Coffee is about as wholesome and everyday as it gets. We drink it at church socials, diners, and kitchen tables. So it's hard to imagine a time when sipping a cup could get you fined, or when kings saw coffeehouses as a danger to the throne.
But coffee has been banned many times. Religious courts outlawed it for its stimulating effect, kings worried about the rebellious talk in coffeehouses, and governments fretted about how much money was leaving the country to import it. In the end, none of those bans lasted. People simply kept drinking.
Trouble in Mecca and Cairo
Coffee spread from Yemen, where Sufis drank it to stay alert during nighttime devotions. By the early 1500s it was popular in Mecca and Cairo. But in 1511, conservative religious scholars at a court in Mecca forbade it because of its stimulating effect. The debate was so lively that in 1587 a writer named Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri compiled an entire book on coffee's history and the legal arguments over it.
That ban didn't hold. In 1524, an order from the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I overturned it, and a leading religious authority issued a ruling allowing coffee. In Cairo, a similar ban came in 1532, and coffeehouses and warehouses full of beans were raided. Later Ottoman sultans tried taxes and restrictions, especially when ordinary workers started drinking it, but coffee kept winning.
The Devil's Drink Gets Blessed
When coffee reached Italy in the late 1500s, some in the Catholic Church called it the Devil's drink. According to a famous story, Pope Clement VIII tried it himself and gave it his blessing, declaring it so delicious that it would be a pity to let nonbelievers keep it to themselves. By 1763, Venice alone had more than 200 coffee shops.
England's Rowdy Coffeehouses
England's first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650. By 1675, there were more than 3,000 across the country. They became lively places for sober debate about religion and politics, which made those in power nervous.
King Charles II saw the coffeehouses as possible hotbeds of rebellion and tried to shut them down in the 1670s. His effort was short-lived. Remarkably, one Oxford coffeehouse that opened in 1654 is still in business today.
Sweden's Twin Experiment
Sweden fought coffee harder than almost anyone. It was banned by royal decree in five separate periods between 1756 and 1823, partly over health worries and partly because importing luxuries was draining money from the country. People kept drinking anyway, sometimes in secret groups known as coffee guilds.
King Gustav III was determined to prove coffee was dangerous. According to a famous account, he ordered an experiment on identical twins who had been sentenced to death. Their sentences were changed to life in prison if one drank three pots of coffee a day and the other drank the same amount of tea. The tea drinker died first, at 83. Historians have questioned whether the experiment really happened, but it makes a delightful story.
In Prussia, Frederick the Great banned coffee too, worried about the cost of importing it. Meanwhile in Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a comic piece known as the Coffee Cantata, a little comic opera that pokes fun at a coffee addiction.
So the next time you pour a cup, raise it to all those coffee lovers who refused to give it up. Thanks to their stubbornness, your morning brew is perfectly legal.
