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
