Black Gold

скачать книгу бесплатно


The result of the Mecca debate was that Kha’ir Bey banned the consumption of coffee in that city, and reported his action to the Mameluke Sultan in Cairo, where it appears that coffee was already well established, inevitably, amongst the Sufi community. The Sultan ordered Kha’ir Bey to rescind the ban, and eventually the hapless Pasha lost his job for unrelated reasons. The Mameluke Sultans had waged a constant battle against taverns, but for the time being the coffee house was not tainted by association. After the Ottomans took Cairo in 1517, the two doctors who had given evidence in support of the ban in Mecca were arrested and cut in two at the waist on the orders of Selim I, who died in 1520. Coffee, from being an ecstatic in the service of the Sufis, rapidly spread throughout the newly united territories, acting both as an engine of social cohesion and a valued internal trading commodity. It was adopted by the Khalwatiyya, confrères of the élite bodyguard of the Sultan, and the approval of coffee by the Court Physician to Suleiman in 1522 further secured its position. Ottoman support for coffee drinking was by no means unwavering, however: a succession of prohibitions ebbed and flowed around the Empire. Banned again at Mecca in 1526, coffee houses in Cairo were smashed up in 1535 as a result of the preachings of al-Sunbati and reinstated by the judge Ibn Ilyas. In 1539, again in Cairo, night watchmen imprisoned any coffee house customers they found, and a prohibition order arrived in Cairo from Istanbul in 1544, but was enforced only for a day.

The intense controversy provoked by the growth of coffee consumption throughout the Ottoman Empire became one of the intellectual and literary obsessions of the sixteenth century. Coffee, increasingly secularized, became a powerful social force, in that people now had a reason to be out at night other than the performance of their religious duties. Traditional patterns of hospitality were broken as the coffee house started to replace the home as a place of entertainment; strangers could meet and converse, and men of different stations in life could be found sharing the beverage. In addition, of course, coffee by its nature was a powerful aid to intellectual dispute and clarity of thought, as well as providing the means whereby debate could be prolonged into the night. These factors combined to make coffee potentially subversive in the eyes of not only the religious authorities, but the secular ones as well. The increasing assertiveness of the Ottomans in the Red Sea trade, their possession of Yemen and, in 1555, parts of coastal Ethiopia, gave them greater access to the coffee entrepôts that sustained the coffee habit that had spread throughout the empire and beyond to Persia and the Moghul empire. Coffee had truly been adopted as the drink of Islam. But it was Constantinople, capital of Suleiman the Magnificent’s eponymous empire, that witnessed the great flowering of Ottoman coffee 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 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 ‘with measureless self-conceit and the boldest greed’ the treatment of various classical heroes, including, coincidentally, the fantastic rewards heaped upon Pompilius by the Lacedaemonians, whose Spartan ‘black broth’ we met earlier in these pages. Perhaps worn down by the weight of classical allusions, the council eventually relented and gave him a property at 30 Haidgasse worth over 1000 gulden. It has not been possible to establish whether this in fact became Vienna’s first coffee house; nonetheless, Kolschitsky’s keen sense of his own worth has etched itself on the history of Viennese coffee, so that he has become the hero he almost certainly never was. His statue can be found adorning the exterior of the Café Zwirina.

However flawed his character may have been, it is the case that the Viennese did take enthusiastically to coffee after the siege. They may have been helped in adjusting to the new taste by the invention of the croissant, or, as it was then known, the pfizer. Supposedly created by a Viennese baker who had discovered a Turkish mining operation whilst working at night in his bakery, the curved bread roll was based on the crescent moon that featured prominently on the Ottoman flag, as it still does on that of many Islamic countries. In these highly charged days, it is salutary to recall that, every morning, many in the Christian world celebrate the crushing of Islam in a kind of unconscious anti-Communion.

The Siege of Vienna saw the end of expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a European coalition fought to regain lost territory. The Sultans became increasingly mired in debt, and the slave girls poised with their fine porcelain coffee cups at the lips of the Sultan gave way to the vulgar diamond-encrusted self-service coffee cups of the late imperial era, which can still be seen in the treasury of the Top Kapi Palace in Istanbul. Under Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), Turkey finally turned its back on its Ottoman history, became a secular society, and, mysteriously, took up tea drinking, as if four hundred years of glorious coffee culture had never been.

