“It is bullshit,” said the shopkeeper. “Competition! One puts up a sign saying he speaks Spanish, so all do the same.”
I asked him if he had any ambergris.
He gave me a puzzled look and waved over a teenage boy who spoke better English.
“Bergris?” He’d never heard of it. “What is for?”
“Aphrodisiac,” I said. “For love.”
“Oh, love!” He pulled a bottle down from the shelf. The fluorescent pink label, shaped like a heart, featured a muscular man glistening with grease. “This is better,” he said. “Ees Aphro-disiaque des Sultans.”
“Not ambergris?” I asked. “I know people used to take it with coffee…”
He shook his head disdainfully. “That old—this is scientific. Turkish people take this all the time. Have you seen Turkish family? Big! Not one, not two, but three, four ninas! Every day they take this, two spoons. This is big jar for family. You have family?”
“No.” I pointed to the African figure with an enormous erection adorning the lid. “That’s nice. And look, here, on the ingredients—it has amber.”
“Oh, has many things,” he said. “Seventeen ingredients. This is sultan’s formula.”
“Really?”
“That is why it is best. Sultan had biggest families. Three hundred wives!” He waved his hands excitedly. “You have seen Topkapi palace? The sultans had own factory there for making only the best and fresh, uh, how you say? Pills. Factory for men, factory for women.”
I bought a bottle. “But you don’t have the amber to put in coffee?”
“Amber in coffee?” He snapped his fingers. “You want not amber, you want anbar from the fish.”
Of course. I had forgotten that anbar is Arabic for ambergris (neither has anything to do with amber), hence the confusion. Ambergris originates in sperm whales who have eaten too many giant deep-sea squids (the beaks irritate their tummies). This black, stinking secretion exposed to air, hardens into a resin-like material so fragrant that a single drop applied to paper remains fresh-smelling for forty years. It was generally found on deserted beaches, and was so desirable among the Turks that failure to hand it over to the sultan was punishable by death. Nobody, however, knew where it came from. The Chinese called it lung sien hiang, “dragon’s spittle perfume,” because they thought it came from drooling dragons sleeping by the edge of the sea.
To protect the whales it has now been banned, but the young man managed to acquire a piece about the size of half an M&M, dark and slightly sticky, which we sampled with coffee from a nearby stall. The smell had a truffle-like intensity: warm, rich, and leathery. I could definitely imagine why it would be thought a sexual enhancer.1
I again raised the question about the Ottoman custom of granting a woman divorce if her husband failed to provide her with adequate coffee beans—and got an interesting alternate explanation.
“My friend, he thinks the problem is translation,” said the boy. “Beans—not enough beans!” He grabbed his testicles. “These are called beans. Not strong enough!” He patted the bottle of Sultan’s Delight. “Must eat this.”
The idea that coffee enhances your sexual prowess, with or without ambergris, is both right and wrong, for while coffee does not affect a man’s or woman’s performance, sperm exposed to caffeine swim faster and are much more likely to fertilize the woman’s egg, thus making a man’s “beans” potentially more potent. What’s odd about the Ottomans’ belief is that it was directly contradicted by the medical theories of the time. Under the Hippocratic theory of essential fluids and humors, coffee was thought to be a “dry” element that deprived the body of essential juices, particularly semen, “rendering men incapable of generation,” according to scholar Simon Paulli. Coffee addicts were thought to literally pee themselves to death, “the body becoming a mere shadow of its former self, going into decline and eventually dwindling away,” according to the tract Istifa’ al-safwa. Doctors at the Medical University of Marseilles in the late 1600s claimed that “ash” contained in coffee desiccated the entire body, particularly the central nervous system, which “dried up… producing prostration and impotence.”
The women of London found these scenarios of withered and flaccid manhood particularly alarming. By the 1670s their city was overrun with coffeehouses. When these medical reports became common knowledge, a group of females petitioned the mayor to ban the “hell-brew” coffee in order to preserve their sex lives. Their seven-page petition gives some compelling reasons. British gentlemen, it said, were the “ablest performers in Christendom…with lusty lads of eight hundred years fathering Sons and Daughters.” These amazing feats of sexual prowess, however, came to an end when that “abominable, heathenish liquor called COFFEE…dried up their Radical Moisture…leaving them with nothing moist but their Snotty noses, and nothing stiff but their joints.”
