Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! 11:21 am January 17, 2012 Twitter (163) Facebook (4247) Google E-mail Share Print Comments (46) Recommend (124) by Adam Cole Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement. But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword. Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense. Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning. Adam Cole/NPR Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning. The sultan was so intent on eradicating coffee that he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with a hundred-pound broadsword. Unfortunate coffee drinkers were decapitated as they sipped. Murad IV’s successor was more lenient. The punishment for a first offense was a light cudgeling. Caught with coffee a second time, the perpetrator was sewn into a leather bag and tossed in the river. But people still drank coffee. Even with the sultan at the front door with a sword and the executioner at the back door with a sewing kit, they still wanted their daily cup of joe. And that’s the history of coffee in a bean skin: Old habits die hard. Wherever it spread, coffee was popular with the masses but challenged by the powerful. “If you look at the rhetoric about drugs that we’re dealing with now — like, say, crack — it’s very similar to what was said about coffee,” Stewart Allen, author of The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, tells The Salt. In Murad’s Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would inspire indecent behavior. As the bean moved west into Europe, physicians rallied against it, claiming that coffee would “dry up the cerebrospinal fluid” and cause paralysis. Perhaps the bawdiest argument against coffee was “The Womens [sic] Petition Against Coffee,” published in England in 1674. Brimming with innuendos that would make Shakespeare blush, the six-page manifesto blamed coffee for every type of impotence. The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd. Enlarge Adam Cole/NPR The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd. One of the more repeatable passages: … the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands that they are become as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought. (via Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! : The Salt : NPR)