Pecevi, an Ottoman historian of the early seventeenth century, writes: “Until the year 962
(1554-55), in the High, God-Guarded city of Constantinople, as well as in Ottoman lands
generally, coffee and coffeehouses did not exist. About that year, a fellow called Hakam from
Aleppo and a wag called Shams from Damascus, came to the city: they each opened a large shop
in the district called Tahtalkala, and began to purvey coffee. These shops became meeting places
of a circle of pleasure seekers and idlers, and also of some wits from among the men of letters
and literati, and they used to meet in groups of 20 or 30. Some read books and fine writings,
some were busy with backgammon and chess, some brought new poems and talked of literature.
Those who used to spend a good deal of money on giving dinners for the sake of convivial
entertainment, found that they could attain the joys of conviviality merely by spending an asper
or two on the price of coffee. It reached such a point that all kinds of unemployed officers,
judges and professors, all seeking preferment, and corner-sitters with nothing to do proclaimed
that there was no place like it for pleasure and relaxation, and filled it until there was no room to
sit or stand. It became so famous that, besides the holders of high offices, even great men could
not refrain from coming there. The imams and muezzins and pious hypocrites said: ‘People have
become addicts of the coffeehouse: nobody comes to the mosques!’ The ulema said: ‘It is a
house of evil deeds; it is better to go to the wine tavern than there.’ The preachers in particular
made great efforts to forbid it. The muftis arguing that anything which is heated to the point of
carbonization, that is becomes charcoal, is unlawful, issued fetvas against it. In the time of
Sultan Murad III, may God pardon him and have mercy on him, there were great interdictions
51
and prohibitions, but certain persons made approaches to the chief of police and the captain of
the watch about selling coffee from back-doors in side-alleys, in small and unobstrusive shops
and were allowed to do this. After this time, it became so prevalent that the ban was abandoned.
The preachers and muftis now said that it does not become completely carbonized, and to drink it
is therefore lawful. Among scholars of religion, the sheikhs, the viziers, and the great, there was
nobody left who did not drink it. It even reached such a point that the grand viziers built great
coffeehouses as investments and began to rent them out at one or two gold pieces a day.”
Almost all the themes one would need to cover in dealing with the history of coffee and
coffeehouses are underscored here: new and immensely popular forms of sociability in the early
modern era; secularization of public space; literary activity; novel sites for the formation and
manipulation of public opinion; tensions with the authorities; coffee as a commodity, driven to
significance by growing demand and supply, and the coffeehouse as an investment. Pecevi could
limit his account to the Ottoman realm, from Yemen to Hungary, but already in his lifetime the
buzz of coffee was spreading as a part of daily life both eastward to Iran and India and westward
to Europe, with the opening of coffeehouses in Isfahan, Delhi, Oxford, Paris, Vienna, and many
other cities before the end of the 17th century. This paper will deal with the latter theme of
coffee and coffeehouse (or, café) as part of a global history of trade from the 16th to the 19th
century as well as some of its repercussions in social and political life.
By the time it reached Istanbul, coffee had been known in the certain parts of the Arab
world (the Arabian peninsula, late Mamluk Egypt and Syria) for more than a century.
