Between the 15th and the 20th century, two great empires competed for political and economic dominance in Central and South Eastern Europe: the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire, was the jewel to be captured by their Islamic Turkish competitors.

In 1683 a Turkish army of 300,000 troops under the command of Pasha Kara Mustafa marched from the Sublime Porte in Constantinople (now Istanbul) up the River Danube and besieged the Habsburg Imperial Capital Vienna. The beleaguered city was ringed with twenty-five thousand Turkish tents. The Turkish Army controlled much of the Central European countryside.

As the siege worsened, the isolated Viennese sent a scout through the Muslim lines to deliver a message to their allies, who had massed upriver, that they could not hold out much longer. These Christian troops led by the Polish King Sobieski and Duke Charles of Lorraine arrived just in time, catching the Turkish besiegers by surprise and forcing the Islamic leader to abandon the siege and withdraw down the Danube. It was Georg Kolschitzky, a Pole, who had carried that message to the Christian relief troops. Kolschitzky was an adventurer who had traveled widely in the Ottoman lands, often serving as an interpreter. His intimate knowledge of the Turkish language and customs enabled him to offer his services to the Viennese as a surveillance agent.

On August 13, 1683, Kolschitzky and his servant Milhailovich, each in Oriental disguise, wandered freely around the Turkish encampment northwest of the city. The information they collected about the size and disposition of the enemy forces proved invaluable to the city's defenders. So the siege was raised and after the crisis had passed, the city fathers of Vienna asked Kolschitzky to name his reward.

He disingenuously asked only for the bags of "camel fodder" that had been abandoned by the retreating Turks. The "camel fodder", as he and he alone in Vienna well knew, was actually five hundred pounds of green coffee beans, the virtues of which and the methods of roasting, grinding and boiling he had learned during his travels in the East.Using these beans, he opened Vienna's first coffeehouse, "Kolschitzky's Café".

From then on coffee attained the great popularity in Vienna that it has maintained to this day. An oil painting of "Kolschitzky's Café" hangs in the Julius Meinl boardroom in Vienna.

With excerpts from "The World of Caffeine" by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer. Published by Routledge.