Tulipomania (28 page)

The French ambassador, Jean Sauvent de Villeneuve, described one royal entertainment, held in Ibrahim’s own tulip garden:

The illuminations, Villeneuve added, continued nightly at Damat Ibrahim’s personal expense, “so long as the tulips remain in flower.”

Using his ambassadors’ rapturous reports of the French royal palace at Fontainebleau and Louis XV’s château at Marly as his guide, the grand vizier built a villa for himself in a quasi-European style. It stood on the Bosporus just above Istanbul, and when Damat Ibrahim entertained Ahmed there in the spring of 1721, the enraptured sultan immediately ordered the construction of a new royal palace in similar style nearby. The place chosen was a spot where two streams known as the Sweet Waters of Europe ran through meadows down to the sea. Here Ahmed’s architects constructed a sumptuous pleasure palace called the Sa’adabad (“the Place of Happiness”). It took them just three months, in the summer of 1722. Perhaps for the first time in the Ottoman Empire, the gardens were planted in the more formal European style, with avenues of trees leading to square and regimented beds of tulips. The Sweet Waters themselves were turned into marble-banked canals that fed fountains and cascades surrounding a central ornamental lake.

By keeping the people of Istanbul supplied with cheap bread, and the sultan sated with festivals, Damat Ibrahim remained in office throughout the 1720s. But eventually even he ran out of luck. Events far beyond the gardens of the Sa’adabad were moving beyond his control; ruinous taxation, necessary to fund not just the ostentations of the court but also a war against the Persians that erupted in the early 1730s, combined with famine to set the imperial provinces in turmoil. Worse, Ottoman armies were soon falling back in disarray on the eastern frontier and the hated Persians recovered substantial swaths of land that the Turks had seized from them earlier in the century. When news of these imperial defeats reached Istanbul, the mutterings of discontent that had been circulating in the bazaars turned into outright demands for change.

Not even the grand vizier could keep such bad news from reaching the sultan; not even Ahmed III could afford to ignore it. By the time the Istanbul mob—led by an Albanian secondhand-clothes dealer named Patrona Halil—marched on the Topkapi in the autumn of 1730 clamoring for scapegoats, Ahmed knew that his reign was in grave danger of ending prematurely and that if he failed to placate the crowd, his own life might be forfeit. In this sudden crisis expediency was all to the tulip king, and he ordered his corps of gardener-executioners, the
bostancis
, to surrender up the heads of Damat Ibrahim and Mustafa Pasha, the ministers most closely associated with the unpopular policies of Westernization and reform.

It was the beginning of the end—for Ahmed and for the tulip era too. The grand vizier was discovered at his official residence, strangled and decapitated. Then the
bostancis
set off for Mustafa’s waterfront villa near the Sa’adabad. They came upon the grand admiral transplanting tulips in his garden, blissfully unaware of the sudden political crisis in the capital. Perhaps the gardeners who had come to kill the pasha paused for a moment, while their victim prepared himself for death, to cast a professional eye over the forty new varieties of tulip he had created. But if they did, they certainly could not have known that, as the silken bowstring tightened around the grand admiral’s neck and Mustafa began the journey from his paradise-garden to the gardens of paradise, the time of tulips was all but over.

As it turned out, Ahmed had done too little, and acted far too late, to save his throne. The mob would not disperse, and the sultan’s position soon became critical. Perhaps a more resolute monarch, one whose skills ran more to military matters than to organizing tulip festivals, might still have rallied some loyal troops and saved himself. But Ahmed was no general, and he survived the sacrifice of his closest advisers by only two days. As rioting engulfed Istanbul and control of the capital slipped from his grasp, the sultan was persuaded that his only chance of saving his own neck was abdication.

A nephew, Mahmud, was plucked from the cage and placed on the throne in Ahmed’s place. His accession was a turning point for both the empire and the tulip, for though Mahmud soon dealt ruthlessly enough with the rioters who had deposed his uncle and run wild through Istanbul, burning the wooden tulip kiosks that had symbolized Ahmed’s reign, the new sultan’s real interests lay elsewhere. He was a keen voyeur who liked nothing better than to hide behind a grille in the harem and spy on the women of the palace. On one occasion the sultan even had the stitches of the flimsy clothes the ladies wore while bathing secretly removed and the garments reassembled with glue, knowing that it would melt in the heat of the steam room and expose each woman, naked, to his gaze.