The curious role of coffee in the lifecycle of these early empires was thus complete: the Sufis and the Ottomans had developed coffee drinking as a result of observing tea drinking during one of the rare forays of officials of the Chinese Empire into the Arabian Sea. The coffee habit, initially ritualistic, had fuelled Ottoman expansion during the heyday of their Empire, only to be handed on like a relay baton to the Habsburg Empire and to other European nations, where coffee, stripped of its spiritual function, in turn catalysed the creation of aggressive mercantile cultures linked with European imperialism. As the Ottomans slowly collapsed, so they reverted to drinking what was perhaps the inspiration for their love affair with coffee. Turkey is now the third largest consumer – and fifth largest producer – of tea worldwide.

4 (#ulink_04a7d9ff-8c40-53ad-8e37-c69ed4528312)

THE MOCHA TRADE (#ulink_04a7d9ff-8c40-53ad-8e37-c69ed4528312)

Traces of the history of the expansion of European maritime nations into the East, their adoption of coffee drinking at home, and their involvement in the trade itself can all be found on the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. To the visitor, who must approach by sea, the island looms out of the dawn, its high peaks swathed in funereal clouds, and the enormous, bare, red-black basalt cliffs glisten with the remorseless damp of aeons of isolation, creating a seemingly impregnable fortress. As the boat draws closer and skirts the cliffs around the island towards the miniature capital of Jamestown on the north coast, the impression is of an unfathomable gloom.

This is partly because St Helena is further from anywhere else than anywhere on the planet. If the island were the size of the earth, the nearest land would be four times the distance of the moon away. Ascension Island, some seven hundred miles away, is closest – ‘another meer wart in the sea’, as a Dr Fryer noted in 1679. Madame Bernard was to remark during Napoleon’s exile: ‘the devil sh-t this island as he flew from one world to the other’. St Helena wears its remoteness like a damp, suffocating cloak.

The fierce, naked cliffs of basalt defy the heavy, sluggish swell of the South Atlantic and the unending battering of the south-east trade winds. It is hard to believe from the sea that, in 1502, the 47-square-mile island was regarded by its discoverer, the Portuguese Admiral Juan da Nova, as a veritable Eden. It was densely forested all over with gumwood, oak, and ebony, with no large animal inhabitants except sea-lions, sea-birds, seals, and turtles; it had no predators, no snakes, no poisonous insects, but 120 endemic kinds of beetle. The only usable access to the interior lay through the narrow valley that now contains Jamestown, where the early visitors built a small chapel, collected fresh water, and gathered fruits. Da Nova left a number of goats, and thus the untouched Eden that had first exploded out of the ink-blue waters of the South Atlantic some sixty million years previously commenced the inexorable fall from grace that only contact with man’s intrusive ways can bring.

The goats bred rapidly, and herds of hundreds, huge and fat, roamed the island eating young trees. Rats had escaped from the Portuguese ships and proliferated, along with great poisonous spiders from Africa, and there were packs of feral cats and dogs. The island continued to be the secret solace of Portuguese sailors, but as other European nations began to flex their maritime muscles it was inevitable that the secret of St Helena would out. An English adventurer, James Fenton, came across it by accident in 1582, and hatched a suitably piratical plot to oust the Portuguese and have himself proclaimed King, from which he had to be dissuaded by William Hawkins, his second-in-command. In 1583 three Japanese princes stopped there en route for Rome, on an embassy inspired by the indefatigable Jesuits. By chance, two other Japanese, captured off California from a Spanish ship, the Santa Ana, by Thomas Cavendish on his round-the-world voyage, would also have visited St Helena when the captain stopped there in 1588. He had been able to locate the island by taking prisoner the navigator from the Santa Ana. He stayed twelve days on the island, surveying it meticulously, observing the herds of goats nearly a mile long, the Persian partridges and Chinese pheasants, and stands of imported fig, lemon, and orange trees, as well as herbs and vegetables.

St Helena, despite its isolation, already bore the heavy stamp of man. Having finally been put on the map by Cavendish, it was inevitable that St Helena should become the unfortunate battleground of later European rivalries. A Dutch pilot in the service of the Portuguese, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, put in on the way back from India a year after Cavendish had left and heard stories of the Englishman’s sojourn. He described the island as ‘an earthly Paradise for the Portuguese ships’, so well placed in the vast wastes of the South Atlantic as to appear to be evidence of God’s beneficence. In those early days, there was virtually no piracy and no rival European navies to worry about, so the Portuguese ships sailed their own course from India to convene in St Helena before making the voyage home together. St Helena’s very isolation made it a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, in a bizarre sense obeying the estate agent’s mantra of ‘Location, Location, Location’. There was literally nowhere else to go.

