In Istanbul, coffee could get you executed – in Rome, it was blessed
In 1654, a patriarch gave the Ukrainian hetman an object that had already sparked half a century of controversy – costing people their lives in Turkey while eventually becoming an aid to prayer on Mount Athos.
In 1654, Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo made a brief entry in his travel diary describing how Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, while passing through the lands of the Ukrainian hetman, presented Bohdan Khmelnytsky with, among other gifts, a vessel filled with coffee beans. According to the archdeacon, the hetman was known to be fond of them.
Yet neither the patriarch nor the hetman, it seems, realized that they were giving and receiving the object of a controversy that had already raged for half a century – one that by then had cost lives in Istanbul and given theologians in Rome plenty of headaches.
A drink invented to stay awake
Legend has it that coffee’s effects were first discovered by an Ethiopian shepherd who noticed that after eating red berries, his goats remained restless all night. How much truth there is to the story is difficult to say: it was not recorded until 1671, long after the events supposedly took place.
Far better documented is the route by which coffee entered the Christian world – through the Sufi monasteries of Yemen.
The mystics there brewed roasted beans to keep themselves awake during long nighttime prayer vigils. They believed that sleep stole time meant for prayer – and the bitter brew stole sleep.
From monastic cells, the recipe made its way to Mecca, then to Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo, and by the mid-16th century it had reached Constantinople, where merchants from Aleppo and Damascus opened the city’s first coffeehouse.
The first controversy erupted in Mecca as early as 1511. The city’s governor, Khair Beg, banned coffee gatherings after hearing complaints about the noise and uninhibited conversations taking place over a cup. Theologians debated whether the new drink affected the mind like wine, intoxicating its drinkers no less than the beverage forbidden by the Quran. The ban was soon lifted, but the controversy was far from over.
Coffee – on pain of death
A century later in Istanbul, the debate moved from theology into criminal law.
In 1633, Sultan Murad IV, alarmed by rumors and conspiracies that seemed to flourish in coffeehouses, banned coffee, tobacco and wine on pain of death. Violators were hanged, while some were reportedly sewn into coffee sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. The Sheikh al-Islam, who dared publicly question the wisdom of the ban, paid with his head. Incidentally, it was one of the rarest events in the empire’s history – the execution of the country’s highest-ranking theologian.
The coffeehouses were closed, but just a few years later, under Murad’s successor, the ban was quietly lifted. Far too many people had already grown accustomed to the invigorating drink.
The Western Church was also wary of the newcomer. A legend widely circulated in 17th-century Europe tells how Christian clerics, learning of coffee’s Muslim origins, branded it a bitter invention of Satan and urged the pope to ban it.
The pope – according to tradition, Clement VIII – supposedly decided to taste the controversial brew himself before condemning it. Having tried it, he reportedly remarked that it would be a shame to leave such a wonderful drink to the infidels alone – and, to everyone’s surprise, blessed Christians to drink coffee.
Historians still debate how much truth there is to the story. But the fact that it became so widely known shows that the anxiety surrounding coffee was real, even if the tale of the papal tasting was a later embellishment.
A fasting rule with no place for coffee
In this respect, Eastern Christians had a harder time than Catholics: they had no pope who could settle the controversy with a single ruling.
The Byzantine fasting rule, refined over centuries, divided all food into strict categories: meat, dairy, fish, vegetable oil and wine. Each category had its own days when it was permitted or forbidden.
Roasted and ground beans brewed with boiling water simply did not appear on any list. Coffee was neither food nor drink in the traditional sense – it was something else entirely, something for which the Church’s vocabulary had no ready-made category.
The issue was further complicated by the way coffee was served. Under Ottoman custom, it was almost always prepared with sugar – itself an expensive commodity and one long associated in ascetic literature with the sin of indulgence. Black, unsweetened coffee could, with some flexibility, be regarded as something akin to a herbal infusion – bitter but harmless, much like water. Sweetened coffee, however, was far harder to distinguish from a dessert, and desserts were unequivocally forbidden on strict fasting days.
Merchants – Orthodox Greeks, Arabs and Syrians who had spent decades carrying goods between Aleppo, Istanbul and the Danubian principalities – were the first to find themselves at the heart of this dilemma. Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo himself, whose father brought coffee as a gift for the Ukrainian hetman, came from precisely this mercantile and clerical milieu, while Aleppo was considered one of the great coffee capitals of the age.
Trade regularly brought such people face to face with the new drink. They had to taste the merchandise, entertain business partners and negotiate deals over cups of coffee in coffeehouses that the capricious sultan alternately banned and permitted.
At the same time, merchants, like monks, observed Great Lent, making the question anything but theoretical: could an Orthodox Christian drink a cup of sweetened coffee during Holy Week with a Muslim business partner who observed no Christian fast at all – and do so without sinning?
The monastic answer
There was never an official conciliar ruling of the Orthodox Church on the coffee question. Unlike in Istanbul, there were no executions here – and no papal tastings.
Instead, the controversy was settled in practice.
Black, unsweetened coffee gradually came to be regarded as a drink permissible alongside water and herbal infusions. Sweetened coffee, and especially coffee with milk, remained outside the fasting diet – alongside honey and other treats.
Particularly revealing was the reception coffee received on the Holy Mountain of Athos – a place where any innovation has traditionally been treated with the utmost caution. Today, Athonite monks are permitted to drink a cup of coffee before an all-night vigil. In essence, the reasoning is the same as that of the Yemeni mystics who first brewed roasted coffee beans centuries ago: to keep themselves awake through long hours of prayer.
A controversy that began with suspicion of a strange foreign drink thus ended with the Church accepting coffee into everyday life as an aid to staying awake during worship.
The Church neither rushed to condemn the innovation nor immediately gave it its blessing. It gave itself time – more than a century – to distinguish between what helps a person pray and what serves merely as a source of pleasure.
