History and culture
Coffee's arrival in Europe and the rise of the European coffeehouse
Coffee reached Europe via Venetian trade in the early 17th century, followed by coffeehouses in Oxford, London, Paris and Vienna over the course of that century.
Each section below is labelled by how well-established its claims are — look for the label under each heading.
Venetian trade
Documented history · early 17th century · Venice, Europe
Coffee is documented as having reached Europe primarily through Venetian merchants trading with the Ottoman Empire in the early 17th century, with the drink gradually spreading to other European trading cities from there.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries; The World Atlas of Coffee
Coffeehouses in England and France
Documented history · mid-to-late 17th century · England, France
England's first coffeehouses opened in Oxford and London in the mid-17th century, and Paris followed with its own coffeehouse culture later in the century. These venues became associated with intellectual, commercial and political discussion, a pattern that echoed the earlier Ottoman coffeehouse tradition.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries; The World Atlas of Coffee
The Vienna coffeehouse origin story
Disputed among historians · late 17th century · Vienna
A popular story credits Vienna's coffeehouse tradition to sacks of coffee left behind by Ottoman forces after the 1683 Siege of Vienna, supposedly claimed and put to use by a local figure. This dramatic founding story is widely repeated, but historians generally regard it as an embellished or partly invented narrative — coffee and coffeehouses were already reaching other parts of Europe through ordinary trade around the same period, and the specific 'abandoned sacks' account is not well supported by contemporary evidence.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries; The World Atlas of Coffee
Europe read about coffee before it drank any
Documented history · 1573–1601 · Levant, Venice, England
For about forty years coffee reached Europe only as a report. A German physician, Leonhard Rauwolf, travelled to the Levant in 1573, and the first printed European reference to the drink appeared in his account in 1582–83. A Venetian magistrate in Constantinople described to his senate in 1585 a 'black water' the Turks made from a bean. The Italian botanist Prospero Alpini, who had been in Egypt, published the first printed description of the plant and the drink at Venice in 1592. The English word settled into something like its modern form in a travel book of 1601. These dates come from a chronology compiled in 1922, which marks its own doubtful entries; none of these is marked so.
Sources: All About Coffee
A sequence of ports, not a single arrival
Documented history · 1615–1669 · Venice, Holland, Marseilles, Paris
The same chronology dates coffee's introduction to Venice to 1615 and the first shipment from Mocha to Holland to 1616, with the first commercial cargo offered in Amsterdam in 1640. It reached France at Marseilles in 1644, brought back from Constantinople together with the vessels for making it. In each place coffee was known privately, often among merchants and physicians, for years before anyone sold it by the cup: Paris had coffee privately from 1657 and publicly, through the Ottoman ambassador's household, from 1669.
Sources: All About Coffee
The first coffeehouses, city by city
Documented history · 1645–1694 · Venice, England, France, Vienna, German cities
The dates usually given are these. Venice, 1645, though the same source elsewhere gives 1683 for a shop under the Procuratie Nuove, and the two are not reconciled. Oxford, 1650, opened by a man recorded only as Jacobs. London, 1652, opened by Pasqua Rosée in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill, who also issued the first printed advertisement for coffee in English. Marseilles, 1671. Paris, 1672, when an Armenian named Pascal sold coffee at the fair of Saint-Germain and then opened a house. Vienna, 1683. The Café de Procope, described as the first real French café, opened in Paris in 1689. German cities followed: Hamburg by tradition in 1679, Regensburg in 1686, Leipzig in 1694. 'First' in each case means the first that later writers recorded, which is not always the first that existed.
Sources: All About Coffee
What England did with it
Documented history · 1657–1663 · England
England regulated coffee almost as soon as it was sold. Coffee first appears in the statute book in 1660, when a duty of fourpence was laid on every gallon made and sold, and from 1663 every coffeehouse had to be licensed. That the drink was taxed by the gallon suggests how it was sold: brewed in quantity, not made to order. The first newspaper advertisement for coffee appeared in London in 1657.
Sources: All About Coffee
Related
How to order this abroad
Where it was drunk
The institutions this history runs through, in CoffeeHQ's coffeehouse-history layer.
- The Ottoman coffeehouse (kahvehane) — The institution that invented the coffeehouse — a public room, open to men of any rank who could pay, where coffee was drunk, backgammon played, news exchanged and stories performed, and which the Ottoman state repeatedly tried to close.
- The Viennese coffee house — A public room in which a single small coffee buys an afternoon — marble tables, Thonet chairs, a wall of newspapers and a glass of water refilled unasked — and the most self-conscious coffeehouse culture in Europe.
- The London coffeehouse — The room where English commerce and science did their talking for a century — Lloyd's, the Stock Exchange and the Royal Society all trace to one — sold on a penny's admission, open to men who could pay and effectively closed to women.