But a fuller extract is in order.
The Humble Petition and Address of Several Thousand of Bux-ome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want…”
SHEWETH
That since ’tis Reckon’d amongst the Glories of our native Country To be A paradise for women, it is too our unspeakable Grief we find of late that our gallants are become mere Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on with a world of Fury but in the very first Charge fall down Flat before us…all these qualities we can Attribute to nothing more than excessive use of the most pernicious Coffee, where Nature is Enfeebled and our men left with Ammunition Wanting; peradventure they Present but cannot give Fire….Certainly our Countrymen’s palettes are become as Fanatical as their Brains. How else is it possible they should run a Whor-eing to spend the money and time on a little base, black thick, nasty, Bitter, Stinking, Nauseous, Puddle-water (also known as Ninny’s Broth and Turkish Gruel), so that those that have scarce twopence to buy their children bread must spend a penny each evening in this insipid stuff…
Wherefore we pray that drinking COFFEE be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore and that Lusty Nappy Beer and Cock Ale2 be Recommended to General Use…so that our Husbands may (in time) give us some other Testimonies of the being Men, besides their Beards, and that they no more shall run the hazard of being Cuckol’d by Dildos.
In Hopes of A Glorious Reformation
London, 1674
1 Another coffee used as an aphrodisiac is the Peaberry coffee bean from Central America, called caraiol.
2 Cock Ale is made by adding a dead rooster to fermenting beer and is said to enhance sexual performance. A Scottish Highlands recipe from the 1500s goes like this: “Take ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better; parboil the cock, flay him, and stamp him in a stone mortar until his bones are broken (you must gut him when you flay him). Then, put the cock into two quarts of sack, and put to it five pounds of raisins of the sun, some blades of mace, and a few cloves. Put all these into a canvas bag. Put the bag in the ale in a vessel. In a week or nine days bottle it up, fill the bottle just above the neck, and give it the same time to ripen as other ale.”
War
At this time to refuse or to neglect to give coffee to their wives was a legitimate cause for divorce among the Turks.
William H. Ukers (1873–1945)
I NORMALLY DON’T USE GUIDES, but when Roger (“Call me Roger!”) attached himself to me as I entered Istanbul’s Topkapi palace, I was unable to resist. He was that perfect shade of geek that leaves you wondering, is he annoying? Is he amusing? Or is he just putting you on? A small man with a huge beak of a nose and a bleat like a rubber ducky makes when you squeeze it.
According to Roger, the Topkapi palace was home to the Ottoman sultan. It had all the modern conveniences—heated floors, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a riverfront view, and, of course, castrated doormen. It contained fifteen separate kitchens, now transformed into a museum of culinary history that gives an excellent overview of how coffee’s acceptance by the Islamic elite led to the creation of the modern coffee cup. Originally Turks had sipp
ed their qahwa from the same kind of vessel used by the Ethiopians, a handleless bowl the size of an egg. For the sultan someone created a bowl holder, rather like an eggcup, called a zarf. There are a number of fine examples at Topkapi’s culinary museum, gold and diamond encrusted, serviceable in a quotidian way. Over time the Turks added little handles to the side of the zarfs. Finally some Einstein moved the handle from the zarf to the cup, dumped the zarf, and boom! The modern demitasse was born.
The Turkish technique for brewing coffee echoes the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, in which a single pot is brewed and served three times for friendship. Turks boil ground coffee, water, and sugar three times in rapid succession and pour it, grounds and all, into a demitasse. If there are guests, it is important that they get plenty of the wesh, or crema, that crowns a properly done espresso.1 Afterward, the host is supposed to pour the grounds out onto the saucer and read the guests’ futures. The sultan, Portal of Eternal Light to his friends, had a slightly more elaborate coffee ceremony involving up to thirty people, including a First Minister of the Coffee, according to Souvenir sur le harem imperial by Leila Hanoum:
It arrives already prepared in a golden coffee pot (ibrik) which rests on coals contained in a golden basin hung from three chains which are gathered at the top and held by a slave…Two other girls hold golden trays with little coffee cups made of fine Savoy or Chinese porcelain…The First Minister of the Coffee takes a zarf from the tray, places a cup in it and then, with a small piece of quilted linen that is always on the tray, she pours the coffee…Next, with her fingertips she grasps the base of the zarf, which rests on the end of her index finger supported by the tip of her thumb, and offers it to the Sultan with a gesture of infinite grace and dexterity.
