Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  “You do not speak like a true believer,” said some of the company, critically, before departing.

  The upshot was, however, that coffee was declared to be “mekruh,” neither forbidden nor permitted, thus merely “undesirable.”

  At midnight Khair Bey stood on the roof of his house looking down on the Holy City. There are larger towns than Mecca, but none more sacred. Here the footprint of Father Abraham is eternally preserved in stone. Here is the hallowed Ka’ba, with the Black Stone built into one of the corners. From all parts of the world, a polyhedron with multitudinous sides, the bodies and souls of men fly hither like pious arrows. They wander unceasingly round the sacred edifice, and contemplate the Black Stone.

  Khair Bey contemplated the sleeping city, or what should have been the sleeping city. The constellations Aquila and Swan sparkled in the sky. Betelgeux and Aldebaran were writing the glories of Allah in the firmament, and the minarets, the stony fingers of the mosques, were dumbly tracing the record of the heavens.

  Here and there, however, in the town, there was light where darkness should have reigned. Torches moved near the walls, and noises from the distance reached the viceroy’s ears. He could even hear the sound of fiddles!

  Khair Bey was in a rage. “They are wounding the night,” he thought. Summoning the watch, he issued his orders, and his men hastened to the coffee-houses, where the copper utensils were flung ruthlessly to the floor. Few among the drinkers ventured to resist, and they were bound that they might be haled to prison. Their friends and relatives assembled to attack the watch. Wounds were inflicted; two men lay dead upon the ground. Three of the coffee-houses were burned.

  Next day coffee was prohibited. Not because it was contrary to the sacred words of the Koran, but because it “led to riots.” There followed a reign of terror lasting a whole week. Those who persisted in drinking their favourite beverage were bound, face to tail, on the backs of asses, and driven through the town, being flogged the while. It is recorded that many of the women forsook their husbands from jealousy of coffee, since he who sat awake enjoying the stimulation of the draught had no desire to lie down beside his wife.

  The viceroy sent a report of these happenings to the sultan at Cairo. He described what measures he had taken, and asked the monarch’s approval. The sultan was in a quandary. He himself, and all his courtiers, were habitual coffee-drinkers. His reply to Khair Bey took the form of an advice to withdraw the prohibition of coffee. None of those, said the sultan, who were most learned among the interpreters of the Koran could find any ground for forbidding the use of coffee. Besides, if there had been riots, they had not been due to coffee, but to the steps taken to prevent its enjoyment.

  Mecca is the centre of the world. What happens in Mecca speedily becomes known in Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt, Libya, Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor. The news that Khair Bey had sustained a defeat in his attack upon coffee was borne by returning pilgrims on swift camels to all parts of the Mohammedan world. “K’hawah” had become a stimulant in more senses than one. It played a great part in religion and in politics. The spirit of wakefulness and alertness hidden in the shining bean was not a spirit of evil! Khair Bey was forced to restore the utensils he had impounded in the raid on the coffee-houses. The export of Mocha from the wadies of Yemen to the seacoast towns was considerably increased.

  Enthusiasm of the friends of coffee was, however, countered by the fervour of its adversaries. No one could deny that the drinking of this beverage made people contentious, and that their contentions led to the use of knives and sticks. In the year 1521, at Cairo, there were riotous affrays among those who tarried long at the coffee-houses. For at the refreshment houses in the lands where Islam was dominant, the beverage on sale was not wine but coffee. Quarrels took place between coffee-drinkers and those who wished to lead pious lives and to retire seasonably at night. There were not wanting persons who declared that coffee promoted a critical spirit, and who maintained that the sultan was guided by the voice of his own lusts and had listened to evil counsellors.

  Thus in the land of Egypt, where, twenty years before, the prohibition of coffee in Yemen had been remitted, the drug was for a second time prohibited in places of public entertainment. In private houses, however, people continued to drink as much as they pleased, so that the law was a dead letter.

