Tulipomania Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Limit

  Borderlands

  For Ffion

  CONTENTS

  MAP OF THE UNITED PROVINCES OF THE NETHERLANDS

  A NOTE ON PRICES

  1 A Mania for Tulips

  2 The Valleys of Tien Shan

  3 Within the Abode of Bliss

  4 Stranger from the East

  5 Clusius

  6 Leiden

  7 An Adornment to the Cleavage

  8 The Tulip in the Mirror

  9 Florists

  10 Boom

  11 At the Sign of The Golden Grape

  12 The Orphans of Wouter Winkel

  13 Bust

  14 Goddess of Whores

  15 At the Court of the Tulip King

  16 Late Flowering

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON PRICES

  It is impossible to make accurate comparisons between prices in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and those today. Figures can certainly be calculated, based on the comparative prices of gold or essential foodstuffs, but they do not take into account vital differences such as what constitutes a minimal standard of living (in many respects, people who today would be called poor live more comfortably than the richest Dutch in the seventeenth century) and certainly not what luxuries such as tulip bulbs were worth in the Golden Age.

  The best comparisons probably come from looking at different salaries and earnings. The table that follows sets out some typical examples from the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century.*

  The basic unit of currency in the republic was the guilder. One guilder was made up of 20 stuivers.

  20 stuivers = 1 guilder

  ½ stuiver Cost of a tankard of beer

  6½ stuivers Cost of a 12-pound loaf, 1620

  8 stuivers Daily wage of an experienced Haarlem bleacher, 1601 (= about 110 guilders a year)

  18 stuivers Daily wage of an Amsterdam cloth-shearer, 1633 (= about 250 guilders a year)

  13 guilders Exchange price of one Dutch ton of herring, 1636 60 guilders Exchange price of 40 gallons of French brandy, 1636

  250 guilders Annual earnings of a carpenter, 1630s

  750 guilders Clusius’s salary at the University of Leiden, 1592

  1,500 guilders Typical earnings of a middle-ranking merchant, 1630s

  1,600 guilders Rembrandt’s fee for his greatest masterpiece, The Night Watch, 1642

  3,000 guilders Typical earnings of a well-off merchant, 1630s

  5,200 guilders Highest reliably attested price paid for a tulip bulb, 1637

  *Sources: Deursen, Plain Lives; Hunger, Charles d’Ecluse; Posthumus, Inquiry; Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland.

  They were possessed with such a Rage or,

  to give it its proper Name, such an Itching for their Flowers,

  as to give often three thousand Crowns for a

  Tulip that pleased their Fancies;

  a Disease that ruined several rich Families.

  MONSIEUR DE BLAINVILLE, TRAVELS THROUGH HOLLAND

  (LONDON, 1743), vol. 1, p. 28

  CHAPTER 1

  A Mania for Tulips

  They came from all over Holland, dressed like crows in black from head to foot and journeying along frozen tracks rendered treacherous by the scars of a thousand hooves and narrow wheels. They had cloaked and blanketed themselves against the biting winter wind—the wealthiest rattling along in unsprung carriages that jerked from rut to pothole like an untried sailor lurching through a hurricane, the rest on horseback with their heads bowed against the cold. Traveling singly or in twos and threes, they clattered through the flat and sterile landscape north of Amsterdam, riding on until they came to the little town of Alkmaar near the coast.

  They were middle-aged and stoutly built: shrewd and successful men who had made their money in trade, who knew how to turn a profit and what it meant to live well. Most were clean-shaven and ruddy-faced; their clothes, though drab, were cut from the finest cloth, and the purses that they carried were snugly full of money. Passing through the gates of the town at dusk, the visitors made their way through Alkmaar’s cramped and narrow streets and found rooms in taverns near the busy marketplace. There they ate and drank and puffed their long clay pipes into the night, calling for great pitchers of wine and plates of roasted meats, sprawling back in their hard wooden chairs and talking shop till past midnight by the smoky, jaundice-yellow light of the peat fires in the grates.

