Tulipomania - Mike Dash [32]
At about the same time the Dutch broke what had previously been a Spanish monopoly by opening trading links with the East Indies. To Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Indies were a source of almost unimaginable wealth. They overflowed with luxury goods, from spices to Chinese porcelain, which could not be obtained elsewhere. These goods could be purchased relatively cheaply in the East and were hardly bulky, yet they could earn a fortune at home. A single cargo of spices was worth many times more than the same tonnage of timber, grain, or salt—the commodities on which the Netherlands had long depended—and could be turned into spectacular profits if brought safely home.
Dutch merchants were quick to recognize the potential of trading with the East. By 1610 they had established outposts on a number of Indonesian islands, and despite the constant threat of Spanish attack, fleets laden with peppercorns and nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, silks, and dyestuffs were sailing regularly to the United Provinces. The merchants of Amsterdam called these new commodities the “rich trades,” and with good reason.
The surplus of wealth that now surged into the republic—a single voyage to the Indies could yield profits of up to 400 percent—touched the lives of thousands of Netherlanders. By 1631 fully five-sixths of Amsterdam’s richest three hundred citizens had a stake in the rich trades, and both the Dutch merchant class and the regents who backed them and invested in their enterprises were enormously better off, on average, than their contemporaries in England, France, or the empire.
By the standards of the time the most successful Dutch merchants were astonishingly wealthy. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a trader of the middle rank might have thought himself comfortable if his income reached 1,500 guilders a year and well off if it topped 3,000, while those below him in the social scale—clerks, shop owners, and others with some claim to the title “gentleman”—earned on average a third or a fifth as much: perhaps 500 to 1,000 guilders a year. But for men such as van de Heuvel, who had substantial stakes in the rich trades, incomes of 10,000, 20,000, even 30,000 guilders a year were possible. The richest of the lot was Jacob Poppen, the son of a German immigrant who had built his fortune trading with the Indies and with Russia. He was worth 500,000 guilders when he died in 1624. Adriaen Pauw, a regent who became burgomaster of Amsterdam and eventually one of the most prominent politicians of the United Provinces, amassed a fortune of 350,000 guilders from his successful investments, and by the 1630s another ten Amsterdammers possessed 300,000 guilders or more.
Today men of comparable wealth dress in the finest clothes and travel by private jet and limousine. But even at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, visitors to the republic found it hard to distinguish the wealthiest members of the regent and merchant classes from their countrymen. Even the richest of them dressed in clothes of the most severely unadorned variety, following the national fashion for large, wide-brimmed hats, tight trousers, and a heavy jacket. Underneath they sported a doublet, resembling a waistcoat—all in black—with substantial white ruffs at the throat and wrist,