Tulipomania - Mike Dash [23]
It was a good time to come to Leiden. Suddenly money was available to improve the facilities, hire more staff, buy more books, and offer grants to more young scholars. Over the next half century, the number of students in residence rose fivefold, from one hundred to five hundred, and the library built up one of the most comprehensive collections available anywhere. The university became particularly famous for its school of anatomy, where dissections of human cadavers were carried out. The mysteries of the body were only just beginning to be explored in this period, and anatomy was one of the most fashionable subjects of the day. At Leiden public interest was so great that dissections were frequently carried out before spectators, and visitors were also encouraged to visit the university’s anatomical museum, where over the years wonders such as an Egyptian mummy, stuffed tigers, a giant crocodile, and an immense whale’s penis were put on display. In the fifty years that followed Clusius’s arrival, this sort of excellence resulted in Leiden’s becoming possibly the best—and certainly the most popular—university in Europe. More students were enrolled there than either at Cambridge or at Leipzig, the next two largest establishments in the Protestant North, and Leiden’s student body was also more cosmopolitan and international than any of its rivals’.”
Clusius benefited as much as anyone from this sudden influx of confidence and funds. His principal task was to establish a hortus academicus at Leiden, in imitation of the one set up at the University of Pisa in 1543, which had been the first botanical garden in Europe. Since then similar gardens had been established at the universities of Padua, Bologna, Florence, and Leipzig, but there was still none in the United Provinces. Leiden’s hortus was thus an important symbol not just for the university but for all the Dutch Republic, and the garden was amply funded and laid out on a generous scale. When it was complete, it covered nearly a third of an acre and was divided into four main sections, each of which contained some 350 individual beds.
With the memory of his frustrating years in Vienna still fresh, Clusius was particularly pleased with the rapidity with which his hortus was laid out and planted. He himself was by now too infirm to do any of the physical labor involved, but the university provided him with a very able assistant in the shape of an apothecary from Delft named Dirck Cluyt. Under Cluyt’s direction work on the garden was complete by September 1594, less than a year after Clusius’s arrival at Leiden. It made a pleasant contrast to the dilatoriness of Maximilian and the imperial court.
The speed with which the hortus took shape helped to distract Clusius from some of the difficulties of living in Holland. He had to endure the hard winter of 1593–94, during which Leiden’s mice made short work of 150 of the precious bulbs in his personal collection, and then the miserable weather that the Low Countries experienced in 1594—a year of seemingly constant wind and rain that damaged many of the plants in the botanical garden and did nothing to improve the health of a man who was now sixty-eight years old.
Although he was contractually obliged to look after the garden and to visit it each afternoon in summer to answer the questions of students and distinguished visitors, Clusius’s characteristic intractability led him to refuse his new employer’s request that he deliver lectures on botany as well. Instead, he devoted much of his time to beekeeping and to pottering about the private garden he had insisted that the curators provide