  The business of these rich Dutch merchants was not grain or spices, timber or fish. They dealt, rather, in tulip bulbs—drab and anonymous brown packages of no intrinsic worth, which resembled nothing so much as onions. Yet as unpromising as they might at first appear, flowers at this time were far more precious than the richest commodities that could be found piled up on the wharves of Amsterdam. Some tulips were so scarce and so greatly coveted that they were worth more than a hundred times their weight in gold, and successful bulb dealers could make huge profits. At this time the richest man in the whole of the United Provinces was worth 400,000 guilders—a sum amassed over several generations. But some tulip traders were buying and selling single flowers for hundreds, even thousands of guilders and building paper fortunes of as much as forty or sixty thousand guilders in a matter of a year or two.

  The bulb dealers had come to Alkmaar to attend an unprecedented auction. The guardians of the little orphanage in the town had come into the possession of one of the most valuable collections of tulips in the whole of the Netherlands. Caring more for the flowers’ value than for their beauty, they were selling off the bulbs for the benefit of some of the children in their care. So shortly after dawn broke, gray and chill, the traders began to make their way to the saleroom in the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen—the headquarters of Alkmaar’s civic guard, an ornate and gabled building in the center of the town.

  It was a large room, but they filled it. The bidding started briskly and soon became frantic. Single bulbs were knocked down for 200 guilders, then 400, 600, 1,000, and more. Four of the hundred or so lots were sold for in excess of 2,000 guilders apiece. And when at last the final tulip had been sold and all the money tallied, the auction proved to have raised a total of 90,000 guilders, which was, quite literally, a fortune in those days.

  The date was February 5, 1637, the day flower fever reached such a pitch of frenzy in the United Provinces that once-worthless bulbs truly theatened to supplant precious metals as objects of desire. That day the tulip completed a journey that had begun hundreds of years before and thousands of miles away.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Valleys of Tien Shan

  The tulip is not native to the Netherlands. It is a flower of the East, a child of the unimaginable vastness of central Asia. So far as anyone can tell, it did not reach the United Provinces until 1570, and by then it had already been journeying for many hundreds of years from its original homeland in the mountain ranges that run north of the Himalayas along the fortieth parallel.

  Taxonomists believe that the first tulips sprang from the scrubby slopes of the Pamirs and flourished among the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains, where China and Tibet meet Russia and Afghanistan in one of the least hospitable environments on earth. They were relatively sober and compact things, with narrower petals and much less flamboyant variegation than Dutch tulips. The flowers of the Tien Shan were much shorter than modern tulips, carrying their petals usually a scant few inches from the ground. But they were hardy and well adapted to survive the harsh winters and parched summers of central Asia.

  The tulips of the mountains were predominantly red, the color of blood or soldiers’ uniforms, and they were venerated by the warlike tribes who peopled
this desolate area. Yet nothing could have been less regimented, less militaristic, than the scattered colonies of scarlet flowers that clung to the barren soil of these craggy peaks. They were not uniform but were infinitely varied, each flower differing subtly from its neighbors in its color or the shape of its petals.

  These tulips were not the finished article—not yet. They lacked the striking color schemes that distinguished the flowers that were to entrance the Ottoman Empire and cause Dutchmen to abandon both their caution and their common sense, the contrasting streaks and flares of pigment that made each bloom a living canvas. They had neither the stature nor the easy elegance that characterized their descendants. These would come only with time. But even now they were beautiful.

