From Kaffa the coffee plant found its way into Persia about the year 875, and still later into Turkey. According to popular belief, the drink coffee was the invention of the Sheik Omar in 1258. Others maintain that the drink was not known until even a later period. The mufti, Gemal Eddin of Aden, made a trip to Persia in 1500, where he learned the use of coffee as a drink, and introduced it into his own country for the special purpose of supplying it to the dervishes to make them more enduring in their prayers and supplications. In 1511 coffee had already become a popular drink in Mecca. About this time Chair Beg, the governor of Mecca, issued an edict proclaiming coffee-drinking injurious and making the use of coffee a crime against the laws of the Koran. It was prophesied that on the day of judgment the faces of coffee drinkers would be blacker than the pot in which the coffee was made. As a result of this crusade the coffee houses were closed; the coffee plantations were destroyed, and offenders were treated to the bastinade or a reversed ride on a donkey. The next governor of Mecca again opened the coffee houses, and in 1534 Sultan Soliman opened the first coffee houses in Constantinople, which were, however, again closed by Sultan Murad II., but not for long. In 1624 Venetian merchants brought large quantities of coffee into northern Italy. In 1632 there were 1,000 public coffee houses in Cairo. In 1645 coffee-drinking had already become very common in southern Italy. A Greek named Pasqua erected the first coffee house in London (1652). Coffee houses appeared in other cities in about the following order: Marseilles, 1671; Paris, 1672; Vienna, 1683; Nürnberg and Regensburg, 1686; Hamburg, 1687; Stuttgart, 1712; Berlin, 1721. In 1674 the ladies of London petitioned the government to suppress the coffee houses. To discourage the use of coffee it was maintained that the drink was made from tar, soot, blood of Turks, old shoes, old boots, etc. These coffee houses were of great significance, as may be gathered from the rapidity with which they spread and the general favor with which they were received. They were visited, not so much on account of the drink that was dispensed there, but rather for the purpose of discussing political situations; they constituted the favorite meeting-places for anarchists, revolutionaries, and high-class criminals. At times it even became necessary to close them entirely in order to check or suppress political intrigues or plottings against the government. At the present time the saloons take the place of coffee houses in most countries, and many of them are still the hotbeds of anarchy and crime. In Turkey, where alcoholic drinks are prohibited, coffee houses have full swing.