5

Coffee was known as ‘the devil’s cup’

It did not take long for coffee to travel the short distance to the European
mainland where it was landed first in Venice on the back of the lucrative trade the
city enjoyed with its Mediterranean neighbours. Initially, however, coffee met with
the suspicion and religious prejudice it had suffered in the Middle East and
Turkey. The word on the street, filtering back from intrepid European travellers to
the mysterious and mystical lands of the east, was of an equally mysterious,
exotic and intoxicating liquor. To Catholics it was the ‘bitter invention of Satan’,
carrying the whiff of Islam, and it seemed suspiciously like a substitute for wine
as used in the Eucharist; in any event, it was outlawed.

Such was the consternation that Pope Clement VIII had to intervene: he sampled
coffee for himself and decreed that it was indeed a Christian as well as a Muslim
drink. On tasting it he wittily declared: “This devil’s drink is so delicious… we
should cheat the devil by baptising it!” From then on, coffee has been dubbed the
devil’s drink, or the devil’s cup.