  Nearly half of the 120 known species of tulips grow wild in this forbidding terrain. Together the Pamirs—Russia’s “Roof of the World”—and the Tien Shan—the “Celestial Mountains” that run along China’s western border—form not only the backbone of Asia but also an all-but-impenetrable barrier several thousand miles long and hundreds of miles wide. Thousands of years ago these mountains were the reason why the ancient civilizations of Rome and China remained almost entirely ignorant of each other’s existence; today they remain among the least explored regions on earth. As late as 1900, when Britain had occupied India and Russia had subdued the fastness of Siberia, this inner Asian citadel remained all but unexplored by Europeans. Bordered to the east by impassable bone-dry desert, to the north by barren taiga, to the west by warring, hostile khanates, and to the south by mysterious and unwelcoming Tibet, the fortress of the Tien Shan was as inaccessible as any place on earth. Even the valleys of this immense range were found at such altitudes that the few outsiders who visited them had to acclimatize themselves to the lung-searing mountain air, and the passes that led to more hospitable country could not be crossed during eight or nine months out of each year. When, at the height of summer, the worst of the snows did melt, the Tien Shan remained inaccessible to all but the hardiest travelers, a sea of gneiss and granite that contained no settlements, no soil worth cultivating, and little or no water. Today the mountains remain dry, infertile, and unwelcoming—true desert in stretches, in the sense that they are incapable of supporting either plant or animal life.

  Yet even the Celestial Mountains and the Roof of the World boast occasional oases and foothills where life can flourish. In the case of the Tien Shan, the valleys lie predominantly on the north side of the range, and the oases and settlements and the trade that they attract along the foothills to the south. These towns were a considerable lure for the Turkish nomads who have peopled the Asian steppe lands since the beginning of recorded history. Pasturing their horses in summer in the rich valleys of the north and crossing the mountains through little-used passes, they would descend occasionally on the cities of the south—sometimes pillaging and raiding, sometimes trading with the civilizations of the oases for their learning and their silk.

  As pastoralists, the Turks would have encountered the tulip where it grew wild in the valleys of Tien Shan; as invaders, they would also have found colonies growing at much higher altitudes as they crossed the passes leading south, for the tulip can flourish in very mountainous terrain and even winter under a blanket of snow. The simple beauty of these unsophisticated wildflowers, with their petals colored yellow or orange or cinnabar, must have been considerably enhanced by the bleak surroundings in which they were usually encountered, and that would have made them attractive. But for nomads who had survived another howling, freezing Asian winter, the year’s first tulips were more than just oases of beauty appearing in the wilderness. They represented life and fertility. They were the heralds of spring.

  Tulips, then, became an important symbol for the Turks. And as they moved westward across the endless steppe, the nomads found colonies of the flower growing wild all across the central Asian plateau, from Tien Shan to the Caspian Sea, and then along the farther reaches of the Black Sea coast and south among the Caucasus. These tulips had spread westward naturally, thousands of years earlier. But by the time the Turks appeared in numbers in the Middle East, in the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D., at least some of the flowers that they encountered were growing in gardens, planted where they might best please the eye.

  When exactly the cultivation of these wildflowers began is a mystery, but we do know that by about the year 1050 tulips were already venerated in Persia. Tulips grew in the gardens of the old Persian capital, Isfahan, and also in Baghdad. They appear in one of Omar Khayyam’s best-known verses as a metaphor for perfect female beauty, and later poets often used the flower as a symbol of perfection. One, Musharrifu’d-din Sa’di, described his ideal garden in about 1250—a place where “the murmur of a cool stream, bird song, ripe fruit in plenty, bright multi-colored tulips and fragrant roses” combined to create an earthly paradise. Another, Hafiz, likened the sheen of the flower’s petals to the bloom on his mistress’s cheek.

  Indeed, the tulip’s delicacy and typically bloodred coloring made it a flower of great symbolic importance for the people of Persia. It was synonymous with perfection and eternity, and several myths were told to explain its outstanding beauty. One such legend told how a prince named Farhad was deeply in love with a maiden, Shirin. One day word reached him (falsely, as it turned out) that his beloved had been killed. Gripped by unbearable grief, he hacked his own body open with an ax. Blood dripping from his terrible wounds fell onto the barren soil, and from each drop a scarlet flower sprang, a symbol of his perfect love. Hundreds of years after this story was first written down, wild red tulips remained a favorite Persian token of undying love. “When a young man presents one to his mistress,” the seventeenth-century traveler John Chardin recounted, “he gives her to understand, by the general colour of the flower, that he is on fire with her beauty; and by the black base of it, that his heart is burnt to a coal.”

