History of Coffee Drinking
in Europe in the early 1600s
No one knows how long people in Abyssinia had been aware of coffee
before it first attracted attention outside, and, similarly, as
coffee-drinking spread into Europe, there are no firm indications as
to how many people were drinking it privately, in advance of the
opening of coffee houses. Various European travelers to Islam
mentioned the strange black brew, but not before 1582, by which time
almost the entire Ottoman empire had embraced coffee.
Some people
were drinking coffee in Europe in the early- to mid-1600s - there
are references to beans being taken northwards from Venice in
personal quantities just before 1600. Nevertheless, it was another
45 years before the first coffee house, which was in Venice, would
open. In each European country, coffee houses were only opened well
after "the wine of Araby" had already been sold for some time by
peddlers, street vendors, stallholders and apothecaries. France's
first coffee shipment arrived in the mid-1600s, via merchants from
Marseilles, although it was a few years before the coffee craze hit
Paris, aided by a trendy and much-emulated Turkish ambassador to the
court of Louis XIV. An Armeniah, Pascal, opened the first French
coffee house in 1672, but his wooden hut was entirely eclipsed by
the elegance of Francois Procope's, opened in 1689. The citizens of
Vienna, like those of Paris, first became acquainted with coffee
through a Turkish ambassador in the 1660s, and caffeine habits there
were well-established several years before the retreating Turks gave
up the siege of the city in 1683, leaving behind their bags of
beans, and providing us with another entertaining story about a
spy's reward leading to the first coffee house, which may have been
called The Blue Bottle.
