Tulipomania - Mike Dash [3]
When exactly the cultivation of these wildflowers began is a mystery, but we do know that by about the year 1050 tulips were already venerated in Persia. Tulips grew in the gardens of the old Persian capital, Isfahan, and also in Baghdad. They appear in one of Omar Khayyam’s best-known verses as a metaphor for perfect female beauty, and later poets often used the flower as a symbol of perfection. One, Musharrifu’d-din Sa’di, described his ideal garden in about 1250—a place where “the murmur of a cool stream, bird song, ripe fruit in plenty, bright multi-colored tulips and fragrant roses” combined to create an earthly paradise. Another, Hafiz, likened the sheen of the flower’s petals to the bloom on his mistress’s cheek.
Indeed, the tulip’s delicacy and typically bloodred coloring made it a flower of great symbolic importance for the people of Persia. It was synonymous with perfection and eternity, and several myths were told to explain its outstanding beauty. One such legend told how a prince named Farhad was deeply in love with a maiden, Shirin. One day word reached him (falsely, as it turned out) that his beloved had been killed. Gripped by unbearable grief, he hacked his own body open with an ax. Blood dripping from his terrible wounds fell onto the barren soil, and from each drop a scarlet flower sprang, a symbol of his perfect love. Hundreds of years after this story was first written down, wild red tulips remained a favorite Persian token of undying love. “When a young man presents one to his mistress,” the seventeenth-century traveler John Chardin recounted, “he gives her to understand, by the general colour of the flower, that he is on fire with her beauty; and by the black base of it, that his heart is burnt to a coal.”
Among the largely illiterate Turkish peoples of the steppe, no records exist that trace the flower’s history further back than Omar Khayyam’s day, and it is not until the end of the eleventh century, when a tribe of Turks called the Seljuks came west and conquered Anatolia from the Byzantines, that the tulip first appears in nomad art. The Seljuks either brought the flower with them as they began to explore the land, or they discovered colonies of wildflowers where they settled. The earliest known drawings of tulips are found on tiles excavated from the thirteenth-century palace that one of their sultans, Alaeddin Kaikubad I, built on Lake Beysehir in eastern Anatolia.
By this time the Turks had lost some of their nomadic instincts. The Seljuks settled in the cities that they captured, and they called the lands they had taken “Rum” because they saw themselves as the inheritors of Rome. They certainly developed a Roman taste for empire, and even after the Sultanate of Rum was annihilated at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Seljuk princelings began to carve new kingdoms from its ruins.
One of these petty rulers was a certain Osman of Sogut, and his dynasty (known as “Othman” to the Arabs and as “Ottoman” in Europe) proved to be the most glorious in all the long history of the Turks. It was a house of conquerors and despots that enslaved great swaths of Asia and swept through Europe to the gates of Vienna—a line whose rulers not only held the power of life and death over their subjects, but frequently used it. Yet many of the Ottoman rulers who succeeded, one after the other, to the Turkish throne were also cultivated men whose delicate tastes and passion for beauty made them knowledgeable horticulturists in their own right. Eventually the Ottomans elevated the tulip to a position of eminence it had never enjoyed before.
By 1345 the House of Osman had crossed the Dardanelles, and Turkish horsemen had arrived in Europe. They came at the request of the emperor of Byzantium, who wanted their help to secure his throne against a usurper. Instead, the Ottomans took Greece and Thrace for themselves, and then most of the Balkans as well, reducing the emperor to a puppet whose writ seldom ran more than a few miles beyond the walls of his