Tulipomania - Mike Dash [30]
The first people to follow the fashion of the French court were the French themselves. Shortly after the tulip became popular in Paris, a miniature mania for the flower took place in northern France. There are, unfortunately, no contemporary sources of information about this episode, which by all accounts foreshadowed what was later to occur in the United Provinces. If later reports are to be believed, however, the passion for tulips was such that in about 1608 a miller exchanged his mill for a single specimen of a variety called Mere Brune, and another enthusiast handed over a brewery valued at thirty thousand francs in return for one bulb of the hybrid Tulipe Brasserie. A third account of the same episode tells of a bride whose dowry consisted of one solitary bulb of a new Rosen tulip, which her father had bred and named, with due sense of occasion, Marriage de Ma Fille. (The groom of this tale is supposed to have been delighted by the magnificence of the gift.)
These stories may be apocryphal. It is, however, certain that the fashion for tulips soon spread through the rest of Europe. By 1620 the flower was nowhere more popular than in the United Provinces, where it quickly eclipsed rivals such as the lily and the carnation. Tulips began to be cultivated throughout the republic, where they were admired by an increasing number of knowledgeable connoisseurs and grown in a profusion of varieties from Rotterdam in the south of the country to Groningen in the north.
The initial impetus for the long-standing Dutch enthusiasm for tulips was provided by the flood of refugees and immigrants who poured across the borders of the United Provinces from the southern Netherlands at intervals throughout the Dutch Revolt. Tens of thousands of Protestants living in the Spanish lands fled north in order to keep their religion and escape intermittent bouts of persecution. In some instances the influx of immigrants more than doubled the size of Dutch towns; 28,000 refugees arrived in Leiden between 1581 and 1621, and the total population quadrupled from 12,000 to 45,000, while in Amsterdam, throughout the seventeenth century, the majority of men marrying within the city walls had not been born there. The immigrants were willing to work hard, and they often had capital to invest, substantially adding to the sum total of Dutch prosperity. The majority were capable artisans who could contribute useful skills—the foundation of the famous Amsterdam diamond trade was directly attributable to immigrants from Antwerp—but among their numbers were many of the wealthiest merchants of great towns such as Brussels and Antwerp. These men included a number of early enthusiasts for the tulip who brought their bulbs with them, introducing many new varieties to the United Provinces. By swelling the number of bulbs in cultivation, the refugees must also have made the flower significantly more widely available than it had once been.
But the tulip was not popular just among immigrants; many Dutchmen were also becoming passionate about the flower. In the United Provinces, unlike the rest of Europe, tulip connoisseurs were rarely aristocrats; the nobility of the northern Netherlands, which had controlled the country for hundreds of years, had been largely wiped out in the Spanish wars. They were, rather, members of the new ruling class of the republic—a group of rich and influential private citizens whom the Dutch called “regents.”
The regents of a Dutch city typically included particularly well-to-do second-or third-generation businessmen, some lawyers, and perhaps a physician. As a rule they were wealthy enough to live