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
