The Tulip Read online

  Mehmed described himself as a bendegan or servant of the ruler, so it is most likely that he worked as a member of the nakassan in the imperial studios and that these paintings of rare and expensive tulips may have been made as a record of flowers in the collection of the Sultan, or at the very least, one of the Viziers.21 The Book of Tulips was made when the passion for Istanbul tulips was at its height and huge prices were being paid for particular types; Turkey was indulging in its own form of tulipomania. The book contains little by way of words, apart from the name of each tulip, usually inscribed in red ink (more rarely in black) in a flowing Talik script. Only the strange purplish-grey ‘Cucemoru’ has a description of its characteristics, written in a slanting block of text arranged to the left of the flower. But The Book of Tulips appeared at almost the same time as the official price lists that the government had decreed should be published as an attempt to keep soaring prices under control. By comparing the two, it is possible to build up an idea of the value of the bulbs. In the catalogue of prices, issued on 28 June 1726, Nize-i Rummani, the fabled ‘The Roman’s Spear’, is the most expensive of the 239 tulips registered. It was priced at fifty kurus or seven gold coins. That same rich red flower also headed the list of 306 tulips published in August of the following year, but in that short time, the price had increased fourfold to 200 kurus. ‘The Roman’s Spear’ was followed in value by ‘One That Changes Owners’, a sumptuous red tulip, intricately streaked and edged with chrome-yellow. That cost 150 kurus. Third in value was another red and yellow tulip, ‘One That Scatters and Flowers’, priced at 100 kurus. Tulip sales generally took place behind the New Mosque (Eminonu) in Istanbul, where there is still a flower market.

  The official list named only the most expensive varieties available, the ones most likely to tempt speculators, and represented only about a fifth of the total number of Istanbul tulips known to exist in the Tulip Era. Mehmed Ucambarli’s manuscript of 1726, Lalezar-i Ibrahim (Notes of Ibrahim, a Tulip Grower) lists 850 varieties. In the same year, Ali Emiri Efendi Kutuphanesi brought out his Defter-i Lalezale-i Istanbul (Notes of a Tulip Grower in Istanbul) which gave the names and characteristics of 1,108 tulips grown in Istanbul between 1681 and 1726. Kutuphsanesi includes all the information that a keen tulip grower of today might hope to find in a specialist nursery catalogue. Writing of the variety ‘Vala-san’, he says, ‘The colour is a deep red, like the red of a pomegranate flower. The petals are almond shaped. The size of the petals are equal, with thin pointed tips – tips as delicate and flexible as sulsani [a type of written script]. It is a perennial and grows well outdoors. The anthers are yellow and longer than the ovarium. It is a plant with filaments, and is delicate. The flower, as a whole, is extremely beautiful. The flower has been named ‘Vala-san’ after Alisan.’ Sheik Mohammed, official lalizari or chief tulip grower in the last two years of Ahmed Ill’s reign, produced two tulip manuscripts while in office. One of them lists 1,323 varieties of Istanbul tulip and names, unusually, two women growers: Azize Kadin who in 1728 raised ‘The Gem of the Shah’ and ‘Grey Swallow’ and Fatma Hatun who raised ‘The Seeker of Hearts’.

  With the end of Ahmed Ill’s reign in 1730, the tulip abruptly lost its status as an imperial flower. A few private displays were arranged at court for Ahmed’s successor, Mahmud I, but the secretive courtyards of the Topkapi Palace never again glittered with the lanterns and fiery torches that had lit up the priceless collection of tulips gathered by Ahmed, tulips that had been almost as valuable as the jewels in his strong-room. The cascade of manuscripts celebrating the Istanbul tulip’s beauty dried to a trickle. Members of the court’s high-ranking Council for Screening Flowers diplomatically drifted away into the shadows of the labyrinthine palace. In the summer pastures, high in the Sipylus mountains above Manisa only shepherds and their vast herds of sheep and goats gazed at the swathes of tulips once grown for the Sultan’s garden in Istanbul. But the tulip was not entirely forgotten. Up until the end of the eighteenth century at least, craftsmen working in textiles and in stone continued to use the flower as a motif. A headstone of 1746 in the graveyard of the Hadim Ibrahim Pasha Mosque, Silivrikapi in Istanbul shows superb, long, thin dagger-petalled tulips displayed in typical thin-necked laledan. And, just occasionally, the Istanbul tulip returns to haunt twentieth-century gardeners. Sometimes a bulb, especially a bulb of a Parrot tulip, will revert to a form which the Dutch growers used to call Tulipa dief or tulip thieves. These tulips have strange, tall, spectral flowers with pointed, dagger-shaped petals. Not thieves, but benefactors, ones that increase joy.

