Tulipomania - Mike Dash [5]
*The reason was that it was thought insulting for man to attempt to capture—imperfectly—one of the perfect creations of God.
CHAPTER 3
Within the Abode of Bliss
Two hundred and fifty years before Dutchmen bid for bulbs in the taverns of Holland, the tulip came to the plain of Kosovo in the southern marches of Serbia. There, at a place called the Field of Blackbirds, a Christian army of fifteen thousand men led by a man named Prince Lazar stood and faced twice that number of Ottoman Turks under the command of their sultan, Murad I. The great battle that Murad and Lazar fought on St. Vitus’s Day in 1389 helped to seal the fate of the Balkans for the next five hundred years.
The day did not begin well for the Serbs. The charge of the best and bravest Christian knights that opened the battle was beaten back, and Lazar himself was captured in the confusion. On the Turkish side, meanwhile, Murad directed his men with the skill to be expected of a sultan who had spent most of his thirty-year reign on campaign. His position at the center of the Ottoman army seemed secure; he was screened by three lines of camels, chained one to another to present an impenetrable obstacle to the Christian cavalry, and intended, like Hannibal’s elephants, to terrify an enemy that had never encountered such exotic creatures before. And yet somehow one Christian soldier did reach the sultan. According to legend, this man was a Serb whom Lazar had publicly accused of treachery on the previous evening, and who now proved his loyalty by impaling Murad with such force that the dagger he thrust into the Turk’s chest sprouted from his back.
The sultan fell, mortally wounded, but he remained alive just long enough to summon the captive Prince Lazar and order his immediate execution. Thus the Christian and the Turk joined the thousands of their men who lay dead upon the Field of Blackbirds. And a Muslim chronicler, recalling a battleground thickly covered with the fallen and strewn with severed heads still wearing brightly dyed turbans, wrote that he was put in mind of a gigantic bed of tulips, their gaudy red and yellow petals echoing the brilliant colors of the Turkish headdresses.
In fact, it is quite possible that tulips really were present at the battle of Kosovo—not merely in the poetic phrase of the chronicler but in the more physical form of talismans. In the course of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans seem to have adopted this most holy of flowers to guard themselves against misfortune. They used it in a slightly peculiar way. Partly for protection and partly because the religious proscription against images of living things still had force, the tulip was embroidered not onto banners and surcoats but onto underclothes. The Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul still displays a simple cotton shirt—made to be worn beneath armor and richly decorated with verses from the Koran on the front and embroidered tulips on the back—that was taken from the tomb of one of the Ottoman generals who fought at Kosovo. This was Sultan Murad’s second son, Bayezid, a young prince who had scarcely reached manhood when he led a division of the Turkish army against Prince Lazar. Bayezid is the first man in history who can be personally identified with the tulip.
He is supposed to have donned the shirt as a protection against evil but also as a good luck charm. If that is so, the flower served him well at Kosovo. Acclaimed as sultan by his men, Murad’s younger son succeeded his father on the Field of Blackbirds while the battle against the Serbs still raged. He began his reign as he would go on—quite ruthlessly—by ordering the execution of Yakub, his elder brother and chief rival for the throne. This unfortunate prince was quickly garrotted with a silken bowstring in compliance with Bayezid’s decree. The new sultan thus secured the Ottoman succession for himself