Note 187 — Chapter VIII · IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE CRUSADERS

In marked contrast to this wildly lyrical praise of the fragrant and delicious beverage made from the Arabian berry, is the denunciation which was hurled against it by the orthodox followers of Islam who declared it to be a menace to public morals and one of the four ministers of the Devil—the other three being wine, opium, and tobacco. “During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coffee-drinkers were persecuted more rigorously in Constantinople than wine-bibbers have ever been in England or America. Their most unrelenting enemy was the bloody Murad IV—himself a drunkard—who forbade the use of coffee under pain of death. He and his nephew, Mehmed IV, after him used to patrol the city in disguise, à la Harun-al-Rashid, in order to detect and punish for themselves any violation of the law.... A personage no more straitlaced than Charles II caused a court to hand down the following decision: ‘The Retayling of Coffe may be an innocente Trayde; but as it is used to nourisshe Sedition, spredde Lyes, and scandalyse Greate Mene, it may also be a common Nuissaunce.’” Constantinople Old and New, p. 24 (by H. G. Dwight, New York, 1915).