  Among the largely illiterate Turkish peoples of the steppe, no records exist that trace the flower’s history further back than Omar Khayyam’s day, and it is not until the end of the eleventh century, when a tribe of Turks called the Seljuks came west and conquered Anatolia from the Byzantines, that the tulip first appears in nomad art. The Seljuks either brought the flower with them as they began to explore the land, or they discovered colonies of wildflowers where they settled. The earliest known drawings of tulips are found on tiles excavated from the thirteenth-century palace that one of their sultans, Alaeddin Kaikubad I, built on Lake Beysehir in eastern Anatolia.

  By this time the Turks had lost some of their nomadic instincts. The Seljuks settled in the cities that they captured, and they called the lands they had taken “Rum” because they saw themselves as the inheritors of Rome. They certainly developed a Roman taste for empire, and even after the Sultanate of Rum was annihilated at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Seljuk princelings began to carve new kingdoms from its ruins.

  One of these petty rulers was a certain Osman of Sogut, and his dynasty (known as “Othman” to the Arabs and as “Ottoman” in Europe) proved to be the most glorious in all the long history of the Turks. It was a house of conquerors and despots that enslaved great swaths of Asia and swept through Europe to the gates of Vienna—a line whose rulers not only held the power of life and death over their subjects, but frequently used it. Yet many of the Ottoman rulers who succeeded, one after the other, to the Turkish throne were also cultivated men whose delicate tastes and passion for beauty made them knowledgeable horticulturists in their own right. Eventually the Ottomans elevated the tulip to a position of eminence it had never enjoyed before.

  By 1345 the House of Osman had crossed the Dardanelles, and Turkish horsemen had arrived in Europe. They came at the request of the emperor of Byzantium, who wanted their help to secure his throne against a usurper. Instead, the Ottomans took Greece and Thrace for themselves, and then most of the Balkans as well, reducing the emperor to a puppet whose writ seldom ran more than a few miles beyond the walls of his gr
eat capital, Constantinople.

  It is impossible, at this remove, to be sure how widespread was the cult of the tulip among the Ottomans who swarmed across the Balkans in the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turks of this era generally obeyed Islam’s proscriptions against the public display of realistic portraits of living things.* For this reason there are no representations of the tulip in Ottoman manuscripts of the period, and no contemporary paintings, vases decorated with flowers, or tulip-emblazoned tiles appear to have survived—if any were ever made. Nevertheless, we know that gardening was a well-developed art in Persia by this time. Indeed, the garden is central to the Muslim vision of paradise. Christian clerics told their flocks that heaven was a shining city on a hill; the Arab founders of Islam, a religion that had after all sprung originally from the desert, looked forward to an endless garden of delight, full of pavilions and fountains, carpeted with flowers of a beauty unequaled on earth. Pious Muslims treated flowers almost as holy relics and often wore blooms in their turbans.

  The Turks told a story to explain why gardens were so important to them. When Hasan Efendi, a famous dervish holy man, was preaching one day, one of those who had come to hear him speak passed him a note. It inquired whether any Muslim could be certain he would go to paradise when he died. After Hasan had finished his sermon, he asked if there were any gardeners present. When one member of the congregation stood up, Hasan pointed to him and said: “This man will go to heaven.”

  Immediately the dervish was surrounded by a press of people demanding to know what the gardener had done to be certain of a place in paradise. But Sheikh Hasan explained that he was merely quoting from the hadiths—the oral traditions of the prophet Muhammad—which state that people will do in the afterlife what they most enjoy doing on earth. Because all flowers belong to heaven, gardeners will surely go to paradise to continue their work.