A History of the World in 6 Glasses (12 page)

7

The Great Soberer

Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.

—
Jules Michelet, French historian (1798-1874)

Enlightenment by the Cup

T
HE GREEKS WERE fallible. Heavy objects do not fall faster than lighter ones. The Earth is not the center of the universe, and the heart is not a furnace that heats the blood but a pump that circulates it around the body. But only in the early seventeenth century, as astronomers and anatomists uncovered previously unseen worlds, did European thinkers seriously begin to challenge the old certainties of Greek philosophy. Pioneers such as Galileo Galilei in Italy and Francis Bacon in England rejected blind faith in ancient texts in favor of direct observation and experiment. "There is no hope of any major increase in scientific knowledge by grafting or adding the new on top of the old," Bacon declared in his book
The New Logic,
published in 1620. "The restoration of the sciences must start from the bottom-most foundations—unless we prefer to go round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate." Bacon led the denunciation of the influence of the Greek philosophers. He and his followers wanted to demolish the edifice of human knowledge and rebuild it, one brick at a time, on solid new foundations. Everything could be challenged, nothing assumed. The way had been cleared by the religious wars of the Reformation, which reduced the authority of the church, particularly in northern Europe. The new rationalism flourished in England and the Netherlands, driven in part by the challenges of exploiting and maintaining far-flung overseas colonies, and giving rise to the flurry of intellectual activity known as the Scientific Revolution.

This spirit of rational inquiry spread into the mainstream of Western thought over the next two centuries, culminating in the movement called the Enlightenment, as the empirical, skeptical approach adopted by scientists was applied to philosophy, politics, religion, and commerce. During this Age of Reason, Western thinkers moved beyond the wisdom of the ancients and opened themselves to new ideas, pushing out the frontiers of knowledge beyond Old-World limits in an intellectual counterpoint to the geographic expansion of the Age of Exploration. Out went dogmatic reverence for authority, whether philosophical, political, or religious; in came criticism, tolerance, and freedom of thought.

The diffusion of this new rationalism throughout Europe was mirrored by the spread of a new drink, coffee, that promoted sharpness and clarity of thought. It became the preferred drink of scientists, intellectuals, merchants, and clerks—today we would call them "information workers"—all of whom performed mental work sitting at desks rather than physical labor in the open. It helped them to regulate the working day, waking them up in the morning and ensuring that they stayed alert until the close of the business day, or longer if necessary. And it was served in calm, sober, and respectable establishments that promoted polite conversation and discussion and provided a forum for education, debate, and self-improvement.

The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak "small beer" and wine. Both were far safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated, particularly in squalid and crowded cities. (Spirits were not everyday staples like wine and beer; they were for getting drunk.) Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildy inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved. Coffee came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol, sobering rather than intoxicating, heightening perception rather than dulling the senses and blotting out reality. An anonymous poem published in London in 1674 denounced wine as the "sweet Poison of the Treacherous Grape" that drowns "our very Reason and our Souls." Beer was condemned as "Foggy Ale" that "beseig'd our Brains." Coffee, however, was heralded as

Coffee's novelty further contributed to its appeal. Here was a drink that had been unknown to the Greeks and Romans; drinking it was yet another way seventeenth-century thinkers could emphasize that they had moved beyond the limits of the ancient world. Coffee was the great soberer, the drink of clear-headedness, the epitome of modernity and progress—the ideal beverage, in short, for the Age of Reason.

The Wine of Islam

Coffee's stimulating effect had been known about for some time in the Arab world, where coffee originated. There are several romantic stories of its discovery. One tells of an Ethiopian goatherd who noticed that his flock became particularly frisky after consuming the brownish purple cherries from a particular tree. He then tried eating them himself, noted their stimulating powers, and passed his discovery on to a local imam. The imam, in turn, devised a new way to prepare the berries, drying them and then boiling them in water to produce a hot drink, which he used to keep himself awake during overnight religious ceremonies. Another story tells of a man named Omar who was condemned to die of starvation in the desert outside Mocha, a city in Yemen, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula. A vision guided him to a coffee tree, whereupon he ate some of its berries. This gave him sufficient strength to return to Mocha, where his survival was taken as a sign that God had spared him in order to pass along to humankind knowledge of coffee, which then became a popular drink in Mocha.

As with the legends associated with the discovery of beer, these tales may contain a grain of truth, for the custom of drinking coffee seems to have first become popular in Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century. While co>ffee berries may have been chewed for their invigorating effects before this date, the practice of making them into a drink seems to be a Yemeni innovation, often attributed to Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a scholar and a member of the mystical Sufi order of Islam, who died around 1470. By this time, coffee (known in Arabic as
qahwah)
had undoubtedly been adopted by Sufis, who used it to ward off sleep during nocturnal religious ceremonies in which the participants reached out to God through repetitive chanting and swaying.

As coffee percolated throughout the Arab world—it had reached Mecca and Cairo by 1510—the exact nature of its physical effects became the subject of much controversy. Coffee shook off its original religious associations and became a social drink, sold by the cup on the street, in the market square, and then in dedicated coffeehouses. It was embraced as a legal alternative to alcohol by many Muslims. Coffeehouses, unlike the illicit taverns that sold alcohol, were places where respectable people could afford to be seen. But coffee's legal status was ambiguous. Some Muslim scholars objected that it was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same religious prohibition as wine and other alcoholic drinks, which the prophet Muhammad had prohibited.

