Coffee Comes to Europe
The first Europeans to taste coffee mostly hated it. George Sandys, an English poet traveling through the Ottoman Empire in 1610, described the drink as “black as soot, and tasting not much unlike it”; another Englishman living in Istanbul found it unpleasant to taste and smell. Beyond the flavor there was the problem of its associations — coffee was conspicuously the drink of the Islamic world, which made it doubly suspect in seventeenth-century Christendom. According to a story that is probably too good to be true but too good to skip, advisers urged Pope Clement VIII around 1600 to condemn the “Muslim drink”; the pope tried a cup first, enjoyed it so much that he declared it would be wrong to let the infidels monopolize it, and proposed to baptize it instead. Whatever actually happened in Rome, the anecdote captures the arc of the century that followed: within two generations, a beverage Europeans found sooty and foreign had become the fuel of their commerce, their science, and eventually their revolutions.
Coffee reached Europe along two routes. Overland and across the Mediterranean, Ottoman trade brought beans to Venice — the great commercial hinge between East and West — where coffee was sold as an exotic medicine by the early 1600s and where Europe’s earliest cafes would eventually open. By sea, the English and Dutch East India Companies began buying at the Yemeni port of Mocha early in the century, shipping cargoes home around the Cape of Good Hope. For decades the beans trickled in as a curiosity. The transformation came when Europe imported not just the commodity but the institution that went with it: the coffeehouse, perfected in Ottoman Istanbul a full century before — and, fittingly, it arrived in the hands of people from the Ottoman world.
London: the penny universities
Europe’s first documented coffeehouse was opened in London around 1652 by Pasqua Rosée, an ethnic Armenian from the Ottoman city of Smyrna, who had come to England as the servant of a Levant Company merchant and set up shop in St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill. (Oxford has a competing claim from about 1650, and its scholars took to the drink early — the Oxford Coffee Club that met at Tillyard’s coffeehouse would grow into the Royal Society.) The timing was perfect. England was mid-revolution, censorship had loosened, and here was an institution seemingly designed for the age: a sober, alcohol-free public room where, for the price of a penny cup, any man could sit at the long communal table, read the newsletters, and argue with strangers about anything. Londoners called the coffeehouses “penny universities,” and the name was only half a joke — Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and their circle talked science in them (the Grecian was practically the Royal Society’s annex), and a famous coffeehouse wager about planetary orbits helped prompt the Principia.
By 1700 London had hundreds of coffeehouses, perhaps more per capita than any city before or since, and they had begun to specialize in ways that shaped the modern economy. Merchants and ship owners gathered at Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse to trade shipping intelligence and underwrite voyages — the room became Lloyd’s of London, still the world’s most famous insurance market. Stockjobbers, expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdiness, decamped to Jonathan’s coffeehouse in Exchange Alley, where the posted lists of stock prices grew into the London Stock Exchange. Not everyone was charmed: the anonymous Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674 complained that the drink made men “as unfruitful as the deserts” and kept them from their homes, and in 1675 Charles II — alarmed, like every Ottoman sultan before him, by rooms where “the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” — issued a proclamation suppressing coffeehouses entirely. The public reaction was so furious that he withdrew it in eleven days. It was the Meccan and Istanbul story replayed beat for beat: the coffeehouse had become too useful to close.
Vienna 1683: the siege that became a legend
Coffee’s most theatrical European arrival came at the point of a sword. In the summer of 1683 an Ottoman army of some 150,000 laid siege to Vienna, and when a Polish-Habsburg relief force under Jan Sobieski broke the siege that September, the retreating Ottomans abandoned their camp — including, the story goes, hundreds of sacks of green coffee beans. The Viennese allegedly took them for camel fodder until Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, a Polish officer who had slipped through Ottoman lines as a spy and knew the drink from years in Istanbul, claimed the sacks and opened the city’s first coffeehouse, softening the Turkish brew for local palates with milk and honey. Historians have poked holes in nearly every detail — Vienna’s first licensed coffeehouse was probably opened by an Armenian merchant named Johannes Diodato in 1685 — but the legend is Vienna’s founding myth for a cafe culture that became one of the glories of European civilization, the marble-tabled Kaffeehaus of Freud and Klimt that UNESCO now lists as intangible cultural heritage. One habit survives as a possible fingerprint of the Ottoman inheritance: Viennese coffee is still served, like Turkish coffee in Istanbul, with a glass of water on the side.
Paris: the cafe and the Enlightenment
France got its taste for coffee from an ambassador. In 1669 Suleiman Aga, envoy of the Ottoman sultan, spent a season in Paris serving coffee in oriental splendor to the fashionable world, and the city never recovered. In 1686 a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, opened the Café Procope opposite what became the Comédie-Française, trading the smoky tavern model for mirrors, chandeliers, and marble tables — the template of the elegant European cafe. Voltaire (who reputedly drank dozens of cups a day, mixed with chocolate) was a regular; Diderot and d’Alembert are said to have planned the Encyclopédie at its tables; Benjamin Franklin was toasted there. And when the Enlightenment curdled into revolution, the cafes came with it: Marat, Danton, and Robespierre conspired at the Procope, and on July 12, 1789, it was outside the Café de Foy that Camille Desmoulins leapt onto a table and called the crowd to arms, two days before the Bastille fell. By the late eighteenth century Paris had some 1,800 cafes, and the pattern begun in Mecca in 1511 had reached its logical conclusion — historians have only half-jokingly credited the shift from beer-soaked mornings to caffeinated ones with sharpening the entire continent’s thinking. The coffeehouse was where the age of reason drank.
There is a coda across the Atlantic. Britain’s American colonies had coffeehouses too — the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was reportedly planned in one, the Green Dragon — and after the tea tax made tea-drinking unpatriotic, Americans switched allegiance to coffee more or less permanently. Meanwhile, the same European demand that built the cafes reshaped the world that grew the beans: unwilling to keep paying Mocha’s prices, the Dutch, French, and British smuggled seeds and seedlings to their colonies, and by the early 1800s Java, Ceylon, the Caribbean, and Brazil had reduced Yemen — once the world’s only source — to a footnote. That story, of coffee’s origins and global spread, and of the industrial and specialty eras that followed, is told elsewhere. But the European chapter left a permanent legacy: the idea that a city is not complete without rooms where anyone can sit, sip something warm, and argue about the state of the world.
Frequently asked questions
When did coffee first come to Europe? Beans arrived through Venetian trade and East India Company cargoes in the early 1600s, but coffee became a public institution with Europe’s first documented coffeehouse, opened in London around 1652 by Pasqua Rosée, an Armenian from Ottoman Smyrna.
Why were London coffeehouses called “penny universities”? A penny bought a cup of coffee and a seat at the communal table, with newspapers, gossip, and conversation included — an education for the price of a drink. Institutions like Lloyd’s of London and the London Stock Exchange began as coffeehouse gatherings.
Did the siege of Vienna really start Viennese coffee culture? The legend — abandoned Ottoman coffee sacks claimed by the spy Kulczycki in 1683 — is mostly myth; Vienna’s first licensed coffeehouse was likely opened by the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato in 1685. But the siege did mark coffee’s dramatic entry into Central Europe.
What role did cafes play in the French Revolution? Paris cafes like the Procope were meeting grounds for Enlightenment philosophes and later for revolutionaries including Marat, Danton, and Robespierre. Camille Desmoulins’s call to arms outside the Café de Foy on July 12, 1789 helped spark the storming of the Bastille.