Tobacco arrived on the European continent with the discovery of America, where the plant originates from. Although at first it was even used as a remedy against certain diseases —in fact, the first European to cultivate it was Francisco Hernández de Toledo , physician to Philip II—, nowadays we are all aware —even smokers— of its ills. As early as 1590, Pope Urban VII , who would only be in charge of the Church for thirteen days, enacted the first ban on smoking in public places. He threatened to excommunicate anyone who took tobacco at the doors or inside the churches, whether it was chewed, smoked in a pipe or snorted powder through the nose.
Faced with this prohibition, the adventurer and great seducer Giacomo Casanova he knew how to find a life to continue smoking in his rooms while he was a novice in the service of Cardinal Acquaviva. The rest of the smoking novices tried to get the same dispensation from the cardinal, but got no for an answer. They decided to interrogate Casanova to see how he had achieved it. Casanova asked them how they had formulated the question to the cardinal:
"Your Eminence, can we smoke while we meditate?" they answered.
—You haven't done well, I asked him:Your Eminence, can I meditate while I smoke? And the answer was yes.
But it would not be only Christians who would prohibit smoking, the sultan of the Ottoman empire Murad IV he also banned it.
Murad IV
The first thing he did as soon as he came to power in 1623 was to apply the law of fratricide , an Ottoman tradition imposed in the XV century by Mehmed II the Conqueror to avoid civil wars. When a new Sultan was appointed, all possible heirs (brothers, uncles, cousins...) were strangled with a silk rope -Murad ordered three brothers to be killed-. The greatest slaughter took place in the succession of Mehmed III, when nineteen members of his family were killed. This practice was abandoned in the 17th century by Ahmed I and replaced by the prison in the Kafes (cage), a set of rooms in Topkapi Palace where would-be successors to the throne were kept under arrest and under constant surveillance. Another of the measures that he implemented was the prohibition of alcohol, tobacco and coffee. He ordered the immediate execution of all those " who dared to smoke on any place on earth under my sovereignty «. He even tells that at night, disguised as one more subject, he walked the streets and taverns to see if the ban was complied with, and if he caught you red-handed … he executed you himself. Of course, it seems that the prohibition only affected his vassals, because he was a textbook alcoholic. Even so, there were those who tried to skip the ban by pulling their wits -it's what vices have, that it's hard to leave them-. Interpreting the sultan's ban literally, one of his subjects dug out a cellar under his house so that he could continue smoking without violating the terms of the ban. A neighbor of this—how neighbors are!—denounced him and the sultan had him arrested to kill him. When he was in front of Murad IV he tried to defend himself claiming that…
The law prohibits smoking ON anywhere on earth under his sovereignty, but nothing says to do it below.
That show of ingenuity saved his life, and the ban was extended everywhere... even underground .