Black Gold. Antony Wild
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small army of the Prince of Lorraine, camped near the city on Mount Kahlenburg, Vienna must surely fall. The Turks were already digging ‘workings, trenchings and minings’ by the city walls, and preparing to swarm through the breaches that subsequent explosions would make. Only one man in Vienna could save the day – Kolschitsky, who had been a coffee house keeper in Istanbul and knew the customs and language of the Turks well. He volunteered to slip through the Turkish lines in disguise to carry messages to and from the Prince of Lorraine. This, in the more elaborate versions of the tale, also involved heroically swimming across four channels of the Danube. He managed the round trip four times, doing much to boost the morale of the beleaguered city. On his final outing, when he took the alarming news that the Turks were about to blow a significant breach in the city walls, Kolschitsky found that the Prince of Lorraine had been joined by the warrior-king Jan Sobieski of Poland, at the head of an army of 30,000 men. Kolschitsky was given crucial information about the attack signal, which would enable the Viennese garrison to make a diversionary sortie. On his way back through the Turkish lines, Kolschitsky joined a group of soldiers drinking coffee around a campfire. He listened as they spoke wistfully of their Anatolian homes, of their Fatimas and little Mohammeds, and was so convinced that the morale of the Turks was at an all-time low that, when he regained the city, he rushed unannounced into the chamber of the garrison commander, Count Rudiger von Staremburgh. The Count awoke to find what appeared to be a Turk gabbling excitedly at him, and understandably summoned the guard. They were about to kill the assassin when the Count recognized Kolschitsky. Had the sword fallen, it is said, then so too would have Europe, for the diversionary sortie from Vienna proved crucial to the success of the joint army of Poland and Lorraine in the battle the following day, 12 September 1683.
The Turks were routed, and in their haste to retreat left behind a vast quantity of supplies – oxen, camels, grain – which the starving Viennese fell upon joyfully. In hot pursuit of the fleeing army went troops of Ukrainian Cossacks, who caught up with them at Parkany, near Budapest, where in the ensuing battle the Turks were finally broken. The defeated Vizier struggled back to Istanbul to be greeted with the painful disgrace of being strangled in front of his family. Lurking amongst the provisions left behind at Vienna were some five hundred pounds of coffee, which no one recognized, coffee being unknown in the city at that time. The valiant Kolschitsky, having been rewarded with 100 ducats for his feats of derring-do, again stepped into the breach and offered to relieve the authorities of the burden. The money he applied to purchase of a property, and he soon opened the Blue Bottle coffee house, happily combining the spoils of war and the skills he had learnt in Istanbul. It was a great success, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the story itself. An eyewitness account by an Englishman in the service of the Austrian army detailed the great victory and the booty left behind, and coffee is conspicuous by its absence from the list. Although the bravery of Staremburgh warrants specific mention, Kolschitsky does not feature in the account. While it is hardly to be expected that a lowly spy should receive any accolade in a report that concerns itself primarily with the chivalrous behaviour of the noblemen in victory, if indeed Kolschitsky’s bravery had averted disaster, then the action, if not the perpetrator, would surely have warranted a mention.
Neither does the Franz Georg Kolschitsky who is the hero of Viennese coffee history feature in the mainstream works concerning the siege. He was probably a small player on a large field of intrigue and espionage, one of many spies operating on behalf of the besieged Viennese. Indeed, another spy, Johannes Diodato, is credited by some with opening the first coffee house. Kolschitsky’s reward of 100 ducats is well documented, but so is the fact that he immediately started harassing the city council with demands for more money and permanent premises, recalling in his letters ‘with measureless self-conceit and the boldest greed’ the treatment of various classical heroes, including, coincidentally, the fantastic rewards heaped upon Pompilius by the Lacedaemonians, whose Spartan ‘black broth’ we met earlier in these pages. Perhaps worn down by the weight of classical allusions, the council eventually relented and gave him a property at 30 Haidgasse worth over 1000 gulden. It has not been possible to establish whether this in fact became Vienna’s first coffee house; nonetheless, Kolschitsky’s keen sense of his own worth has etched itself on the history of Viennese coffee, so that he has become the hero he almost certainly never was. His statue can be found adorning the exterior of the Café Zwirina.
However flawed his character may have been, it is the case that the Viennese did take enthusiastically to coffee after the siege. They may have been helped in adjusting to the new taste by the invention of the croissant, or, as it was then known, the pfizer. Supposedly created by a Viennese baker who had discovered a Turkish mining operation whilst working at night in his bakery, the curved bread roll was based on the crescent moon that featured prominently on the Ottoman flag, as it still does on that of many Islamic countries. In these highly charged days, it is salutary to recall that, every morning, many in the Christian world celebrate the crushing of Islam in a kind of unconscious anti-Communion.
The Siege of Vienna saw the end of expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a European coalition fought to regain lost territory. The Sultans became increasingly mired in debt, and the slave girls poised with their fine porcelain coffee cups at the lips of the Sultan gave way to the vulgar diamond-encrusted self-service coffee cups of the late imperial era, which can still be seen in the treasury of the Top Kapi Palace in Istanbul. Under Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), Turkey finally turned its back on its Ottoman history, became a secular society, and, mysteriously, took up tea drinking, as if four hundred years of glorious coffee culture had never been.
The curious role of coffee in the lifecycle of these early empires was thus complete: the Sufis and the Ottomans had developed coffee drinking as a result of observing tea drinking during one of the rare forays of officials of the Chinese Empire into the Arabian Sea. The coffee habit, initially ritualistic, had fuelled Ottoman expansion during the heyday of their Empire, only to be handed on like a relay baton to the Habsburg Empire and to other European nations, where coffee, stripped of its spiritual function, in turn catalysed the creation of aggressive mercantile cultures linked with European imperialism. As the Ottomans slowly collapsed, so they reverted to drinking what was perhaps the inspiration for their love affair with coffee. Turkey is now the third largest consumer – and fifth largest producer – of tea worldwide.
Traces of the history of the expansion of European maritime nations into the East, their adoption of coffee drinking at home, and their involvement in the trade itself can all be found on the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. To the visitor, who must approach by sea, the island looms out of the dawn, its high peaks swathed in funereal clouds, and the enormous, bare, red-black basalt cliffs glisten with the remorseless damp of aeons of isolation, creating a seemingly impregnable fortress. As the boat draws closer and skirts the cliffs around the island towards the miniature capital of Jamestown on the north coast, the impression is of an unfathomable gloom.
This is partly because St Helena is further from anywhere else than anywhere on the planet. If the island were the size of the earth, the nearest land would be four times the distance of the moon away. Ascension Island, some seven hundred miles away, is closest – ‘another meer wart in the sea’, as a Dr Fryer noted in 1679. Madame Bernard was to remark during Napoleon’s exile: ‘the devil sh-t this island as he flew from one world to the other’. St Helena wears its remoteness like a damp, suffocating cloak.
The fierce, naked cliffs of basalt defy the heavy, sluggish swell of the South Atlantic and the unending battering of the south-east trade winds. It is hard to believe from the sea that, in 1502, the 47-square-mile island was regarded by its discoverer, the Portuguese Admiral Juan da Nova, as a veritable Eden. It was densely forested all over with gumwood, oak, and ebony, with no large animal inhabitants except sea-lions, sea-birds, seals, and turtles; it had no predators, no snakes, no poisonous insects, but 120 endemic kinds of beetle. The only usable access to the interior lay through the narrow valley that now contains Jamestown,