  Chapter II

  The Tulip in Northern Europe

  It is entirely possible that the tulip reached Europe, unchronicled, before Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Ferdinand F’s ambassador to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed the honour of introducing it. After all, Süleyman had annexed much of the Balkan peninsula and Hungary early in his reign and, although he failed to take Vienna in 1529, he maintained trade throughout his reign with the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, no tulips appear in European paintings of the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. No mention is made of them before the mid sixteenth century by the busy botanists, herbalists and physicians who at the great centres of learning in Europe – Wittenburg, Montpellier, Padua, Vienna – were beginning to describe and list the plants growing around them. The first botanic gardens in Europe were established at Pisa and Padua between 1543 and 1545.

  Busbecq (1522–1591) was one of a long series of Flemish ambassadors who represented the Habsburg emperors in Constantinople and sent plants and other curiosities back to their patrons. Accompanied by the physician Willem Quackelbeen, Busbecq set off for Turkey on 3 November 1554. ‘Having delayed at Adrianople one day’, he wrote in a letter describing his journey, ‘we were going on towards Constantinople, now near, for we were almost accomplishing the end of our journey, and as we were passing through the district an abundance of flowers was everywhere offered to us – Narcissus, Hyacinths, and those which the Turks call tulipam, much to our wonderment, because of the time of year, it being almost the middle of winter, so unfriendly to flowers. Greece abounds in Narcissus and Hyacinths remarkable for their fragrance. Scent in tulips is wanting or very slight; they are admired for the variety and beauty of their colours. The Turks cultivate flowers with extreme zeal, and though they are careful people, do not hesitate to pay a considerable sum for an exceptional flower.’

  So started the muddle over the tulip’s proper name. The Turks did not call tulips tulipam. They called them lale, the name coming with the flower from its Iranian heartland. Busbecq evidently confused his interpreter’s description of the flower, made in the shape of a turban (tulband in Turkish) with the flower itself. But his letter clearly shows that he was unfamiliar with tulips. He knew the narcissus and the hyacinth well enough, but he had to ask the name of the tulipam. As oddities, novelties, they were amongst the seeds and bulbs that he later sent back for Ferdinand I’s gardens in Vienna and Prague, but tulip bulbs also turned up in cargoes at other European harbours, including Venice.

  Busbecq’s role in introducing the name of the tulip to Europe rests on the date he wrote his four famous letters. Until recently, it was generally supposed that these Legationis Turcicae Epistolae Quator had been composed during or shortly after his seven years (1555–1562) in the Ottoman Empire. But new research suggests that they were in fact written and published twenty years later, between 1581 and 1589 when Busbecq was back in Europe.1 Perhaps the honours for the tulip’s introduction should belong not to this Fleming but to the intrepid French explorer, Pierre Belon.

  Belon (1517–1564) started his garden at Touvoie near Le Mans in 1540 and, helped by his patron, René du Bellay, Bishop of Le Mans, made an important collection of foreign trees and shrubs, which included cedar of Lebanon and the first tobacco plants that France had ever seen. His aim was to increase the range of plants available to French gardeners and, to that end, he went in 1546 to
the Levant where he spent the next three years travelling and collecting. He described his adventures in an important book, Les Observations de Plusieurs Singularités, published in Paris in 1553, the year before Busbecq began his journey to Constantinople. It was a huge success, with three reprints in Paris and another, two years later, in Antwerp. In the third part of his Observations he writes: ‘Il n’y a gents qui se délectent de porter de belles fleurettes, ne qui les prisent plus que font les Turcs: car quand ils trouvent quelque belle girofflée, ou autre élégante fleurette, encore qu’elle soit sans odeur, néantmoins elle ne perdra point son pris. Nous aymons les bouquets de plusieurs fleurs et petites herbettes odoriférentes meslées ensemble: mais les Turcs ne se soucient que de la vue, and ne veulent porter qu’une fleur à la fois: et encore qu’ils en peussent avoir de plusieurs sortes, toutes fois suivant le common usage, ils en portent plusieurs seule à seule dedans le reply de leurs turbans. Les artisans ont communément plusieurs fleurs de diverses couleurs devant eux, dedans quelque vaisseau plein d’eau, pour les tenir frâichement en leur beauté.’

