Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (7 page)

Tumbledown Arab coffee-house near Port Said

Arab coffee-house in Jidda

Arab coffee-house in Cairo

Constantinople coffee-house

“Now, at length, the coffee-bean is victorious!” sang the poet Belighi. Coffee had conquered, for, after long splitting of the cadis and the devotees of the Koran into parties, the learned became unanimously convinced of its virtues. In Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo, it won the battle; and on the Golden Horn, whither a breeze from the Bosporus blew, “the aroma of wine, the forbidden drink,” had been dispelled.

Since then, the pleasant reek of coffee has been inseparable from the thought of Constantinople. Approaching Istanbul seawards shortly after sunrise, as did James Baker, “catching sight of cupolas and minarets thrusting upwards out of the mist, like jewels lying upon cotton-wool,” one’s nostrils are assailed by the aromatic odours of coffee being roasted and brewed. Invisibly it presides over Pera and Galata, mingling with the warmth of morning and helping to dispel the chill of night.

The first coffee-houses in the town on the Golden Horn were opened in 1554 by two merchants, Hakim from Aleppo and Jems from Damascus. They were termed “mekteb-i-irfan” (schools of the cultured). Coffee itself soon came to be called “the milk of chess-players and of thinkers.” For then as now, day after day and night after night, men in white silken robes with wide sleeves sat facing each other across the chessboard, moved their pieces with one hand while they stroked their chins with the other.

T
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growth of the Ottoman Empire continued. From its new centre, Constantinople, which, under its old name of Byzantium, had been the focus of widespread Christian dominion, it radiated towards the four winds of heaven, east, south, west, and north. Somewhere about 1460, Serbia and Bosnia were conquered; two years later, Walachia; in 1517, Syria, Mesopotamia, Hejaz, and Egypt. Two years later, Algeria; five-and-thirty years afterwards, Tripoli, and later, Tunis. By this time, the Crimea, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Hungary were allied or vassal States.

Thus Islam became a great power which, despite the loss of Spain, the headquarters of the western caliphate, to the Christians, became a graver and ever graver menace to western Europe. All the more dangerous because, this time, the impetus of the Tartar thrust came from the east, and not from the south, which had no hinterland.

With the conquest of the greater part of Hungary, however, victorious Islam reached the zenith of its fortunes. Progress was arrested at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Buda was recovered from the Turks in 1686, and thenceforward there began a slow decline in the power of Islam. The decline lasted until the close of the World War in 1918.

The repulse of the Turks from Vienna, this strange turn in the fate of what had for several centuries been a conquering nation, was mysteriously associated with the history of coffee. The story of the rise and fall of the Turks cannot be treated apart from the saga of coffee.

Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, had foreseen the attack of the Turks on Vienna, having been kept well informed by his ambassador in Constantinople. Nevertheless Leopold had reason to hope that war might be avoided, for he knew that the sultan did not want war. But Kara Mustafa, the ambitious grand vizier, whose position at the sultan’s court was shaky, needed the war to restore his prestige. He began it. The emperor fled to Linz. Thence he negotiated with the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, with the estates, and with the king of Poland, in order to assemble an army able to cope with the Turks. Vienna, which had been hastily fortified, was invested by the huge army of Kara Mustafa, and the siege began. The fall of the city was imminent on the very first day, when a fire broke out close to the arsenal. Panic among the citizens was only prevented by the presence of mind of Liebenberg, the mayor, and Starhemberg, the chief of the armed forces of the city. In trenches and in mines, the Osmanlis drew nearer and nearer. Not a day, not an hour, passed without bombardment. The dead and wounded lay in heaps before the wall; but, as the crescent moon returns with unfailing regularity month after month in the skies, so unceasingly was renewed the crescent-shaped order of battle of the besieging Turks.

Matters had still been bearable in July, but in August the hospitals of the city became overcrowded, for an epidemic of dysentery then broke out. The morale of the besieged was being undermined, and short of a miracle they could not maintain their resistance.

Had Vienna fallen, the way up the Danube to Linz would have been opened to the Turks; Passau and Ratisbon, now known as Regensburg, would have fallen; Bavaria and Swabia would have been conquered. In that case, maybe, the Turks would have been established on the Lake of Constance. For several centuries the history of Europe would have taken a different course. Thus the resistance to their advance at Vienna was a second Battle of Poitiers, when Charles Martel, defending the soil of France, saved the whole western world from the rule of the Saracens.

The man who gave the Viennese courage to hold out until the arrival of the relieving forces was Georg Kolshitsky, a Pole. Born at Sambor in Galicia, he had for a long time been a Turkish interpreter, and had lived among the Osmanlis. He offered to carry a letter to the Duke of Lorraine, the leader of the relieving force, although for this purpose he would have to pass through the Turkish lines.