Such a monarch could never accord a mere flower the exaggerated respect it had enjoyed in the time of Ahmed III. Though flower festivals continued to be held each spring, they were far more modest than they had been during the
lale devri
, and the tulip’s second decline in Turkey dates from the reign of Mahmud I. In the end it was so complete that the whole gorgeous panoply of Istanbul tulips—all thirteen hundred varieties and more—slowly vanished from the gardens of the empire and the memories of men. Today not a single specimen survives.

And what of the sultan who presided over the tulip’s late flowering? He was permitted to live, but only after a fashion. Ahmed, the tulip king, was returned to his cage to gaze once more over the Ottomans’ fig groves—and to while away his nights in dreams of dagger-petaled flowers bathing in the full moon’s light and throwing needle-pointed shadows about the secret gardens of the Abode of Bliss.

T
hat was the end of the tulip mania. When the door of the Ottoman cage slammed shut for the last time on Ahmed III, the flower began to fade from the history books. Its greatest years had passed; never again would it so captivate a king, or enslave half a nation with the promise of easy money. In time people would come to wonder how such a mania could ever have occurred at all.

But if the tulip ceased to be a public craze, it remained a private passion. The collapse of the bulb trade did not end all interest in tulips, even though prices plunged and then remained uniformly low in reaction to the excesses of the Dutch and the Turks. On the contrary, large sums were still demanded for the bulbs of a very few rare and highly regarded varieties.

It took only a year or two for the Dutch bulb trade to regain some sort of equilibrium. The speculators had gone, but there was still a market for the flower; the purchasers were the same patrician collectors who had stayed aloof from the tavern trade, and they continued to value the tulip for purely aesthetic reasons. Even in the summer of 1637, less than six months after prices crashed, a Haarlem connoisseur
named Aert Huybertsz. paid 850 guilders for a single bulb of the fine Rosen variety Manassier. Jacques Bertens, the dealer from whom he purchased the tulip, had earlier paid 710 guilders for the flower and thus profited to the tune of 140 guilders, or about six months’ wages for a local artisan.

The fashion among tulip connoisseurs in the postmania years was to cultivate single specimens of as many different tulips as possible. This meant there was still at least a limited demand for many of the most attractive varieties of flower. In an odd way the infamy that the mania had attracted helped too; the whole of Europe had heard of tulips now, and many people wanted to see for themselves the flower that had generated such passions. Dutch florists were thus able to offset their domestic catastrophe by developing an export business. A fair number enjoyed considerable success; indeed the dominance that Holland still enjoys in the international flower trade dates to the first half of the seventeenth century.

This steady business was of inestimable value to the florists, who certainly must have lost a good proportion of their customers to the mania, and from scattered hints it appears that the bulb growers did what they could to keep the supply of the most favored species low. They thus contrived to maintain prices at a decent level for years, cannily resisting the temptation to breed more tulips and risk flooding the limited market that remained.

Comparatively little data concerning the prices paid for tulips has survived for the years after 1637. Peter Mundy, who traveled through the United Provinces in 1640, noted that “incredible prices” were still being paid for what he called “tulip rootes,” without giving examples. But the sort of sums Mundy, a reasonably well-off merchant, would have considered incredible were still far short of those commanded in 1636 and 1637. An Admirael van der Eijck, which sold for an average of about 1,345 guilders per bulb at Alkmaar, went under the hammer for only 220 guilders when another grower’s estate was auctioned off
in 1643, and a Rotgans once worth 805 guilders, for only 138. Without knowing the precise weights of the bulbs concerned, it is impossible to say for certain that the sums are truly comparable, but in both these cases prices had fallen to only a sixth of what they had been at the height of the mania—an average annual depreciation of 35 percent.

