Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (10 page)

Thus it happened that few Italian traders journeyed into Germany, whereas plenty of German merchants visited Italy. From the Carinthian Alps their wagons rattled down the green valley of the Tagliamento to reach Venice. They passed through Gemona and Portogruaro. Where the Ponte di Rialto spanned the Grand Canal, in the middle of the City of the Lagoons, was the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the great German warehouse. Here the men from the North found what they needed. The word “fondaco” is derived from the Arabic “funduk.” The Arabs, in their turn, had borrowed it from the Greek “pandokos,” meaning all-receiving, common to all. Everywhere along the Mediterranean shores the Venetians had erected many-storied buildings that were part inn, part store, part counting-house, and part fortress—like the “factories” of African and Indian trade at a much later date. In the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, beside the Rialto Bridge, merchants from Nürnberg, Ratisbon, Augsburg, and Ulm rubbed shoulders; men who had come for the spices of the East, and to have them conveyed across the frontier by German wagoners.

Here, far away from home, they slept in clean beds, though the house was an unfamiliar one, built on pillars, in the city of Venice amid the waters which, nevertheless, had a land-beast, a lion, in its coat of arms. And hither, to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, there came day after day the representatives of the Venetian sea-merchants, to dispose of their wares.

The Germans, however, were not allowed to make their bargains without an official imprimatur. Venice appointed brokers to watch over the contracts, keep records of them, and impose taxes. In the history of painting we learn that no less a man than Titian was one of these brokers. At any rate he was styled a broker, and received a salary therefor. He does not seem to have taken his duties very seriously, and certainly it would not have suited him to install his studio overlooking the packing-yard with its noise of porters and beasts of burden. Had he done so, he might have painted like one of the Dutch or Flemish School!

From this packing-yard, the precious commodities of the Levant started on their long overland journey to Germany: perfumes, spices, silks, and dyes, pearls and pepper, incense and ginger. On the southward journey the wagons had been laden with Syrian ores and Low German textiles, which were to be shipped to Egypt. Most of what was carried northward was included under the name of “groceries and spices.” The total quantity was not large. What in those days crossed the passes of the Alps in wagons in a year’s time could today be carried through the St. Gotthard tunnel in a couple of freight trains.

Was coffee among these goods? Yes, but in very small quantities. Before the days when Venice began to amuse herself at masked balls where coffee was served, there was little demand for this commodity in Ratisbon and Nürnberg. Beyond Nürnberg, there was no demand at all. For in Central Germany and North Germany coffee had to wrestle with a titan whose powers were enormously greater than those of Bacchus.

This titan was the lord of Northern Europe. His name was Beer.

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North Germany at that date the dominion of beer was still comparatively recent, dating from not more than two and a half centuries back. If we were to speak of an exclusive dominion, the period would be shorter still.

No doubt the early Teutons, like other barbarians such as the Thracians and the Scythians, drank beer; but they did not deify it, did not make of it a central feature of their lives, as the Hellenes and the Romans had done with wine. Still, beer in those early days played a fairly important role. This “beverage brewed from malted barley or wheat,” concerning which Tacitus disparagingly declared, “it somewhat resembles wine of an extremely bad quality,” moved the Roman historian, who was not usually critical, to remark of its use by the Teutons, “if we were to encourage them in their drunkenness, and to give them as much beer as they are inclined to swill, it would be easier, thanks to this vice of theirs, to overthrow them than it is to do so by force of arms.” But the beer drunk by the ancient Teutons must have been different from the beer known to us today, inasmuch as no hops were grown in Germany before the eighth century
A.D
., and the flowers of the hop-plant were not used as an ingredient of beer earlier than the year 1070. The early Scandinavians speak more of mead or metheglin (made from honey dissolved in water and fermented) than of beer.

Beer-drinking, however, steadily decreased among the Germans, along their frontiers, as they came into closer contact with Roman civilization. Where Roman legionaries, Roman traders, and Roman lawyers dwelt, beer was out of fashion. Bacchus quickly put an end to brewing in Spain and in Gaul—that is to say, on Roman territory. Pliny tells us that beer was in those days called “cerevisia,” that is to say, the “force of Ceres.” But Bacchus was stronger than Ceres, wine was stronger than beer. This was so even in the western and southern parts of Germany. Where the Romans colonized effectively, John Barleycorn has never become a supreme monarch even down to our own day.

