Tulipomania - Mike Dash [11]
Most unusually of all, the bostancis doubled as the sultan’s executioners. It was the royal gardeners, for example, who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosporus. The tread of an approaching group of red-skullcapped bostancis, wearing their traditional uniform of white muslin breeches and cut-off shirts exposing muscular chests and arms, heralded death by ritual strangulation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years.
When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the sultan’s head gardener, the bostanci-basha, in person. The bostanci-basha also held the post of chief executioner, and he was required to play a leading role in what was surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history. This was the race held between a condemned notable—a deposed vizier or a chief eunuch—and the man commanded to kill him. As soon as sentence of death had been passed, it was the practice to allow the condemned man to run as fast as he was able the half mile or so through the gardens and down to the Fish-House Gate, which stood at the extreme southern end of the Topkapi and was the appointed place of execution. If he reached the Fish-House before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. If, on the other hand, the condemned man found the bostanci-basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.*
One of the bostancis’ less fearsome duties was the provision of cut flowers to decorate the living quarters of the palace. In general the Turks rarely displayed plants in this way, preferring to leave them in the gardens in which they were grown. But the custom flourished within the walls of the Abode of Bliss. Paintings show the sultans’ favored rooms brightened by a profusion of flowers, displayed singly or, more rarely, in small groups. Tulips, of course, featured heavily in such arrangements. They were placed in fine glass vases that were often embellished with filigree using a technique known as cesm-i bulbul—“the nightingale’s eye”—and scattered about a series of low tables.
It was thus, in all likelihood, that Westerners first encountered the cultivated tulips of Istanbul. They came as ambassadors and envoys first, responding to the terrifying successes that Süleyman’s armies enjoyed as they captured Rhodes, the apparently impregnable stronghold of the crusading Knights of St. John, in 1522, then crushed the armies of the king of Hungary in 1526 and besieged Vienna three years later. This string of almost unbroken victories elevated the Ottomans to the rank of the greatest power in the Mediterranean and forced the Christian monarchs of Europe to negotiate with them. Later, mercenaries and merchants also made their way to Istanbul to enlist with the Turks or seek permission to trade with them. It was one of the minor consequences of the rise of Ottoman power that by the time of Süleyman’s death in 1566, many hundreds of travelers such as these had journeyed to Turkey, a country that had for several centuries been all but closed to the West.
The Westerners found much to remark on. Everything about the Ottoman Empire seemed exotic, from the rowdy vigor of the bazaar to the sensuous grace of Istanbul’s mosques. The Turks’ passion for flowers, and the remarkable skill with which they tended them, were among the novelties that drew comment; even the cultivation of plants purely for their beauty seemed strange to visitors accustomed to think of them as things to eat or pound into primitive herbal medicines.
The slender and irresistible tulips displayed in every fashionable garden could not fail to attract attention. Whether the travelers who found themselves gazing on the splendid Ottoman gardens were ambassadors or army officers, whether they loved flowers or were indifferent to them, they could hardly fail to see that the Turks favored this one bloom above all others.
By the middle