The earlier history of the coffee-tree is rather obscure; the Greeks and Romans did not know it. Its fruits were used in Abyssinia and Nubia, in Arabia, since the fifteenth century, and in other countries of the Orient since the sixteenth century.

The application of coffee-beans for a beverage had its origin in Arabia, and spread from there in the sixteenth century to Egypt and Constantinople. Leon-hard Rauwolf, a German physician, was likely the first that made the coffee known in Western Europe by the publication of his travels in the year 1573. In A. D. 1591 Prosper Alpinus brought some beans as a drug from Egypt to Venice.

Coffee was drunk in Italy already in the beginning of the seventeenth century, in France and England in the middle, and in Germany at the end, of the same century. A more general use of it, however, cannot be reported before the eighteenth century.

The first coffee-house in Europe was opened at Constantinople in the year 15 51. A century later, in the year 1652, another one was opened in London at Newman's Court in Cornhill by a Greek servant of the merchant Edwards, whose ships sailed to and from the Levant. Paris saw its first cafe opened in the year 1670; it was owned by the Armenian Pascal. The next one in the same city was the Cafe Procope, established by the Sicilian Procopio, in the year 1725; it was frequented by all the literary men of France that visited Paris, and soon became fashionable, but also the meeting-place of republicans and revolutionists.

Vienna opened its first cafe in the year 1694; the privilege was granted to a Polish citizen for the services he had rendered when the capital was besieged by the Turks in the year 1683. Berlin received its first mocha-temple in the year 1721.

King Frederick I. of Prussia, an obstinate enemy of coffee, made the coffee-trade a monopoly; nobody but the clergy and the nobility were permitted to roast their own coffee. The people at large had to pay, in the royal roasting-houses, from six to seven times more than they would have paid at the merchant's.

In Leipsic the first coffee-house was opened to the public in the year 1694, in Stuttgart in the year 1712.

The infamous Jew Suss, founded in Wuertemberg a coffee-monopoly by granting the privilege of sale only to such people as were able and willing to pay him for it liberally.

The colonists that sailed out to find new islands and to found new settlements took the coffee-beans the decoction of which had become already a necessity with them. A mayor of Amsterdam, Wieser, is said to have brought the coffee-tree from Mocha to Batavia, where he established great plantations; this took place at the end of the seventeenth century. From Batavia he sent 169 young trees to Amsterdam for the Botanical Garden, whence the Jardin des Plantes in Paris received one. Captain Declieux took a layer of this to Martinique, where it grew so well that in a few years all the Antilles could be supplied with trees.

The consumption of coffee amounts, in England, to 1⅓ lbs., in France to 2 ½, in Germany to 4, in Denmark to 5½, in Switzerland to 6, in Holland to 10 to 12, and in the United States to more than 9 lbs. per head yearly.