Although coffee is mentioned in Arab medicinal literature by the 10th century, intensive cultivation in Arabia, via Yemen, did not begin until the 15th century. Coffea arabica is believed to have been introduced to Yemen from Ethiopia by traveling merchants or herbalists via the well-established trade routes across the Gulf of Aden. The coffee trees flourished there, and this single area soon began supplying the rapidly expanding market for the new beverage throughout the Muslim world.

Useage in Arabia

The Arabs are instrumental in giving coffee consumption its initial big send-off. Popular acceptance of the drink was in no small measure influenced by the use of the beverage by religious authorities. Coffee had become an essential component in religious ceremonies by helping the pious stay awake during lengthy prayer and study sessions. It became especially popular with the dervishes, whom are believed responsible for introducing it to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Once established in Mecca, familiarity with the new beverage was quickly spread throughout the Muslim world by religious pilgrims. By the end of the 15th century Egypt, the Mahgreb, Turkey and Persia were importing substantial quantities of coffee from the Yemen.

According to Jaziri, a 16th century Arab scholar, the phenomenal spread of coffee drinking throughout the Islamic world, is explained by the following: "At the beginning of this century, the news reached us in Egypt that a drink, called qahwa, had spread in the Yemen and was being used by Sufti shaykhs and others to help them stay awake during their devotional exercises, which they perform according to their well-known Way. Then it reached us, sometime later, that its appearance and spread there had been due to the efforts of the learned shaykh, imam, mufti, and Sufi... al-Dhabhani. We heard that he had been in charge of the critical review of fatwas in Aden, which at that time was a job whose holder decided whether fatwas were sound or in need of revision, which he would indicate at the bottom of the document in his own hand.

The reason for his introducing coffee, according to what we heard, was that some affair had forced him to leave Aden and go to Ethiopia, where he stayed for some time. He found the people using qahwa, though he knew nothing of its characteristics. After he had returned to Aden, he fell ill, and remembering, he drank it and benefited by it. He found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigor.

In consequence, when he became a Sufi, he and other Sufis in Aden began to use the beverage made from it, as we have said. Then the whole people- both the learned and the common- followed in drinking it, seeking help in study and other vocations and crafts, so that it continued to spread."

With the spread of the coffee habit from the clergy to the masses, coffee production and trade became a very serious business. The Arabs sought to maintain their monopoly of this lucrative trade. They forbade the export of any live coffee seedlings and sterilized all green coffee


Introduction to Europe

The Turks, through their Ottoman Empire, are believed to be responsible for introducing Europeans to coffee. Early in the 16th century Mecca and Medina had come under Ottoman rule, and for most of the next century the coffee trade was largely controlled by the Turks. During this period the port of Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik) began trading in substantial quantities of beans, supplying the "Turk's drink" throughout the Ottoman's most northwestern outposts. In fact, the famed dark roasts of contemporary Vienna (schwarze coffees) are a consequence of that region's proximity to the Ottoman's former frontiers. Through this initial contact with the Ottoman Turks, Christian Europe's fascination for the exotic beverage grew.

A Venetian in 1615 wrote: "The Turks have a drink of black color, which during the summer is very cooling, whereas in the winter it heats and warms the body, remaining always the same beverage and not changing its substance. They swallow it hot as it comes from the fire and they drink it in long draughts, not at dinner time, but as a kind of dainty and sipped slowly while talking with one's friends. One cannot find any meetings among them where they drink it not..."

The emergence of coffee as a beverage of the masses was not to occur without controversy. Ironically, for a custom that originated as an integral part of religious observance, the use of coffee would come to be challenged by both Muslim and Christian authorities because of religious and moral concerns.

In the 1700's, coffee found its way to the Americas by means of a French infantry captain who nurtured one small plant on its long journey across the Atlantic. This one plant, transplanted to the Caribbean Island of Martinique, became the predecessor of over 19 million trees on the island within 50 years. It was from this humble beginning that the coffee plant found its way to the rest of the tropical regions of South and Central America.

Coffee was declared the national drink of the then colonized United States by the Continental Congress, in protest of the excessive tax on tea levied by the British crown.