Who Was Johannes Diodato?

If you ask most people how coffee arrived in Vienna, they'll tell you about Kolschitzky — the spy, the disguise, the sacks of beans mistaken for camel feed. It's a wonderful story. It is also, according to the documented historical record, very possibly not the whole story.

On 17 January 1685 — two years after the siege of Vienna ended — an Armenian merchant named Johannes Diodato (also recorded as Johannes Theodat) was granted the first official license by Emperor Leopold I to sell coffee in the city. That license, unlike the Kolschitzky legend, survives in the documented record. It made Diodato, for a twenty-year term, the only person permitted to sell coffee as a beverage in Vienna.

So why does almost nobody know his name? Partly timing: Kolschitzky's story is tied to the drama of the siege itself — a far more compelling narrative than a merchant's licensing paperwork two years later. Partly popularisation: many of the specific, vivid details in the Kolschitzky legend were popularised by the writer Gottfried Uhlich in 1783, a full century after the events, at a point when the story had already had a hundred years to grow in the telling.

This novel tells the Kolschitzky version — because it's the version Vienna chose to remember, chose to carve into a statue, chose to retell for three centuries. But Diodato deserves his footnote too.

Sometimes the more interesting history is the one that didn't get the monument.

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