Roger thought all this quite dull.
“Here is most important!” he said, shoving me through a crowd of Malaysian Muslims wearing white jogging suits and gathered about what looked like a piece of old rug. “This is Mohammed’s beard.”
No disrespect to the Prophet’s Whiskers (May They Grow Ever Longer!), but I was more interested in the Sultan’s Harem, a two-hundred room complex, which supposedly no man other than the sultan had ever entered. I discovered that this was not exactly true.
“Here is where the Black Eunuchs slept,” droned Roger as we entered a series of rooms at the harem’s entrance. “Outside were the White Eunuchs. Only the Black Eunuchs were allowed inside.
“Yes!” he continued, before I could ask. “And there was a very good reason for this. This is because sometimes the operation was not always a success.“
“I’m sorry, Roger,” I said. “What operation would that be?”
“The removal of the thing.” He blinked. “The manly organ. Sometimes, if the operation was not a success, the eunuch could perhaps get a woman with baby.”
“You mean they missed?” I asked.
“Perhaps. And that is why only the Black Eunuchs were allowed within the harem. It was thought possible to see in the baby’s face if the father was a black man of Africa and not the sultan.”
I was impressed. “I’d never have thought of that,” I said.
Roger gave me a dry look. And that, my friend, it said, is why the sultan was the sultan and you are just a tourist.
The harem was a lively place. Wives poisoned each others‘ children, sons had their mothers strangled, and brothers had other brothers’ eyes put out. One of its more exclusive features was the Cage, four inner rooms where the sultan’s brothers were imprisoned from birth until death. Meant to prevent wars of succession, it was considered a humanitarian alternative to the tradition of having the sultan murder his own siblings upon ascending to the throne.
The nastiest of the sultans was coffee-hating Murad IV. Born in 1612, he became sultan at the age of eleven and had ordered the strangulation of five hundred soldiers by the time he was twenty. He then dispatched two of his brothers, only sparing the third because his mother convinced him that the remaining bro’ was too loony to ever take the throne. Murad quickly earned the nickname “Hasty” for executing a group of ladies who had sung in public (disturbing the peace). It is said he particularly enjoyed beheading men with fat necks.
He often wandered the city in disguise, searching for traitors. One night in 1633 he and (perhaps) his vizier dressed themselves as commoners and crept out into the darkened city. Being an alcoholic, the sultan made his first stop at a tavern which, according to eighteenth-century English traveler John Ellis, he found full of “people getting drunk and singing songs of love.” His next stop was one of Istanbul’s many cafés, where Ellis reports he “observed several sensible and grave persons soberly discoursing on the affairs of the empire, blaming the administration” for a variety of problems. Murad listened for a while and then crept back to the palace.
Soon after this Murad banned coffee. Istanbul’s cafés were razed. People caught drinking were beaten. If again apprehended, they were sewn into a leather bag and tossed into the Bosporus to drown. Ships carrying coffee were sunk. Murad claimed coffeehouses were a fire hazard, but his real concern was that they encouraged insubordination by providing his subjects with a meeting place that invited sober discussion. His anticoffee campaign was the first purely secular coffee suppression, as opposed to the earlier religious ones, and perhaps the first politically motivated campaign against a mind-altering substance. But he also had a personal hatred for the water pipe which invariably accompanied a Turkish cup of coffee. According to foreign visitors, Murad started roaming the streets with his executioner, instantly beheading anyone he found drinking coffee or smoking.2
“Where the Sultan went on his travels…his halting places were always distinguished by a terrible rise in executions,” wrote contemporary Nicolo di’Conti. “Even on the battlefield he was fond of surprising men in the act of smoking [or drinking coffee], whom he would punish by beheading or crushing their hands and feet.” Others reported that he liked to humiliate smokers by forcing a pipe through their noses and making them ride about Istanbul before personally beheading them.
