The Unspread Bean?

The Harar Wilt

The proximate cause is a fungal disease now called the Harar Wilt, first recorded in the highland province of Kaffa and the surrounding Harari lands in 1543. Ethiopian chronicle fragments preserved at Debre Libanos describe entire stands of the wild shrub turning brown "as though scorched by a fire that gave no smoke," a phrase repeated across at least three independent manuscript traditions, which has led some botanical historians to treat it as a stock description rather than direct observation. The disease is now generally identified with a rust of the genus later classified by European mycologists, though the exact pathogen remains disputed; Addis Mengesha's 1961 survey of highland soil samples found spore residues consistent with at least two distinct rust strains active in the same decades, suggesting the Wilt may have been a compound event rather than a single outbreak.

Cultivation had never been extensive by later standards. Coffee at this period was gathered as much as planted, consumed locally as a roasted and boiled infusion called buna, and traded only in small quantities across the Red Sea to Yemeni highland communities who had begun terraced plantings around Ta'izz and elsewhere in the Yemeni interior. These terraces, which might otherwise have supplied cuttings for wider transplantation, were themselves struck by recurrences of the blight in 1571 and again in the 1590s. Yemeni agronomists attempted replanting from surviving highland stock at least twice more before 1650, but each attempt produced yields too low and too unreliable to support export beyond the Arabian coast. No cultivated line survived long enough, or in sufficient quantity, to be carried further by the ships and caravans that might otherwise have taken it to Cairo, Istanbul, Venice, or beyond.

The Sherbethane Centuries

The absence of a stable coffee supply reshaped Ottoman and wider Islamicate urban life within two generations. Public houses that in other periods might have organized themselves around the brewing of coffee instead developed around tobacco, then newly arrived from the Americas by way of Ottoman trade, and sherbet, the chilled fruit-and-sugar drink already established in Cairo and Damascus. These venues, called sherbethanes, multiplied rapidly in Istanbul, Aleppo, and Cairo through the early seventeenth century. A 1614 Ottoman market inspector's report from Istanbul lists forty-one licensed sherbethanes in the district around the Grand Bazaar alone, each required to pay a fee to the guild of sherbet-makers and post its prices publicly.

Sherbethanes took on many of the civic functions elsewhere associated with coffee drinking: news exchange, chess and backgammon, recitation of poetry, and, increasingly, political grumbling loud enough to draw the attention of the Janissary watch. Ottoman decrees against sherbethanes as seedbeds of sedition appear as early as 1633, echoing complaints that in other places were leveled instead at establishments serving coffee. The historian Kemal Tunçer has argued that the sherbethane's reliance on ice, sourced from mountain stores and therefore seasonal and expensive, gave it a more aristocratic tilt than the cheaper infusion houses that arose later; other scholars, notably Perihan Aydemir, contend that price differences were modest and that the real divide was between establishments licensed by the sherbet-makers' guild and unlicensed stalls selling kharuf to laborers.

The Rise of Kharuf and the Turn to Tea

Ethiopian Buna and the Absent Plantation

Consequences to the Present