into a substance of almost divine aroma and extraordinary flavour is a compelling symbol of what alchemy and its Sufi followers wished to achieve with their spiritual quest. In every sense, then, coffee brought them closer to God and it became a vital component of their communal prayers.

The ritual use of coffee is itself a hypothesis, but one supported by archaeological evidence, the first that we have come across in our peregrinations around coffee’s prehistory. Excavations at Zabid have shown that initially (c.1450) coffee was almost certainly served amongst the Sufi community at their dhikrs (communal worship, usually at night) from a ladle dipped into a glazed bowl named a majdur. Previously, this sort of pottery had not been glazed, which suggests that coffee was deemed of higher importance than other liquids. Shortly afterwards, smaller glazed bowls started to be produced at Haysi, a nearby town. These would have been passed around from person to person, replacing the ladle. Significantly, these small bowls bear striking resemblance in shape to the Chinese porcelain tea-drinking bowls of the same era, and some have rudimentary imitations of the classic blue and white Chinese patterns. The passing around of coffee was one of the reasons why it was banned in Mecca in 1511 as sharing was associated with alcohol consumption. Some Sufi sects today still pass around a drinking bowl of coffee in connection with events of particular importance such as the funerals of members.

Sufis did not live a cloistered existence, and the reason why their dhikrs tended to take place at night was that many of their numbers followed a normal life of work and family during the day – hence the value ascribed to coffee as a means of staying awake during prayers. As they lived amongst the community it would seem that the new habit of coffee drinking was rapidly disseminated amongst the population as a whole. Again the best evidence for this comes from archaeology; within a hundred years the Haysi potteries had evolved an individual coffee cup of the size and shape of a modern demitasse, or the smaller Turkish findjan. This would suggest that coffee consumption had spread from ritual to individual domestic consumption. Its wildfire spread through Islam, however, was the result of geopolitics: the growth of the coffee trade depended upon the relative security of the Red Sea and its ports, and a unified political and spiritual rule that allowed coffee to be quickly adopted.

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.

The Turks were routed, and in their haste to retreat left behind a vast quantity of supplies – oxen, camels, grain – which the starving Viennese fell upon joyfully. In hot pursuit of the fleeing army went troops of Ukrainian Cossacks, who caught up with them at Parkany, near Budapest, where in the ensuing battle the Turks were finally broken. The defeated Vizier struggled back to Istanbul to be greeted with the painful disgrace of being strangled in front of his family. Lurking amongst the provisions left behind at Vienna were some five hundred pounds of coffee, which no one recognized, coffee being unknown in the city at that time. The valiant Kolschitsky, having been rewarded with 100 ducats for his feats of derring-do, again stepped into the breach and offered to relieve the authorities of the burden. The money he applied to purchase of a property, and he soon opened the Blue Bottle coffee house, happily combining the spoils of war and the skills he had learnt in Istanbul. It was a great success, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the story itself. An eyewitness account by an Englishman in the service of the Austrian army detailed the great victory and the booty left behind, and coffee is conspicuous by its absence from the list. Although the bravery of Staremburgh warrants specific mention, Kolschitsky does not feature in the account. While it is hardly to be expected that a lowly spy should receive any accolade in a report that concerns itself primarily with the chivalrous behaviour of the noblemen in victory, if indeed Kolschitsky’s bravery had averted disaster, then the action, if not the perpetrator, would surely have warranted a mention.

Neither does the Franz Georg Kolschitsky who is the hero of Viennese coffee history feature in the mainstream works concerning the siege. He was probably a small player on a large field of intrigue and espionage, one of many spies operating on behalf of the besieged Viennese. Indeed, another spy, Johannes Diodato, is credited by some with opening the first coffee house. Kolschitsky’s reward of 100 ducats is well documented, but so is the fact that he immediately started harassing the city council with demands for more money and permanent premises, recalling in his letters ‘with measureless self-conceit and the boldest greed’ the treatment of various classical heroes, including, coincidentally, the fantastic rewards heaped upon Pompilius by the Lacedaemonians, whose Spartan ‘black broth’ we met earlier in these pages. Perhaps worn down by the weight of classical allusions, the council eventually relented and gave him a property at 30 Haidgasse worth over 1000 gulden. It has not been possible to establish whether this in fact became Vienna’s first coffee house; nonetheless, Kolschitsky’s keen sense of his own worth has etched itself on the history of Viennese coffee, so that he has become the hero he almost certainly never was. His statue can be found adorning the exterior of the Café Zwirina.

However flawed his character may have been, it is the case that the Viennese did take enthusiastically to coffee after the siege. They may have been helped in adjusting to the new taste by the invention of the croissant, or, as it was then known, the pfizer. Supposedly created by a Viennese baker who had discovered a Turkish mining operation whilst working at night in his bakery, the curved bread roll was based on the crescent moon that featured prominently on the Ottoman flag, as it still does on that of many Islamic countries. In these highly charged days, it is salutary to recall that, every morning, many in the Christian world celebrate the crushing of Islam in a kind of unconscious anti-Communion.

The Siege of Vienna saw the end of expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a European coalition fought to regain lost territory. The Sultans became increasingly mired in debt, and the slave girls poised with their fine porcelain coffee cups at the lips of the Sultan gave way to the vulgar diamond-encrusted self-service coffee cups of the late imperial era, which can still be seen in the treasury of the Top Kapi Palace in Istanbul. Under Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), Turkey finally turned its back on its Ottoman history, became a secular society, and, mysteriously, took up tea drinking, as if four hundred years of glorious coffee culture had never been.

The curious role of coffee in the lifecycle of these early empires was thus complete: the Sufis and the Ottomans had developed coffee drinking as a result of observing tea drinking during one of the rare forays of officials of the Chinese Empire into the Arabian Sea. The coffee habit, initially ritualistic, had fuelled Ottoman expansion during the heyday of their Empire, only to be handed on like a relay baton to the Habsburg Empire and to other European nations, where coffee, stripped of its spiritual function, in turn catalysed the creation of aggressive mercantile cultures linked with European imperialism. As the Ottomans slowly collapsed, so they reverted to drinking what was perhaps the inspiration for their love affair with coffee. Turkey is now the third largest consumer – and fifth largest producer – of tea worldwide.