Cavendish’s discovery that the island was the gathering place for the returning Portuguese East India fleet meant that it quickly became the haunt of English warships in search of easy – and lucrative – prey, to such an extent that, by 1592, the fleet returning from Goa had specific orders to avoid St Helena at all costs. Captain James Lancaster stopped on the island in 1591 on the first English commercial voyage to the Indies. He was to be the commander of the first East India Company fleet ten years later, using Portuguese maps of the Spice Islands which, ironically, had been stolen by van Linschoten from the Archbishop of Goa. These maps had excited so much interest in Holland and England that they gave the initial impetus necessary for the formation of merchant companies to exploit the knowledge they revealed. St Helena had already started to be the stage upon which many of the main characters of the coming European dominance of the East were to be first seen.

European sailors returning from the Cape of Good Hope, the Arabian Sea, and the East Indies beyond could run before the south-easterly trade winds that blow almost unceasingly from the Cape across the expanses of the South Atlantic. To avoid running into the same winds, outgoing ships mostly swung out towards the Brazilian coast, eventually making a much more southerly passage to the Cape. Frequently, the boats that had made the long journey to the trading ports of the East were in poor shape by the time they returned, and St Helena became a sanctuary for battered, weary sailors and their broken ships. The island’s history at the beginning of the seventeenth century reflected the waxing and waning of European fortunes in the East. Portugal, after it had become united with Spain in 1580, became embroiled in a war of attrition against the Dutch, who in turn flexed their muscles upon achieving independence at the conclusion of that war and lost no time in filling the vacuum left by the decline in Portuguese trading activity in the East by sending large well-financed fleets to the Spice Islands. This thwarted similar ambitions harboured by the English, who set up the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ (to become known as the East India Company) in 1600 with precisely the same aim. The First Voyage (as each individually financed fleet was termed) of the Company came to St Helena after a particularly gruelling passage of the Cape, during which the Commander, James Lancaster, having lost the rudder of his flagship, the Red Dragon, ordered the accompanying Hector to sail on, writing poignantly in his log: ‘I live … at the devotion of wind and seas.’ Fortunately for Lancaster, the captain of the Hector refused to obey the order, and the two ships eventually limped into St Helena for repairs.

For most English people, the East India Company is principally associated with the tea trade with China, which indeed it initiated in the 1660s and which largely sustained it until 1833, when it ceased to be a trading company and effectively became the managing agency of India. However, from the earliest years of the Company, its factors (as the merchants were known) had identified coffee as a potentially interesting trading commodity, and by the 1620s were actively trading coffee from Yemen throughout the Arabian Sea at a time when coffee was virtually unknown back in England. As St Helena became a vital safe haven for the increasing number of Company voyages that put in there, so it also became part of the intricate web of connections created by the coffee trade. The involvement of the Company in the trade pre-dated the period of rapid expansion of European coffee consumption, but coincided with the first reports of the beverage. The traveller Leonhard Rauwolf from Augsburg went to Aleppo in 1573 where he observed the use of ‘a very good drink, by them called chaube’. Another early reference to ‘this drink called caova’ was by Prospero Alpini, a physician from Padua who travelled to Egypt in 1580 and published a book on the plants of the country in 1592. Padua’s university was at the centre of European medical learning at the time, and knowledge of the new drink thus disseminated rapidly. Preceding this was the report made by the Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini to the Senate in 1585. He had been living in Constantinople and said that the Turks ‘drink a black water as hot as they can suffer it, which is the infusion of a bean called cavee, which is said to possess the virtue of stimulating mankind’. Coffee was well established in the Ottoman Empire by the time these observations were made, and was also being widely consumed in Persia and Moghul India. Where did all the coffee to fill the cups of Islam come from?

It is common for the coffee industry to assert that, whilst Ethiopia was the cradle of coffee, Yemen, having imported plants from Ethiopia, was the first country actively to cultivate and trade in the new beverage. In fact, until the mid sixteenth century, the demand for coffee was met by Ethiopia entirely. Evidence of coffee exports from Zeila, near Djibouti on the western Red Sea coast, can be found in reports of the jurist Ibn Hadjar al-Haytami of Mecca in the late fifteenth century as well as in an account of a boat captured by the Portuguese in 1542 on the way to Shihr in Arabia.

According to some sources, exported coffee was harvested from the wild bushes in Kaffa province in the western highlands. However, recent genetic research into the spread of coffee plant species has suggested that the source of the Yemeni coffee strain was not the type found in Kaffa province, but that found in the east near Harar. As it is clear that the Harar type evolved from the Kaffa type, this would imply that there had been a migration of the plant to the Arab province of Harar before the plant went on to be cultivated in Yemen. This strongly suggests that the original domesticated (cultivated) coffee plant came from Harar, and that this would also have been the source of the Ethiopian coffee traded in parallel to that of Yemeni origin through the port of Mocha. This places Harar securely at the epicentre of the genesis of the world coffee trade: its cultivated varietal was the source of coffee traded in the earliest days. The strain of coffee plant produced there today is still the original type, Harar longberry, which is close in flavour to its Yemeni progeny and, although ‘unwashed’ (generally considered to be a less satisfactory method than wet processing), is one of the world’s most prized coffees.