Religious leaders invoked this rule in Mecca in June 1511, the earliest known of several attempts to ban the consumption of coffee. The local governor, a man named Kha'ir Beg, who was responsible for maintaining public morality, literally put coffee on trial. He convened a council of legal experts and placed the accused—a large vessel of coffee—before them. After a discussion of its intoxicating effects, the council agreed with Kha'ir Beg that the sale and consumption of coffee should be prohibited. The ruling was proclaimed throughout Mecca, coffee was seized and burned in the streets, and coffee vendors and some of their customers were beaten as a punishment. Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha'ir Beg's ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again. His authority undermined, Kha'ir Beg was replaced as governor the following year.

But was coffee really an intoxicant? Muslim scholars had already spent much effort debating whether the prophet had meant to ban intoxicating drinks altogether or merely the act of drinking to intoxication. Everyone agreed on the need for a legal definition of intoxication, and several such definitions were duly devised. An intoxicated person was variously defined as someone who "becomes absent-minded and confused," "departs from whatever he has in the way of mild virtue and tranquility into foolishness and ignorance," or "comprehends absolutely nothing at all, and who does not know a man from a woman, or the earth from the heavens." These definitions, devised as part of the scholarly argument about alcoholic drinks, were then applied to coffee.

Yet coffee clearly failed to produce any such effects in the drinker, even when consumed in large quantities. In fact, it did quite the opposite. "One drinks coffee with the name of the Lord on his lips and stays awake," noted one coffee advocate, "while the person who seeks wanton delight in intoxicants disregards the Lord, and gets drunk." Coffee's opponents tried to argue that any change in the drinker's physical or mental state was grounds on which to ban coffee. The drink's defenders successfully parried this argument too, noting that spicy foods, garlic, and onions also produced physical effects, such as watering eyes, but that their consumption was perfectly legal.

Although Kha'ir Beg's superiors in Cairo did not uphold his ban on the sale and consumption of coffee, they did echo his disapproval of gatherings and places where it was drunk. Indeed, it was not so much coffee's effects on the drinker but the circumstances in which it was consumed that worried the authorities, for coffeehouses were hotbeds of gossip, rumor, political debate, and satirical discussion. They were also popular venues for chess and backgammon, which were regarded as morally dubious. Technically, board games were only banned under Islamic law if bets were placed on their outcome. But the fact that they were played at all added to the perception, among opponents of coffeehouses, that such establishments were at best places of lax morality and at worst dens of plotting and sedition.

There were many further attempts to close down coffeehouses, for example in Mecca in 1524 and Cairo in 1539, though such closures were usually short-lived. For despite these efforts, and the denunciation of coffee drinkers as layabouts or gossips, no law was actually being broken, so attempts to ban coffee ultimately failed. By the early seventeenth century, visiting Europeans were commenting on the widespread popularity of coffeehouses in the Arab world, and their role as meeting places and sources of news. William Biddulph, an English traveler, noted in 1609 that "their Coffa houses are more common than Ale-houses in England. . . . If there be any news it is talked of there." George Sandys, another English traveler who visited Egypt and Palestine in 1610, observed that "although they be destitute of Taverns, yet have they their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There they sit chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it."

One possible objection to the adoption of coffee in Europe—its association with Islam—was dispelled around this time. Shortly before his death in 1605, Pope Clement VIII was asked to state the Catholic church's position on coffee. At the time, the drink was a novelty little known in Europe except among botanists and medical men, including those at the University of Padua, a leading center for medical research. Coffee's religious opponents argued that coffee was evil: They contended that since Muslims were unable to drink wine, the holy drink of Christians, the devil had punished them with coffee instead. But the pope had the final say. A Venetian merchant provided a small sample for inspection, and Clement decided to taste the new drink before making his decision. The story goes that he was so enchanted by its taste and aroma that he approved its consumption by Christians. Within half a century, this exotic novelty was fast becoming commonplace in parts of western Europe. Coffeehouses opened in Britain in the 1650s and in Amsterdam and The Hague during the 1660s. As coffee moved west, it took the Arab notion of the coffeehouse as a more respectable, intellectual, and above all nonalcoholic alternative to the tavern along with it—and more than a whiff of controversy.

The Triumph of Coffee

Coffee could have been tailor-made for the London of the 1650s and 1660s. The first coffeehouses appeared during the rule of the puritanical Oliver Cromwell, who came to power at the end of the English civil war after the dethronement and execution of King Charles I. England's coffeehouses got their start, in Puritan times, as more respectable and temperate alternatives to taverns. They were well lit, and adorned with bookshelves, mirrors, pictures in gilt frames, and good furniture, in stark contrast to the gloom and squalor of the taverns where alcohol was served. Following Cromwell's death in 1658, public opinion turned in favor of restoring the monarchy, and during this time, coffeehouses became centers of political debate and intrigue as the way was cleared for the accession of Charles II in 1660. William Coventry, one of the king's advisers, noted that Charles's supporters had often met in coffeehouses during Cromwell's rule, and that "the King's friends had then used more liberty of speech in these places than they durst to do in any other." He suggested that the king might not have gained his throne but for the gatherings that took place in coffeehouses.