History
While today coffee is ubiquitous in regions such as Northern and Western Europe, Australia, North America, and Brazil, its rise to multicultural glory was not necessarily a smooth one. Associations with Islam and concerns over its energizing effect once threatened to limit its consumption to just the Muslim nations where it originated.
In the 1600s coffee was wildly popular in the great Ottoman Empire, which at the time spanned parts of modern-day Eastern and Southern Europe and Northern Africa and was considered the bridge between the East and the West. Coffee actually became so popular in the Empire that Sultan Murad IV sought to make the beverage illegal and decapitate anyone caught drinking it.
But even with the threat of having their heads separated from their bodies, the people of the Ottoman Empire’s love for and addiction to coffee was so strong, they kept right on drinking it.
As trade with the Muslim world opened up in the 16th and 17th centuries through the trading port of Venice, the Muslim obsession with coffee gave the European Catholics their first introduction to the hot, caffeinated beverage. As coffee began taking up residence on the streets of Venice and Rome, The Catholic Pope was pressured by his advisers to denounce coffee for its association with Islam and its strangely powerful hold on its consumers. His advisers called coffee the “bitter invention of Satan.” Perhaps they had never tried putting sugar in their coffee?
Inspired by the uniquely passionate devotion of its consumers, Pope Clement VIII had to experience it for himself. An immediate convert following his first taste, the Pope declared coffee as delicious, even jesting that it should be baptized. True to his word, Pope Clement VIII did actually physically bless a serving of coffee beans; and with this official blessing, coffeehouses spread like wildfire throughout Europe.
While an amusing and quite believable anecdote, considering today’s international fondness for this single drink, this story about the Pope remains disputed as a possible legend. Nevertheless, it’s still one of the more pleasant Papal tales. Next time you have coffee, you might want to say a prayer of gratitude (or a secular remark of appreciation- your choice) to Pope Clement VIII.
But while the Pope was on board with this newfound coffee craze, the drink was banned by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church sometime before the 18th century. However, not able to resist its aromatic charm for long, Ethiopian attitudes softened towards coffee drinking in the second half of the 19th century. Coffee consumption in the region spread rapidly between 1880 and 1886; according to British Scholar Richard Pankhurst, the founding member of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, “this was largely due to Emperor Menelik, who himself drank it, and to Abuna Matewos who did much to dispel the belief of the clergy that it was a Muslim drink.”
Once denounced and demonized for its connections to the Muslim world and Islam religion, coffee quickly rose to a status of international consumption and is now drunk universally by members of almost every religion (Mormons excepted). Who’s to say what its journey would have looked like had it not been for its original discriminatory knee-jerk shunning?