He and his servant Mihailovich, both disguised in Turkish dress, slipped out of Vienna on August 13, 1683, and made their way among the Turkish tents. Although it was raining in torrents, Kolshitsky sang merrily in Turkish. As if fortuitously, the two men halted in front of the tent of a distinguished aga. The aga, who was a pious and benevolent man, came forth from his tent, commiserated his two supposed fellow-countrymen for being drenched to the skin, and asked them where they were going. They answered that they wished to leave the camp towards the west, where there were vineyards, in order to satisfy their hunger with ripening grapes. The aga warned them against this forbidden fruit, and warned them even more emphatically against the vine-dressers who, being zealous Christians, would be eager to cut down two isolated Moslems. He gave them big bowls of coffee to drink, saying that this beverage was far more pleasing to Allah than the wine prepared by the Christians. Then, granting their request, he had them conducted beyond the western side of the camp.

The pair made their way undisturbed through the vineyards, first to the Kahlenberg, then to Klosterneuburg, and on to Kahlenbergerdorf. On a wooded island in the river, they caught sight of a number of people, but could not at first make out whether or not these were Turks. At length they perceived that the women were unveiled, and were bathing in the river, and must, therefore, be Christians. They waved their hats. The Christians, believing them to be Turks, fired at them with harquebuses. One of the bullets passed through Mihailovich’s long Turkish sleeve.

Kolshitsky, however, shouted that he was a Christian, and an emissary from Vienna. Thereupon the others sent a boat to convey him across the stream into the German camp. Early on August 15, he handed Duke Charles of Lorraine the dispatches which had been entrusted to him. With a written answer, supplemented by oral messages, he and Mihailovich set out on their return, once more under heavy rain. They went by way of Nussdorf. Here the danger they ran from sentinels was exceedingly great, so they determined to separate, after a brotherly embrace and commending one another to God’s care. Soon, however, Mihailovich, feeling timid alone, rejoined Kolshitsky, and the two went on together, much depressed, through the dawn. By way of Rossau, which had been burned to ashes, they reached the Alserbachstrasse. Five Turks were now following them, moved partly by curiosity, but also by suspicion. The two spies hid among some rubbish, where they found a cellar-flap, opened it, and tumbled down the steep steps. Kolshitsky, who was tired out, instantly fell asleep. Towards noon, by chance, a Turk made his way into the cellar. Finding two men there, he was stricken with terror, and ran away. Since the Christians did not know whether he might not seek reinforcements, they, too, quitted the cellar. What would they not have given to encounter another benevolent aga who would refresh them with the “magic drink”! No such luck! Half dead with hunger and fatigue, at nightfall they reached the Schottentor of the city of Vienna.

Kolshitsky’s bold sally and fortunate return gave fresh courage to the beleaguered Viennese. All and sundry felt once more that, beyond the Turkish forces, there were Christians ready to help them, that a formidable relieving army was assembling in the west, and that the hour of liberation was at hand. As prearranged, to acquaint the Duke of Lorraine with the fact that Kolshitsky had got back safely, Starhemberg, the chief of the defending forces, sent up three rockets, that same night, from the tower of St. Stephen’s.

Kolshitsky and Mihailovich were handed a gratification of two thousand gulden. Through the instrumentality of the mayor, the municipality of Vienna promised to grant Kolshitsky the freedom of the city, to bestow on him a domicile (8, Haidgasse in the Leopold quarter), and to give him a charter to pursue any occupation he pleased.

It was not until towards the middle of September, a month after Kolshitsky’s bold penetration of the Turkish lines, that the allied German and Polish armies at length began the attack that was to relieve Vienna.

On September 12 the Viennese, after long and weary waiting, at length saw the lances and banners of the Poles on the heights of the Kahlenberg. At this moment, too, the leaders of the Christian army first glimpsed the immense hosts of the enemy.

“God in heaven, what a sight!” wrote Dupont, a Frenchman in the Polish service. “A wonderful spectacle awaited us when we reached the crest of the hill. The whole plain, including the Leopoldstadt Island, was thickly beset with them. The thunder of Turkish artillery was answered by firing from the walls of the town. Flames and smoke enveloped the capital to such an extent that only the tops of the towers showed above it. In the camp of the Osmanlis were two hundred thousand men in battle array, stretching from the Danube to the hills. Farther to the left, beyond the Turkish flanks, were disorderly hordes of Tartar cavalry making ready to attack the forest. All was in lively movement, directed towards the Christian army.”