The folk-migrations, bringing the Germans to the shores of the Mediterranean, convinced them of the superiority of wine over beer. Throughout the rise of German civilization during the Middle Ages, beer played a very small part. At the princely courts on the Danube, among the minnesingers of Zurich, on the Lake of Constance, on the Neckar, and on the Main, no one, in those days, drank beer. King Beer, as a great industrial power, did not extend his rule into South Germany until the close of the Middle Ages, his realm spreading from the north. He first ascended the throne in that proud city which, for five centuries, had flourished among the mists of the North Sea.

Beer was one of the main sources of wealth in Hamburg. About a century before, setting out from Mecca, coffee began the subjugation of the Ottoman Empire; beer, on the other hand, set forth from Hamburg upon its invasion of Holland and Jutland, Sweden and Russia. Through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, by the waters of the Sound and the Belt, sailed the freighters of the Hamburgers. They were deeply laden with beer, and with tubs of another commodity, which goes so well with beer and increases the thirst for it, pickled herrings. Wherever these vessels came to port, there were promoted orgies of beer-drinking and herring-eating. Salted gullets had to be slaked with Hamburg beer. On the Zuider Zee and among the Frisian islands, in Bergen and Helsingborg, in Danzig and Riga and Königsberg, beer flowed abundantly, a yellow sea capped with white froth. At the masthead of the freighters fluttered the flag of the Hanseatic League.

There are documents to show that throughout the fourteenth century the cargo of the vessels that set sail from Rostock, another of the Hansa ports, was chiefly beer. Their usual destination was Bruges; but the thievish Danes often plundered them in the Sound, and carried off the beer-casks in triumph to Copenhagen. Shakespeare recorded the Danish fondness for beer in immortal verse. They drank deep at the court of King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, and when the monarch raised his tankard, cannon were fired:

Hamlet would be greatly astonished, could he be resurrected today and read in the reports of the Brazilian Coffee Institute for the year 1932 that little Denmark had become the greatest coffee-importing country in the world—eleven and a half pounds per head of population!

In those days, drunkenness was prevalent throughout Northern Europe. A reeling giant, armed with battle-ax and sword, Beer sailed the seas. In their voyages through ice-encumbered waters, the Vikings kept themselves warm with copious potations. Their sails were sprayed with beer as well as with water. The smell of malted liquor accompanied them wherever they went; their beards were stained with it; and to replenish their tankards, the heady potion flowed freely out of the spigot.

The whole of the Northwest, the whole of the Northeast, became gigantic beer depositories. The eyes, the blood-vessels, the senses of the men of those days were soused in beer. It choked their livers, their voices, and their hearts. They thought, they felt, they reckoned in beer. In the budget of the war carried on by Hamburg against Denmark, payments for beer constituted the main item of expenditure. Two-thirds of Stralsund’s provision for its troops and sea-fighters was devoted to beer; of 2640 marks spent by Lübeck upon a naval campaign, 1140 marks were assigned to beer. We find it recorded in the Hansa account-books that twenty sailors consumed on an average per diem no less than fifty-seven gallons of beer. In a list of occupations in the town of Hamburg dating from the year 1400 and dealing with 1200 persons, we find mention of 460 brewers and more than 100 coopers, so that forty-five per cent of occupied persons were engaged in the beer industry.

The brewers were traders and monopolists as well. They did all they could to promote the sale of beer in Holland and Friesland, until at length, shortly before 1400, for the protection of the brewers of Haarlem, the import of beer from North Germany was prohibited. By now Flanders, too, had taken to brewing its own beer. Indeed, according to a local myth, Flanders and not Germany was the original homeland of beer. The name of “Gambrinus,” the deity who presides as a wooden image in many modern beer-halls, is said to be derived from Jan primus, or Jan I, Duke of Brabant in the thirteenth century. Jan may have been real enough, but Gambrinus is supposed to have been the Flemish inventor of beer. This worthy finds mention as a contemporary of Charlemagne. When, many centuries later, King Philip of Spain, a wine consuming land, occupied the Low Countries, Spanish vintages encountered the stubborn resistance of beer in street and market-place and guild-house.