There is no clue to suggest how the coffee plant came to be cultivated in Harar, although there is some anecdotal evidence that the slave routes from the Oromo region (the Harar Arabs were incorrigible slavers) were lined with coffee plants discarded by the coffee-chewing Oromo captives. This would not account for the domestication of the plant, however, which required the application of specific skills. As there was a sudden surge in demand for coffee in the first half of the sixteenth century, it would have made the cultivation of coffee commercially worthwhile, and Harar was in any case a great deal more convenient for Arab traders than distant Kaffa. The presence of a domesticated coffee plant in the Arab-controlled Harar region would have made the transplanting of that variety to Yemen virtually inevitable as Mocha consolidated its position as the chief coffee port.

Although the coffee trade remained relatively insignificant, and the records concerning its usage remarkably thin in the era up to 1550, it would appear that the groundwork, in the form of tacit social acceptance, along with religious and imperial approval, had been done on the basis of Ethiopian coffee alone, and that the cultivation of the plant had first commenced in the Harar region. The pretensions of Yemeni coffee to hold the monopoly on the early coffee trade are hollow indeed.

However, the switch of the principal source of coffee production from Ethiopia to Yemen can be dated with some confidence. In 1544 the Imam banned the cultivation of qat in the Jabal Sabir region of Yemen and introduced coffee plants ‘from which the population will derive great benefit’. The same date is ascribed to the introduction of coffee in a later Arabian chronicle. The Ottomans took the neighbouring city of Ta’izz in the following year, and it is under their auspices that the cultivation of coffee became a significant feature of the economy. Indeed it was in many ways a classic colonialist venture: cultivated in a conquered country, coffee was principally consumed in the main cities of the conqueror. The only element missing from the later European model was the use of slaves, for it appears that the rapid expansion of coffee drinking throughout the Ottoman Empire had created a golden opportunity for Yemeni farmers. The mountains overlooking the Tihama – the coastal plain which had previously been relatively uncultivated – proved to be perfectly suited to coffee growing. Farmers from the Tihama and inland plateau moved there: an immense project of terrace building and irrigation works was implemented, financed by the burgeoning coffee trade throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Situated at the south-west corner of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen defies any mistaken preconceptions of unrelenting heat and equally unrelenting sand dunes. It is as if the peninsula had been stood upon, like a sheet of ice, in the north-east, raising the south-west Yemeni portion into ranges of mountains sliced through with precipitate gorges strewn with rocks and vegetation and watered by seasonal streams. The Tihama, bordering the Red Sea, is intensely hot and humid, but only thirty kilometres inland the mountains soar straight out of the plain to heights of well over three thousand metres. Whereas the Tihama remains relatively dry almost throughout the year, the mountains catch the monsoon clouds, and short, intense bursts of rain are frequent, resulting in sayl – flash floods in the dry river beds. From this dramatic landscape the coffee farmers fashioned a yet more dramatic way of life; to catch the sporadic rainfall, the precipitate hillsides are covered from peak to trough with terraces held in place by stone walls. It may take a wall five metres high, snaking around the craggy contours, to create a cultivatable terrace two metres wide. Looking up from below, it sometimes seems as if the whole mountain is one gigantic man-made dry stone wall stretching into the clouds. In order to harness the rainfall in an elaborate system of irrigation channels and tanks, Yemeni villages are deliberately built away from the terraces – the only such place available being on top of the mountains. Since the vernacular architecture favours houses in the form of five- or six-storey square-built stone mini-skyscrapers, the total effect is unique and astounding. Villages of perhaps ten of such houses are perched in the most improbable clusters on the top of jagged mountainsides, whilst below them row after row of terracing planted with windbreaks of wolf’s wood and screw pine fall into the infinity of colossal ravines, home to wild roses and prickly pear, baboons, rock hyrax, leopards, and weaver birds.

There are no records concerning the terrace building project. However, the mass migration to the coffee mountains is still recalled in many oral family histories in the country. It was in its time as significant as the California gold rush. By the end of the sixteenth century, Arabia Felix was universally seen to be the origin of coffee production, totally eclipsing Ethiopia in a matter of half a century. When Europeans first heard of coffee, and when their merchants gathered intelligence regarding the trading potential of the mysterious new drink, it was to Yemen they looked. Yemen had usurped the Ethiopian claim to be the unique source, and farmers brought coffee to the busy entrepôt of Bait-al-Faqih at the foot of the mountains, from whence it was transported in camel trains down the Tihama to the port whose name soon became synonymous with the coffee trade: Mocha.