  Besides, what was drunk in Egypt, though in private, was drunk openly and without shame in Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. A hundred reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, were given for drinking coffee. During the heat of the day it promoted coolness of body and deliberation of mind, whereas during the cold hours of the night it fostered warmth both physical and mental. Especially was its use recommended in the foothills, because it counteracted the evil effects of the tramontana, the cold wind from the mountains. Then, as now, it was the sovereign remedy for migraine.

  From time to time, religious zealots took up their campaign against coffee. The dervishes raged whenever they saw the black drink boiling in copper vessels over a fire. Many fanatics declared that, at the Day of Judgment, the faces of coffee-drinkers would be as black as the beverage itself. Of course this did not matter to the Ethiopians and other Africans, who were now being won over to Islam, since they were blackavized by nature.

  It was the period in which the power and greatness of Islam were spreading far and wide. Vengeance was being taken against Christendom for having unchained the horror of the Crusades against Syria and Palestine. The aims of Islam were more than half fulfilled. In 1453, Constantinople fell before the onslaught of the Turks; the Byzantine empire was partitioned; the Balkan peoples had been largely exterminated or forcibly converted to Mohammedanism. Within the boundaries of the state, the Turkish impetus unified the Moslem realm, destroying the petty sultanates, so that Islam and the Ottoman Empire had come to mean the same thing. In the year 1517, Selim I annexed Egypt and Arabia to the northwestern portion of the Ottoman dominion.

  In the unified Turkish realm, the importance of coffee was greatly enhanced. In camp and on the battlefield, it refreshed the Turkish warriors, and at home it performed the same service for the members of philosophical circles. Even women, now, had begun to drink the beverage. It was found that coffee eased the pains of labour, and in Turkey a law was actually passed making it a valid ground for divorce that a husband should refuse coffee to his wife. By now the national drink had become a regular article of diet, declared to be nutritive and of equal importance with bread and with water.

  In view of this widespread popular sentiment, the attacks of the zealots and the dervishes had no more than a sectarian significance. Yet they were right enough in contending that coffee, “reduplicating the ego,” was really being idolized, for people thought more of their coffee than they thought of Allah. To the ultra-faithful, this seemed as intolerable as the deification of the vine in the Greek worship of Bacchus.

  Moreover, just at that time, a fierce struggle was going on between coffee and wine. In the newly conquered provinces, which had so recently been Christian, viticulture naturally prevailed. Coffee-drinking was advocated with missionary fervour as against wine-bibbing. In Constantinople, more particularly, wine-shops were closed. Thus the “Black Apollo” became once more one of the most successful champions of Islam.

  Tumbledown Arab coffee-house near Port Said

  Arab coffee-house in Jidda

  Arab coffee-house in Cairo

  Constantinople coffee-house

  “Now, at length, the coffee-bean is victorious!” sang the poet Belighi. Coffee had conquered, for, after long splitting of the cadis and the devotees of the Koran into parties, the learned became unanimously convinced of its virtues. In Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo, it won the battle; and on the Golden Horn, whither a breeze from the Bosporus blew, “the aroma of wine, the forbidden drink,” had been dispelled.

  Since then, the pleasant reek of coffee has been inseparable from the thought of Constantinople. Approaching Istanbul seawards shortly after sunris
e, as did James Baker, “catching sight of cupolas and minarets thrusting upwards out of the mist, like jewels lying upon cotton-wool,” one’s nostrils are assailed by the aromatic odours of coffee being roasted and brewed. Invisibly it presides over Pera and Galata, mingling with the warmth of morning and helping to dispel the chill of night.

  The first coffee-houses in the town on the Golden Horn were opened in 1554 by two merchants, Hakim from Aleppo and Jems from Damascus. They were termed “mekteb-i-irfan” (schools of the cultured). Coffee itself soon came to be called “the milk of chess-players and of thinkers.” For then as now, day after day and night after night, men in white silken robes with wide sleeves sat facing each other across the chessboard, moved their pieces with one hand while they stroked their chins with the other.

