“I’ll drink no coffee, bring me wine,” belongs in a Persian couplet attributed to emperor Akbar. By the time of Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, rich Indians, said author Edward Terry, shunned wine but drank coffee.
Coffee, the word, is derived from the Arabic and Turkish word for wine, kehwa.
Discovered first by the owner of some frolicsome goats in Abyssinia, the brew travelled by hands of dervishes from Mocha in Yemen to Grand Cairo in Egypt around 1510 and finally onto Mecca.
It was a sacred ceremonial drink received from the hands of a superior who held out a red earthen vessel. Into it the dervishes dipped their small bowl, chanting all the while. The bowl was then passed on to the lay members of the congregation. To partake of coffee was an act of devotion.
Coffee, the word, is derived from the Arabic and Turkish word for wine, kehwa.
The first coffee houses came up in Mecca and people gathered to play chess, exchange news and amuse themselves with music and song. That which is popular with the masses necessarily attracts the suspicion of the guardians of society. Coffee houses world over have a history of being persecuted.
The first attack took place in 1511. Kair Bey governed Mecca on behalf of the sultan of Egypt. It is said he chanced upon a group of coffee drinkers who were preparing to spend the night in prayer. Mistaking them for wine drinkers, he made enquiries and was shocked to discover the popularity of the brew.
Throwing the coffee drinkers out first, he summoned the lawyers. The brew was condemned and forbidden. All coffee houses in Mecca were shut down. The sultan of Cairo, however, was far from pleased. How dare the governor condemn a thing approved at Cairo? The coffee houses of Mecca were back in business.
Constantinople was introduced to coffee with the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517.
A hiccup arose in 1524 when Suleiman the Magnificent passed an order forbidding the drinking of coffee. No one really took him seriously and it was whispered that it was at the behest of a pretty lady at court who was being wooed.
The brew continued its journey through Syria and was received in Damascus in 1530 and Aleppo in 1532. Richly furnished and carpeted coffee houses, the great institutions of early eastern free thought, flourished. In the sultan’s palace and harem, coffee stewards were appointed. To refuse or to neglect to give coffee to the wives became a legitimate cause for divorce among the Turks.
A new problem arose. The mosques were now always empty and the coffee houses full. The clergy drew it to the notice of the sultan and coffee was banned. The prohibition was honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
In 1580, Murad III tightened the rules and coffee was classed along with wine. The inspectors winked and for a consideration coffee could be had behind closed doors and in backrooms of shops.
It was a handsome source of revenue for the grand vizier. But during the Fifth Ottoman Venetian War in the reign of Murad IV, coffee houses were declared hotbeds of sedition and closed down by the orders of Grand Vizier Kuprili. Despite the severe penalties: a thrashing for the first time offender and being sown into a leather bag and tossed into the Bosporus for the second, vendors moved about the markets balancing large copper vessels on burning stoves.
Kuprili’s argument would be used 100 years later by Charles II of England. Both would later withdraw their orders.
Persian emperor Shah Abbas’s queen dealt with political discussions in coffee houses in her own way. She appointed a kazi who would sit there daily. He would veer conversations towards history or the finer points of law. Poets, storytellers received similar appointments and disturbances were rare.
By 1645 lemonade vendors in Italy were selling coffee. Pope Clement VII, overcome by curiosity, tried it. “Why,” he cried after tasting it, “this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it, and making it a truly Christian beverage.”
The first European adaptation of Constantinople’s oriental coffee house was known as a caffe. Italians have since retained this double f.
Coffee house persecution history began to repeat itself. The proprietor of Caffe della Spaderia, where a radical room had been proposed, received a request from the Inquisitors to inform the first person to enter that room that he was to present himself before the tribunal.
The proposed room never opened. By 1776 an order was passed to eradicate these “social cankers” but the caffes survived the reformers.
Coffee houses reached their pinnacle in Austria and France with Vienna naming Franz George Kolschitzky as the Patron Saint of Vienna Coffee Lovers. Franz had kept the morale of the besieged city uplifted by donning a Turkish uniform and swimming across the Danube repeatedly to bring back news of help and succour.
Murad IV’s Ottomans were turned back once and for all and Christendom triumphed. The French took to coffee out of curiosity. Murad IV’s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV carried his own stock of beans. Turkish coffee won the Parisians over and soon Pascal, an Armenian, had opened a coffee drinking booth at St Germain.
The first coffee house in England was set up by Jacob, who was either a Jew or a Lebanese, at Oxford. It served chocolate and coffee.
Tillyard who opened up next to All Souls College played host to the Oxford Coffee Club which grew into the Royal Society. Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends frequented Mol’s at Exeter and enjoyed the newly imported tobacco.
The blow to English coffee houses came from their very own East India Company which, having lost the coffee trade to the French and Dutch, concentrated on tea, engaged in promoting the “cup that cheers”. Imports rose steadily and in 1757 some four million pounds were brought in. Coffee houses succumbed and tea became the national drink of the English.
Coffee houses in India date from 1936.
Given that India had no culture of a hot morning or evening beverage or for that matter social drinking, coffee had succeeded in percolating into the upper middle class households of the Deccan. Though widespread in its use today, tea still remains the newbie on the block.
Manoshi Bhattacharya
