Tulipomania - Mike Dash [0]
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