  5

  Kolshitsky’s Valiant Deed

  THE growth of the Ottoman Empire continued. From its new centre, Constantinople, which, under its old name of Byzantium, had been the focus of widespread Christian dominion, it radiated towards the four winds of heaven, east, south, west, and north. Somewhere about 1460, Serbia and Bosnia were conquered; two years later, Walachia; in 1517, Syria, Mesopotamia, Hejaz, and Egypt. Two years later, Algeria; five-and-thirty years afterwards, Tripoli, and later, Tunis. By this time, the Crimea, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Hungary were allied or vassal States.

  Thus Islam became a great power which, despite the loss of Spain, the headquarters of the western caliphate, to the Christians, became a graver and ever graver menace to western Europe. All the more dangerous because, this time, the impetus of the Tartar thrust came from the east, and not from the south, which had no hinterland.

  With the conquest of the greater part of Hungary, however, victorious Islam reached the zenith of its fortunes. Progress was arrested at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Buda was recovered from the Turks in 1686, and thenceforward there began a slow decline in the power of Islam. The decline lasted until the close of the World War in 1918.

  The repulse of the Turks from Vienna, this strange turn in the fate of what had for several centuries been a conquering nation, was mysteriously associated with the history of coffee. The story of the rise and fall of the Turks cannot be treated apart from the saga of coffee.

  Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, had foreseen the attack of the Turks on Vienna, having been kept well informed by his ambassador in Constantinople. Nevertheless Leopold had reason to hope that war might be avoided, for he knew that the sultan did not want war. But Kara Mustafa, the ambitious grand vizier, whose position at the sultan’s court was shaky, needed the war to restore his prestige. He began it. The emperor fled to Linz. Thence he negotiated with the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, with the estates, and with the king of Poland, in order to assemble an army able to cope with the Turks. Vienna, which had been hastily fortified, was invested by the huge army of Kara Mustafa, and the siege began. The fall of the city was imminent on the very first day, when a fire broke out close to the arsenal. Panic among the citizens was only prevented by the presence of mind of Liebenberg, the mayor, and Starhemberg, the chief of the armed forces of the city. In trenches and in mines, the Osmanlis drew nearer and nearer. Not a day, not an hour, passed without bombardment. The dead and wounded lay in heaps before the wall; but, as the crescent moon returns with unfailing regularity month after month in the skies, so unceasingly was renewed the crescent-shaped order of battle of the besieging Turks.

  Matters had still been bearable in July, but in August the hospitals of the city became overcrowded, for an epidemic of dysentery then broke out. The morale of the besieged was being undermined, and short of a miracle they could not maintain their resistance.

  Had Vienna fallen, the way up the Danube to Linz would have been opened to the Turks; Passau and Ratisbon, now known as Regensburg, would have fallen; Bavaria and Swabia would have been conquered. In that case, maybe, the Turks would have been established on the Lake of Constance. For several centuries the history of Europe would have taken a different course. Thus the resistance to their advance at Vienna was a second Battle of Poitiers, when Charles Martel, defending the soil of France, saved the whole western world from the rule of the Saracens.

  The man who gave the Viennese courage to hold out until the arrival of the relieving forces was Georg Kolshitsky, a Pole. Born at Sambor in Galicia, he had for a long time been a Turkish interpreter, and had lived among the Osmanlis. He offered to carry a letter to the Duke of Lorraine, the leader of the relieving force, although for this purpose he would have to pass through the Turkish lines.

  He and his servant Mihailovich, both disguised in Turkish dress, slipped out of Vienna on August 13, 1683, and made their way among the Turkish tents. Although it was raining in torrents, Kolshitsky sang merrily in Turkish. As if fortuitously, the two men halted in front of the tent of a distinguished aga. The aga, who was a pious and benevolent man, came forth from his tent, commiserated his two supposed fellow-countrymen for being drenched to the skin, and asked them where they were going. They answered that they wished to leave the camp towards the west, where there were vineyards, in order to satisfy their hunger with ripening grapes. The aga warned them against this forbidden fruit, and warned them even more emphatically against the vine-dressers who, being zealous Christians, would be eager to cut down two isolated Moslems. He gave them big bowls of coffee to drink, saying that this beverage was far more pleasing to Allah than the wine prepared by the Christians. Then, granting their request, he had them conducted beyond the western side of the camp.