  He goes on to describe flowers – ‘Lils rouges’ – which are without doubt tulips, so common, he says that ‘il n’y a celuy qui n’en ait des plantes en son jardin. Tels Lils rouges sont différents à ceux que nous avons par deça, desquels la fleur ressemble aux lils blancs: mais la feuille des Lils Turquois est faite comme de la canne nommée Elégia, et sa racine comme celle du chiendent, sinon qu’elle est beaucoup plus grosse. Parquoy plusieurs estrangers qui viennent à Constantinople sur navires de divers pays apportent les racines des plantes qui sont belles fleurs, et ainsi les vont vendant par les marchés, et de toutes choses qu’ils apportent sont argent’.2

  Like Busbecq, Belon notes the Turkish passion for flowers, celebrated in painted miniatures, embroidery, poetry and ceramics. He remarks that the lack of scent in these ‘Lils rouges’ (red tulips are rarely scented) did not make them less precious in the eyes of the Turks. He compared the European taste for mixed posies of flowers with the Turks’ manner of displaying just one bloom on its own, either in ‘quelque vaisseau plein d’eau’, the laledans of pottery or metal designed especially to show off single specimens of tulips, or in the folds of their turbans. Surely this is how the tulipam muddle began? Busbecq pointed to an unfamiliar flower worn in a Turkish turban, wanting to know its name. His translator, thinking he meant the turban itself, gave him the name for that, rather than for the flower that was being worn in it.

  The ‘Lils rouges’ cannot have been true lilies, for few are native to Turkey and none of them are red. In Turkey, these red flowers were so common, wrote Belon, that they appeared in everyone’s gardens. Although widespread, they were evidently as unfamiliar to him as they were to Busbecq, but Belon attempts to relate them to other flowers known in Europe (‘la canne’, ‘la chiendent’), in order to conjure them up more plainly to his readers. He also makes it clear that merchants coming by sea into Constantinople had already built up an export trade in Turkish bulbs. In 1562, some of those bulbs came into the port of Antwerp in northern Belgium where, as Clusius later wrote, a merchant was sent tulips along with bales of cloth from Constantinople. He thought they were onions, had them roasted over the embers of his fire and ate them with oil and vinegar. ‘Others he dug into his garden amongst the cabbages and other vegetables where, by neglect, they all perished in a short time, except for a few which George Rye, a merchant of Mechlin, keen about garden matters, gathered up, and to his wise diligence and industry we give the credit that it has afterwards been permitted to us to see the flowers which bring so much pleasure to our eyes by their charming variety.’ Like the Antwerp merchant, Clusius experimented with eating tulip bulbs and asked a Frankfurt apothecary, J Muler, to preserve some in sugar, as orchid roots sometimes were. He ate them as sweetmeats and pronounced them far superior to orchids.

  Carolus Clusius, or Charles de L’Ecluse, plays a seminal part in the early history of the tulip in Europe. He was particularly interested in bulbs and was responsible for distributing many new ones: crown imperials, irises, hyacinths, anemones, ranunculus, narcissi and lilies as well as tulips. Single-handed, he transformed the appearance of gardens in northern Europe, introducing many of the most precious delights of Renaissance flower beds. Perhaps more than any other figure, he embodies the cosmopolitan ethos of the time. Born in Arras, France, he was educated at Louvain until, at the age of twenty-three, he went to study under the great Protestant reformer, Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg. From there he moved on to Montpellier where he became a student of Guillaume Rondelet’s. After that he began a two-year journey, plant-collecting in Spain and Portugal. In 1573 at the invitation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, he went to Vienna to establish and direct the Imperial Botanic Garden. By the time the Emperor died three years later, Clusius had already published his pioneering work on the flora of the Iberian Peninsula, Rariorum aliquot Stirpium… The book included an important Appendix (starting at page 509) which had nothing to do with Spain, but contained a detailed list of the plants that Clusius had up to that time received “ex Thracia”: anemones, ranunculus and, above all, tulips. He was also in touch with Busbecq who had sent him seeds and bulbs (including tulips) for the Vienna garden, although Busbecq was only part of a flourishing Turkish export trade which during the reigns of Sultan Selim I and Sultan Murad I, maintained strong links between Turkey, Austria and the Netherlands.

  Clusius also corresponded with gardeners in England and visited the country twice, meeting Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake. Between 1587 and 1593 he was based in Frankfurt and advised Wilhelm IV, Landgrave of Hesse, on the botanical garden that Camerarius had founded there. But another correspondent, Joest Lips (1547–1606) eventually persuaded Clusius to leave Frankfurt and come to Leiden to a new job as Horti Praefectus at Leiden’s new university. He arrived on 19 October 1593 with a commission to lay out a physic garden, bringing the bulbs he had been growing in his garden at Frankfurt.