The name Mocha is so enmeshed with that of coffee itself that it appears on everything from Ethiopian coffee to a variety of brewing machines, to coffee blends, or coffee made in myriad ways, including, in the case of one coffee bar, ‘espresso, steamed milk, chocolate, richly blended, topped with fresh cream’, which would seem about as far removed from the austere majesty of the Yemeni original as it is possible to be. The reason for this ubiquity is simple: for a hundred and fifty years Mocha was celebrated as the sole port supplying the world’s coffee, at a time when coffee drinking was booming in the Islamic world and Europe. Today, it is hard to believe that the town was very prosperous, with six thousand houses and a stone-built Governor’s mansion ‘with very fayre and large stayres’. It is now a godforsaken, fly-blown spot, strewn with the inevitable mounds of plastic bags and mineral-water bottles that are the unfortunate detritus of Yemen’s qat chewing habit. The sand dunes have reclaimed much of the town, and the most permanent buildings are made from redundant shipping containers. Even in the mid nineteenth century it was described as ‘a dead-alive mouldering town’. However, one can still find some signs of its former glories: the ruinous brick walls that have not been buried by the sand show signs of having been richly decorated with ornate plasterwork – these would have been the villas in which the wealthy coffee merchants lived. Likewise the mosque dedicated to Shadomer Shadhili, patron saint of the town, rises like a pearly mirage in the distance through the hot, dusty air, and the curving stairs of the ruins of what is said to have been the lighthouse, marooned half a mile from the sea, can still be visited, as long as the smell of human dung can be endured. This is one feature of Mocha that has not changed since the first descriptions by Europeans, who found it handsome and whitewashed along the waterfront, but ‘unbearably filthy within’. The other is the unrelenting heat and humidity. The Tihama is as airless and humid a place as can be imagined, and early European merchants who ventured there in their doublets and fustian must have been horribly uncomfortable. The squalor and the heat contributed to the town’s reputation for being an unhealthy place, ‘a hell of heat and humid air, of infected drinking water and without a breath of wind’. The villa owners built verandas on the top of their houses, shaded by reed screens and designed to admit the slightest of breezes.

Mocha, according to one early account, ‘standeth hard by the waterside in a plaine sandye field’. The local soil was barren because of salt contamination, and the only thing that grew there was date palms, from which toddy was made. It was hardly an ideal place for a port, but it was the best that was on offer on the Tihama coast. Aden, one of the world’s great natural harbours around the corner on the Arabian Sea, was too far away from the coffee-producing mountains to be of use. Although fourteen fathoms deep, Mocha’s anchorage was ‘open and dangerous with very shoali water a mile off the town’. These shallows were eventually to be the death of the port as they accreted silt and became increasingly treacherous: today the water is only four fathoms deep as far as four miles off the town. This natural tendency to silt up was not helped by American trading ships in the early nineteenth century dumping their ballast in the anchorage before taking coffee on board.

By the time the first European traders arrived in the first decade of the seventeenth century the prosperity of Mocha was assured, with the coffee supplied by new plantations developed on the towering Yemeni mountains hard by. However, the increasing dominance of the Ottomans on both sides of the Red Sea meant that the strain of coffee that had been successfully introduced to Yemen continued to have a rival in the form of the Ethiopian Harar coffee. That coffee was under Arab control, and it was shipped to Mocha before being sold to other merchants. Hence the so-called monopoly held by the port of Mocha was a monopoly on the trade, not on the origin of the coffee. At times, the quality of coffee being shipped to Mocha from Ethiopia exceeded that of the local Yemeni coffee, and it achieved a better price. The East India Company’s chief factor at Mocha, Francis Dickinson, wrote as late as 1733: ‘There has been about Three hundred Bales of Abbysine coffee imported this Season, but as that is now cleaner than the Coffee generally brought to this Market, it sells for a higher price, and was all brought up for the Busseroh Market.’ It has long been a puzzle to those interested in the coffee trade as to how the name ‘Mocha’ has been misappropriated by Ethiopia – in line with the assumption that the world’s first cultivated coffee came from Yemen, it was believed that the Mocha sobriquet should properly be applied only to coffee from that country and that Ethiopia was guilty of barefaced theft. Since we have now demonstrated that, historically, Ethiopian coffee was sold alongside Yemeni coffee through the entrepôt of Mocha, that mystery has been solved.