  The pair made their way undisturbed through the vineyards, first to the Kahlenberg, then to Klosterneuburg, and on to Kahlenbergerdorf. On a wooded island in the river, they caught sight of a number of people, but could not at first make out whether or not these were Turks. At length they perceived that the women were unveiled, and were bathing in the river, and must, therefore, be Christians. They waved their hats. The Christians, believing them to be Turks, fired at them with harquebuses. One of the bullets passed through Mihailovich’s long Turkish sleeve.

  Kolshitsky, however, shouted that he was a Christian, and an emissary from Vienna. Thereupon the others sent a boat to convey him across the stream into the German camp. Early on August 15, he handed Duke Charles of Lorraine the dispatches which had been entrusted to him. With a written answer, supplemented by oral messages, he and Mihailovich set out on their return, once more under heavy rain. They went by way of Nussdorf. Here the danger they ran from sentinels was exceedingly great, so they determined to separate, after a brotherly embrace and commending one another to God’s care. Soon, however, Mihailovich, feeling timid alone, rejoined Kolshitsky, and the two went on together, much depressed, through the dawn. By way of Rossau, which had been burned to ashes, they reached the Alserbachstrasse. Five Turks were now following them, moved partly by curiosity, but also by suspicion. The two spies hid among some rubbish, where they found a cellar-flap, opened it, and tumbled down the steep steps. Kolshitsky, who was tired out, instantly fell asleep. Towards noon, by chance, a Turk made his way into the cellar. Finding two men there, he was stricken with terror, and ran away. Since the Christians did not know whether he might not seek reinforcements, they, too, quitted the cellar. What would they not have given to encounter another benevolent aga who would refresh them with the “magic drink”! No such luck! Half dead with hunger and fatigue, at nightfall they reached the Schottentor of the city of Vienna.

  Kolshitsky’s bold sally and fortunate return gave fresh courage to the beleaguered Viennese. All and sundry felt once more that, beyond the Turkish forces, there were Christians ready to help them, that a formidable relieving army was assembling in the west, and that the hour of liberation was at hand. As prearranged, to acquaint the Duke of Lorraine with the fact that Kolshitsky had got back safely, Starhemberg, the chief of the defending forces, sent up three rockets, that same night, from the tower of St. Stephen’s.

  Kolshitsky and Mihailovich were handed a gratification of two thousand
gulden. Through the instrumentality of the mayor, the municipality of Vienna promised to grant Kolshitsky the freedom of the city, to bestow on him a domicile (8, Haidgasse in the Leopold quarter), and to give him a charter to pursue any occupation he pleased.

  It was not until towards the middle of September, a month after Kolshitsky’s bold penetration of the Turkish lines, that the allied German and Polish armies at length began the attack that was to relieve Vienna.

  On September 12 the Viennese, after long and weary waiting, at length saw the lances and banners of the Poles on the heights of the Kahlenberg. At this moment, too, the leaders of the Christian army first glimpsed the immense hosts of the enemy.

  “God in heaven, what a sight!” wrote Dupont, a Frenchman in the Polish service. “A wonderful spectacle awaited us when we reached the crest of the hill. The whole plain, including the Leopoldstadt Island, was thickly beset with them. The thunder of Turkish artillery was answered by firing from the walls of the town. Flames and smoke enveloped the capital to such an extent that only the tops of the towers showed above it. In the camp of the Osmanlis were two hundred thousand men in battle array, stretching from the Danube to the hills. Farther to the left, beyond the Turkish flanks, were disorderly hordes of Tartar cavalry making ready to attack the forest. All was in lively movement, directed towards the Christian army.”