Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [162]
The arrangement and deployment of these symbols—weapons and costume—began to alter subtly in the first decades of the eighteenth century, in part, remarkably, as a result of a shared interest in flowers. Flowers had been highly visible in the Ottoman capital from the mid–sixteenth century. By the 1630s the famous Turkish traveler Evliya Chelebi was estimating that there were some 300 florists in Constantinople. The open meadows along the Golden Horn were filled with tulips and lilacs in the spring and the lilacs’ scent was intoxicating. The introduction of the tulip to Europe from Turkey in the mid–sixteenth century, first to Augsburg in 1559, then to Antwerp and the Habsburg domains in the Netherlands between 1562 and 1583, revived a passion for flowers and gardens in the West. Mass production of blooms developed into an industry in the Netherlands, and tulip bulbs were exported across Europe. The Margrave of the small state of Baden Durlach had more than 4,000 tulips in his garden by 1636, all carefully listed in his garden registers.23
This “Tulipomania” that gripped Europe during the seventeenth century eventually subsided (after making many fortunes and breaking many more). But it had an aftershock in the Ottoman domains early in the eighteenth century. Sultan Ahmed III had an excessive passion for tulips, and his reign, between 1703 and 1730, became known as lale devri, “the Tulip Era.” The blooms that decorated his palaces were not the wild native Turkish or Persian varieties but the products of European horticultural ingenuity. These exotic (and often diseased) specimens, as gaudy as parrots, marbled in different colors, were called “bizarres” or “fantasticks.” They were very different from the simple slender flowers long revered by the Turks. Yet they were ravishing and infinitely seductive to the Ottoman taste. The French ambassador reported in 1726 that there were
500,0 bulbs in the Grand Vizier’s garden. When the Tulips are in flower and the Grand Vizier wants to show them off to the Grand Seigneur [the sultan] they take care to fill any spaces with Tulips picked from other gardens and put in bottles. At every fourth flower, candles are set into the ground at the same height as the Tulips and the pathways are decorated with cages of all sorts of birds. All the trellis work is bordered with flowers in vases, and lit by a vast number of crystal lamps of various colours.24
This was not quite the old image of cruel barbarity.
It is impossible to be precise about the date but certainly beginning in the Tulip Era the symbolic connotations of “the Turk” began to gather new and extended meanings. The similarity of the tulip’s appearance to a turban was first noted by the Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople Ghislain de Busbecq in the 1550s. He was passionate about flowers and, based upon this visual connection, mistakenly gave the tulips their name—a corruption of the Turkish for turban, tulban. But turbans, once the symbol of Eastern violence, now acquired an additional, softer connection. When the first Ottoman embassies came to France in the 1720s, turbans, heavy silks, furs, and flowing robes suddenly became immensely desirable. The fashion for being painted in Oriental dress, à la Turque, spread throughout Europe’s aristocracies. For the West, flowers, silks, and flowing robes suggested an indolent life rather than the rigors of the field of battle (although the evidence of earlier images showed that turbans and kaftans had done nothing to hinder the Ottomans in war).
À la Turque was also a fashion suggestive of the boudoir, and highly eroticized images of the Ottomans began to proliferate. Where once the limitless and boundless energy of the sultan and his pashas had evoked blood and gore, now images of them suggested ravening lust, raw sex,