At the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of the modern era, a new type of beauty began to be depicted in northern European art—the type of the man whose bones are thoroughly well covered. Gothic artistry knew nothing of this type. Neither in the stone statues of Naumburg cathedral, nor yet at Strasbourg, Bamberg, or Magdeburg, nor in the countless recumbent figures on the tombs of knights and dignitaries of the Church, do we see persons with a “corporation.” Since sculptors in the hey-day of cathedral building took nature as their model, and, despite an occasional inclination to carve grotesques, generally depicted what they saw around them, and since many of the figures on the tombs were indubitably portraits, we are justified in the inference that in northern Europe of those days obesity must have been extremely rare. The obese were exceptions; they were subjects for caricatures, like Sancho Panza in Spain; they were not typical. Such a type as John Bull, supposed to be a characteristic English country squire, was inconceivable in the Middle Ages.

At the opening of the humanist epoch, there was a sudden change of bodily type in northwestern and northeastern Europe. The Scots, the English, the Dutch, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, and, above all, the Low Germans, began to put on flesh. Especially the leaders—princes, artists, men of learning, generals, priests, persons of taste or of musical genius—were fat folk. An amazing transformation! Never, since the world had been turning on its axis and since human beings had dwelt on its surface, was the belief prevalent that obesity was practically synonymous with health, power, genius, and dignity. Yet from 1400 to 1700 this belief, inconspicuously, gained predominance throughout northern Europe.

A large number of notables during that period were exceedingly stout: Gustavus Adolphus and Henry VIII, Georg von Frundsberg and Martin Luther, Pirckheimer and Johann von Staupitz, Peter Vischer and Hans Sachs, Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Christian IV of Denmark, and countless others, were amazingly corpulent.

To us, these worthies look unpleasantly fat. They themselves regarded their pot-bellies as so natural that they would be puzzled to learn that we find it necessary, for æsthetic reasons, to tone down their outlines. No sculptor today, modelling a memorial statue of Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant hero who fell at Lützen, would dream of giving his image the huge belly which the king really possessed. To the sentiment of their day, they seemed all that could be desired. Leanness was then looked upon as morbid. It is true that Erasmus of Rotterdam, Prince Eugene, and Frederick the Great were by no means healthy persons, but of the morbidly asthenic type. Nevertheless, if we were to meet them today in a dinner-jacket or a lounge suit, we should regard them, precisely because of their leanness, as much healthier persons than, say Philipp Emanuel Bach or George Frederick Handel.

But it was only in northern Europe that this “monstrous regiment” of the fat prevailed. Southern Europe clung to its lean and sinewy type. The men of the wine-drinking countries, the Spanish, the dwellers in central and southern France, the Italians and the Greeks, the Hungarians and Danubian vintners, did not share, or shared very little, in the inflation of bodily type. For the inflation was the outcome of a new mode of nutrition, the outcome of beer-swilling.

Whereas wine is mainly a beverage that washes out the intestines and the tissues, and that (except for the heavier wines) exerts its magical influence almost exclusively upon the central nervous system, beer is a food. In addition to alcohol and water, it contains albumin, dextrin, nutritive salts, and sugar. A litre of good beer contains five grammes (one part in two hundred) of albumin, and fifty grammes (one part in twenty) of carbohydrates. The fact that these nutritive substances are introduced into the organism in a fluid and readily assimilable form, accompanied by effervescent carbonic acid, probably accounts for the revolution in the aspect of the human figure that had never been observed before beer became a popular beverage.

At the time when the consumption of beer reached its climax, which was in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, this beverage was not, as most commonly today, drunk in public-houses or saloons. It was drunk at home; and therein lay the danger, for it was brewed where it was drunk. Whoever was granted the freedom of the city had the right to brew what beer he needed for his own use. The authorities had no objection, since every beverage was taxable. The consumption was recorded, but a tax edict promulgated by Elector John George in 1661 shows that in the countryside illicit brewing was common. This edict expressly forbade that home-brewed beer should “on any account be sold or publicly provided.” Still, no one bothered about the edict. All got their beer wherever they pleased.