Tulipomania - Mike Dash [1]
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