Although it seems incredible, from ten thousand to one hundred thousand people were executed for these crimes. Thousands more were mutilated. Islamic historians of the time reported that for decades Istanbul remained as “desolate of cafés as the heart of the ignorant.” Taverns, although also banned, were allowed to stay open.
After Murad died, from alcohol poisoning, Istanbul’s coffeehouses gradually began to reappear. Nonetheless, the damage was done. Dispossessed coffee vendors had gone abroad to seek their fortune and within a decade began to pop up in Italy, France, and Austria
Murad’s suppressions did have the effect of helping to restore order in the empire. The Ottomans consolidated their hold over their eastern territories and then turned their attention to Romania and Bulgaria. Within thirty years of Murad’s death they controlled all of Eastern Europe, and in 1683 they marched on Vienna, home to the Hapsburg Empire, then the largest political entity in the West. Their first act, upon arriving at the gates of Vienna, was to shoot over the city’s walls a pillowcase with a demand of surrender inside.
To You, Generals, Governors, and Noble Citizens of Vienna, we make known by these presents, according to the Orders we have received from the most Serene, Most Mighty, most Redoubted, and Mightiest Emperor of the Universe, our Master, the true Image of God upon Earth, who, by the Grace of the Most High, in imitation of our holy Prophet Mahomet Mustapha, to whom be Honor, Glory, and Benediction, hath rendered Himself by the multitude of His Miracles the greatest of all Sovereigns of the one and the other World, and most August of Emperors, who, having caused our innumerable Armies, protected always by Divine Providence, to come hither, We are resolved to take Vienna.
Please surrender, is what they were saying. The Viennese declined. The Turks, all three-hundred thousand of them, pitched tents—about twenty-five thousand of them—and settled in for the summer.
I LEFT ISTANBUL AND HEADED FOR VIENNA TWO DAYS AFTER MY tour of t
he Topkapi palace. It was December 23. As we snaked our way out of the city, I kept pressing my face against the window to see what could be seen through the falling snowflakes. I went to sleep while it was still light out. By morning the snowfall had lightened, and I could see the countryside. Leafless trees, dull wet earth. There was virgin snow everywhere, glittering during the day, turning luminous blue at dusk. After a year in the tropics, the sight made me want to weep with joy.
The only problem was that my ticket had the wrong date on it. Turkish conductors waved me on with an exasperated “Bismallah!” The Bulgarians wanted to arrest me as a spy but settled for a bribe. The Romanian conductor seemed content to nag me to death, returning every half hour and demanding to see my ticket yet again, muttering, “Ees no goo, ees no goo!” Clearly he wanted a bribe of his own. But one payoff per day is my policy.
My Romanian cabinmate told me not to worry. “Berry Romany,” he said of the conductor. “Ees jes de talk.” I loved my cabinmate. He looked just like Roman Polanski. His shoes smelled worse than mine. Best of all, he spoke no English. I too liked the conductor—the way his chins shook in bureaucratic outrage, and his teeny blue conductor’s cap. And Polanski was right. By the time we reached the other side of the Transylvania Mountains, Christmas morning, we were all three sitting in the cabin sharing my Turkish tangerines. The conductor whipped up some fiercely black Java, syrupy and delicious, which we drank out of heavy porcelain cups decorated with a dashing red Romanian Rail Systems logo. It was nice to be back in Europe.
I’d taken the Transylvanian route to Vienna in order to put as much distance as possible between myself and the Serbian conflict. Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même, a French saying all too distressingly true of the current situation. Today it’s Christians raping and killing Muslims; under the Ottoman rule, it had been Muslims playing the heavy. The Ottomans had used this area as a recruiting ground for military slaves. Men were carried off, women were forced into harems, and children were left behind to starve. In many respects it was identical to Serbia’s ethnic cleansing atrocities.
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