“This is the beverage of the friends of God.”
In Praise of Coffee
Arabic Poem 1511 A. D.
When you drink your morning cup of coffee tomorrow, say thanks to the pope who made it all possible.
A coffee craze first gripped the world about six hundred years ago in the Middle East. Some of the earliest coffee fanatics were Muslim mystics, trying to stay awake for nighttime worship. As coffee became popular, it also became controversial. Early coffee houses were such brewing grounds for radical ideas that the authorities in Mecca and Cairo tried to outlaw the drink. Their attempted prohibitions proved totally ineffective.
When coffee hit Europe in the late 1500s, priests at the Vatican argued that it was a satanic concoction of Islamic infidels. Accordingly, they thought it should be banned. That is when Pope Clement VIII stepped up and intervened. After giving coffee a taste,…he gave his blessing to the bean.
“This Satan’s drink is so delicious, it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it.”
With this papal blessing, coffee soon began to conquer Europe, and become the morning necessity it remains for many people today.
Pope Clement VIII may have given coffee his blessing, but that doesn’t mean everyone fell instantly in love with it. In 1610, British poet Sir George Sandys described the bitter brew this way: “Black as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.”
Moving forward in time until today, we see coffee shops like Starbucks on practically every other street corner. This may give rise to people thinking that coffee has never been more popular, but that is nothing when compared to the popularity it enjoyed in the Middle East during the 1500s. In Turkey, for an example, a woman could divorce a man who did not provide her with enough coffee.
There is so much more information that most of us do not really know about, surrounding the many varied things, places, and people that we thought we knew well. Knowing the real history of our world gives us much new and powerful knowledge and understanding that most of us never knew anything about.
Learn More, Know More, and Become More………