Tulipomania - Mike Dash [7]
Footman, pour me some wine, for one day the tulip garden will be destroyed;
Autumn will come soon, and the spring season will be no more.
But realist though he may have been, the sultan had no intention of relinquishing the Ottomans’ hold on their new capital just yet. On the contrary, the once-great city began to recover under his rule. New buildings appeared on the skyline; four huge minarets rose alongside St. Sophia, which became the Hagia Sofia mosque; the land walls were repaired, and new palaces were begun. And in places that had been abandoned to ruin under Byzantine rule, the Turks built a myriad of gardens.
Blessed though it was by one of the most perfect physical situations in the world, Istanbul craved such adornment. It had been built at the very edge of Europe, with water on three sides, and it contained seven great hills; even as the Byzantines had left it, the city offered gorgeous views at every turn. Taking full advantage of its emptiness, the Turks planted trees and flowers so that their natural beauty complemented and offset the city’s buildings, old and new. Within a few decades of the conquest, the Ottoman sultan alone could enjoy more than sixty private gardens scattered along the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. Dozens more kitchen plots supplied fruit and vegetables to his palaces. Other Ottomans built sunken gardens that offered shade in the heat of the summer, terraced gardens full of vines, pleasure gardens in public places, and private “paradise gardens,” enclosed within the walls of their own homes and filled with flowers.
This profusion of greenery distinguished Istanbul, in the eyes of visitors, from any European city. And the Turks planted their gardens in ways that startled Western horticulturists. They hated the corseted regimentation of the formal gardens that were in fashion at the courts of England, France, and Italy. Ottoman gardens were impressionist spectaculars in comparison, planted not to impress the eye with geometrical precision but to seduce it with visions of lushness and plenty. An Ottoman garden was designed as a place where its owner might seek refuge from the cares of the world and a retreat from the heat of the day. Within its walls the Turks grew soft fruits and created fountains and melodic streams. It was intended as a little piece of heaven here on earth.
Europeans who traveled to Istanbul during the high days of the Ottoman Empire that Mehmed and his successors now built were generally surprised not merely by the city’s size and opulence but by its masters’ manners and good taste. This was a city of culture and coffeehouses that tolerated the religious diversity of its inhabitants in a manner inconceivable in Europe. Yet the Western notion of the Turk had to do only with cruelty and lust—the savagery of the Ottoman armies was a popular theme, as was curiosity about the hidden pleasures of the sultan’s harem—and certainly the Turks themselves were as capable of cruelty as they were appreciative of beauty.
Sultan Mehmed himself was a man of just such contradictions. One of his earliest acts was to order the construction of a wonderful new palace at the eastern end of the city, poetically named the Abode of Bliss by its creator but better known today as the Topkapi. It was specifically intended to outdo in its magnificence anything built during the Byzantine millennium, combining—in the words of one chronicler—“variety, beauty and magnificence,” and in which “on every side, inside and out, shone and glittered gold and silver, ornaments of precious stones, and pearls in abundance.” Mehmed, a passionate gardener who collected rare plants from every part of his domain and could often be seen laboring in person among his flowers, saw to it that the Abode of Bliss was surrounded by “very vast and very beautiful gardens, in which grew every imaginable kind of plants and fruits; where water, fresh, clear and drinkable, flowed in abundance on every side, and flocks of birds, both of the edible and of the singing