How Coffee Went From Banned to Breakfast

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Updated: November 14, 2026

Governments banned this drink at least five times. People kept drinking it anyway. You are probably drinking it right now, or thinking about your next cup. Coffee is the most ordinary thing in the world, and for three hundred years, some of the most powerful rulers on earth treated it like a weapon. One sultan made drinking it in public a crime punishable by death. And every single time, the ban failed, and the coffee came back stronger.

The first bans

Coffee started in Yemen, on the southern tip of Arabia, where Sufi mystics drank it to stay awake through long nights of prayer. They called it qahwa, and from Yemen it traveled up the Red Sea to Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, arriving around the year 1500. Within a few years, Mecca had coffeehouses, and the coffeehouses had customers, and the customers had opinions.

In 1511, the governor of Mecca, a man named Khair Beg, decided he had seen enough. The next morning he called a council of lawyers and doctors. The council voted, coffee was declared forbidden, and Khair Beg closed every coffeehouse in Mecca. Bags of coffee were seized and burned in the street. Vendors and drinkers were beaten. Coffee, the drink that had only just arrived, was now a crime. It did not last the year. Mecca answered to Cairo, and the Sultan of Cairo, Qansuh al-Ghawri, was a coffee drinker himself. He sent word to Mecca that what was allowed in Cairo was allowed in Mecca too, and ordered the ban lifted. The first war on coffee had lasted less than twelve months, and coffee had won it without firing a shot.

The idea did not die with the ban. In Cairo itself, in the 1530s, a preacher at the great mosque of al-Azhar named Ahmad al-Sunbati began thundering against coffee from the pulpit. A judge named Muhammad ibn Ilyas stepped in. He settled the question the only honest way he could think of. He made people drink a great deal of coffee, and watched what happened. It did not intoxicate them, even in large amounts. If it did not intoxicate, it was not forbidden. Case closed, and Cairo kept its coffee.

The sultan with the sword

The most frightening of all the coffee bans came from Constantinople, in 1633, from a sultan named Murad the Fourth. Murad had taken the throne as a boy, and he ruled an empire that was beginning to crack. He knew that sober men with grievances were more dangerous than drunk ones. So he closed every coffeehouse in Constantinople, and he banned coffee, alcohol, and tobacco in public, and he made breaking the ban a capital offence. Drink coffee in public, and you could be put to death.

Here is the joke at the heart of it. Murad never banned coffee for himself. He drank coffee every day in the palace, and he drank a great deal of alcohol too, so much that he died of liver failure at the age of twenty-seven.

London

By the time coffee reached England, it arrived with an advertisement. In 1650, a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob opened the first English coffeehouse at the Angel coaching inn in Oxford. Two years later, in 1652, a Greek servant named Pasqua Rosee opened the first London coffeehouse, a tiny shop in St Michael's Alley, off Cornhill, and handed out a printed broadsheet called The Vertue of the Coffee Drink.

For a penny, anyone could walk into a London coffeehouse and stay for hours, with a fire, a newspaper, and whoever else showed up. Lords and laborers sat at the same tables. The coffeehouses sorted themselves by trade. At Jonathan's Coffee House in Exchange Alley, traders chalked share prices on the wall, and that room became the London Stock Exchange. One of the most powerful institutions in the world was born in a coffeehouse, over a penny cup of coffee.

Then, in December 1675, King Charles the Second decided to end it. He issued a royal proclamation for the suppression of coffeehouses, calling them places where false, malicious, and scandalous reports were spread against the government. Every coffeehouse in England was to close by the tenth of January. The uproar was immediate, and it was spectacular. Merchants, traders, and ordinary drinkers protested, and the king's own ministers quietly told him they liked their coffee too. Eleven days after the proclamation was issued, on the eighth of January 1676, Charles withdrew it. There was no further attempt to close them, and there never would be. A king had tried to ban the room where England did its thinking, and England had answered in eleven days.

And the bans kept coming, long after London. Sweden banned coffee five separate times between 1756 and the 1820s, confiscating cups and saucers from people's homes. None of it worked.

So here is the ending of the story. Coffee was banned in Mecca, in Cairo, in Constantinople, in London, and in Sweden five times over, and every ban failed. The drink survived because what rulers feared was the room, the talk, the ordinary people sitting together and thinking out loud. You cannot ban that with a proclamation.

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