  Clusius was already sixty-seven when he arrived in Leiden, but continued to maintain a vast network of international contacts (he was fluent in seven languages). With his letters, his bulbs too spread out over Europe. Three years after he had settled at Leiden, a young Norwegian physician, Henrik Hoyer, arrived there to take a degree in medicine. When Hoyer returned to Bergen, he had some of Clusius’s bulbs in his luggage, and more were sent to him the following year. The pivotal role that Clusius played in spreading the tulip through Europe is told by his friend, Joachim Camerarius (1534–1598) in his Hortus Medicus of 1588. The two had first met as students at Wittenburg and their friendship is documented in 195 letters which Clusius wrote to Camerarius over the next thirty years.3 In the course of the correspondence, Clusius compliments Camerarius on the number and variety of tulips in his garden (many of which he had provided). He sends Camerarius seeds of a plant newly arrived from Turkey, mentioning a Turkish pasha in Budapest who often provided him with specimens. He lists various bulbs from Constantinople which he sent to Camerarius (often in the hands of itinerant booksellers) with detailed instructions on the best way to look after them.

  By the time Clusius went to Leiden, tulips were already being grown in the city by an enthusiast called John Hogeland. He had got his bulbs from George Rye, the Mechlin merchant who had rescued them from the garden of the unappreciative Antwerp trader. Clusius, though, was so possessive of his rarities ‘that no one could procure them, not even for money. Plans were made by which the best and most of his plants were stolen by night whereupon he lost courage and the desire to continue their cultivation; but those who had stolen the tulips lost no time in increasing them by sowing the seeds, and by this means the seventeen provinces were well stocked’.4 Tulips were in Amsterdam too, before Clusius arrived at Leiden. Nicolas Wassenaer wrote that the first tulip seen in Amsterdam grew in the garden of the apothecary Wallich Zieuwertsz, ‘to the great astonishment of all the florists’.5

  Although Clusius was so closely involved in br
inging the tulip into Europe, he was not the first to describe it in print. That honour belongs to the Zürich physician and botanist Conrad Gesner (1516–1565), who saw the first tulips to be noted in Europe flowering in April 1559 ‘in horto magnifici viri Johannis Heinrichi Herwarti’. He described its red petals and its scent and said that it had ‘sprung from a seed which had come from Constantinople or as others say from Cappadocia. It was flowering with a single beautifully red flower, large, like a red lily formed of eight petals of which four were outside and the rest within. It had a very sweet, soft and subtle scent which soon disappeared’.6

  Councillor Herwart’s garden was at Augsburg in Bavaria, a centre for silversmithing, a rich town and an important one. It is not a surprising place for Gesner to have seen his first tulips, but where had Councillor Herwart got his tulips from? Did they come from Antwerp or Vienna? Were they given to him by Busbecq or Belon? And was Gesner correct in describing the flower as having eight petals instead of six? There may, indeed, have been eight of them, as tulips occasionally produce sports, not true doubles, with seven or eight petals. One of the tulips illustrated in the 1565 Codex made by Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) has eight petals, but the illustration accompanying Gesner’s description of the Augsburg tulip shows it with six. And he describes it as being scented, whereas both Busbecq and Belon had noted the tulip’s lack of scent – scent being then an even more desirable characteristic in a flower than it is now.

  Gesner called this tulip T. turcarum. It may possibly have been a Turkish species, such as T. armena, widespread in the country. But by the time the first tulip bulbs started leaving Constantinople for Europe, huge parts of the Balkans and the country round the Black Sea had been conquered by the Turks. The ‘Turkey’ implied in the T. turcarum tag embraced a far vaster area than the country as it is now defined. T. turcarum could be a Russian species as easily as a Turkish one. Constantinople traders were known to offer two kinds of tulip: the ‘Cafe Lale’ and the ‘Cavala Lale’.7 Clusius used the same terms in his Rariorum plantarum Historia (1601), but by then it was too late for lale, the correct Turkish word for tulip, to replace the mistaken ‘tulipam’. The ‘Cafe Lale’ was an early-flowering tulip from Kefe (now Feodosyia in the Ukraine). The late-flowering ‘Cavala Lale’ probably came from Kavalla in the Macedonian region of the Balkans and may have been the variable T. schrenkii, native to the steppes and low mountains of Crimea and Transcaucasia.