If the rarities fared badly, then—as might be expected—the cheaper bulbs did considerably worse. They had appreciated late, and only when the stock of more desirable bulbs seemed exhausted; they were too common and too drab to interest the connoisseurs. Witte Croonen—plain White Crowns—that had sold for 64 guilders per half-pound in January 1637 and then rose to the giddy heights of 1,668 guilders the half at Alkmaar, could be had for only 37½ guilders five years later. To reach that low, they had depreciated at a spectacular average of 76 percent per year.

Those sort of prices were not enough to sustain everyone who had dabbled in bulb growing. In the years that followed the mania, the fledgling flower industry contracted, and most of the new and inexperienced growers who had been attracted by the prospect of rich profits gave up the business or were driven out. Tulip breeding retreated quite literally to its roots in the rich sandy soils around Haarlem; indeed, the town now established a total dominance over the bulb trade such as it had never enjoyed when the times were good and everyone was growing tulips. During the reign of Ahmed III, the farms of Haarlem shipped tens of thousands of bulbs to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The town became so closely associated with the finest flowers that the handful of florists who did base themselves away from the town routinely listed their address as “Near Haarlem” when they sent out catalogs and price lists. They knew their produce would be dismissed as second-rate if they did not.

The trade was much more rational now. The bulbs that did command high prices were taken to auctions, which continued to be held
in Haarlem for the remainder of the seventeenth century. The tulips sold at these affairs would have been those of new varieties, recently developed and still rare enough to command a premium. After a few years most of these newcomers would lose their sheen, and the connoisseurs would move on to other novelties. In time the once-fashionable bulbs would become relatively commonplace, and the growers would begin to sell them to callers or via mail order through garden catalogs aimed at more modest purses. It would appear from surviving lists of the extensive bulb purchases made by one German tulipophile—Charles, margrave of Baden-Durlach—that by about 1712 the bulbs available from these catalogs cost only a guilder apiece on average, although a few varieties might command ten, twenty, or even forty guilders a bulb. The number of species and the number of bulbs available by the next century was much greater too. An inventory of the margrave’s collection showed that in 1736 he owned not only 4,796 different varieties of tulip but as many as 80,000 bulbs of a single species.

Preferences had not changed much, and the margrave’s flowers would have been recognizably descendants of the tulips grown during the years of mania. The mosaic virus remained undiscovered, and brightly colored flamed tulips remained highly popular. Indeed, the desiderata applied to the most coveted varieties would have been perfectly familiar to a flower dealer of the 1630s: In 1700 Henrik van Oosting’s
The Dutch Gardener
noted that the ideal tulip should have “petals that are rounded at the top, and these should not be curled … as for the flames, these must start low, beginning at the base of the Flower and climbing right up the Petal, and ending in the form of a shell at the edge of the flower…. As regards the base, it must be of the finest Sky Blue, and the Stamens should seem to be Black, although they are really of a very dark Blue.”
The Dutch Florist
, a book by Nicholas van Kampen translated into English in 1763, added
that the “properties required of a fine tulip” were a tall stem, a well-proportioned cup, and lively colors, preferably on a background of white.

Even so, no plant, not even the tulip, could hope to remain in fashion forever. Tastes changed; other flowers offered something different. Although the French in the eighteenth century and the English in the nineteenth retained a passion for the flower, the tulip was often relegated to the second rank as other species briefly came into vogue and occasionally generated miniature manias in their own right.
*

Perhaps the most striking of these affairs was the hyacinth trade, that grew up in the United Provinces in the first third of the eighteenth century. Like the tulip, the hyacinth was introduced to Western Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Clusius knew it and distributed its bulbs, and it was cultivated in the Netherlands in a minor way for several decades without arousing any great passion among flower lovers. Then chance intervened. Over the years growers trying to create new varieties had accidentally produced a few double hyacinths—flowers with twice the usual number of petals. Because these plants did not produce seeds, they were routinely destroyed, and hyacinths occupied a station in the florists’ pantheon below those of the tulip and the carnation. In 1684, however, a Haarlem bulb farmer named Pieter Voorhelm fell ill and was unable to tend his garden for some time. When he recovered and went to dispose of some double hyacinths he had been meaning to get rid of, he discovered that an especially fine double had flowered and that some of his customers wanted to buy it. Not only that—they were willing to pay more for the new flower than they were for the single hyacinths he produced.