Tulipomania - Mike Dash [72]
The total value of the flowers bought and sold by such a large number of people must have been staggering. Some authorities suggest that at the height of the mania bulbs were changing hands as often as ten times in a single day—the price rising, presumably, with every deal. The rarest bulbs, on the evidence of the Alkmaar auction, could realize four or five thousand guilders apiece, and even if we accept that the prices realized at the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen were exceptional, it certainly does not appear to have been unusual for superbly fine tulips to have changed hands for a couple of thousand guilders apiece; lesser varieties for somewhere between the 350 guilders per thousand aces recorded for the red and white Centen and the 750 paid for the popular Bizarden Gheel en Root van Leyde; and mere pound goods for somewhere between 250 and 1,500 guilders a pound. Thus even if we make the conservative estimate that in one of the largest centers of the tulip trade—a Haarlem or an Amsterdam—a total of, say, four hundred florists met in colleges to deal in bulbs just four times a week, the amount of money that changed hands in that one city during the three or four months that the mania was at its peak could have run well into seven figures. If, for example, the typical florist traded just one pound of tulips a day at an average price of 250 guilders per pound, the volume of trade in a single large town would have approached seven million guilders between the beginning of October 1636 and the end of January 1637 alone.
Some dealers appear to have been at least this active. While the mania was at its peak in December and January, a single tulip trader, Pieter van Rosven of Haarlem, bought bulbs worth 2,913 guilders in the space of only six weeks. He began with the purchase of 306 aces of Petters, a Rosen variety owned by Wouter Tulckens of Alkmaar, and continued with the acquisition of a Violetten Jan Gerritsz. of 288 aces, a Tourlons of 275 aces, and half a pound of Oudenaers from the same dealer. Van Rosven also paid ninety guilders for a Legrant of 122 aces. (Tulckens appears to have acted as a sort of broker for several growers. One of the bulbs he sold to van Rosven was planted in the garden of a Cornelis Verwer, another in a plot kept by the Calvinist minister Henricus Swalmius on the Bollslaen [“Bulb lane”] that lay to the south of Haarlem, and a third in the garden of the painter Frans Grebber.) And these are merely the purchases that found their way into the legal archives of Alkmaar as a result of an action van Rosven brought against Tulckens for the nondelivery of his bulbs; he may well have bought and sold many other tulips in the same brief period.
Van Rosven’s example was certainly not unique. In the Samenspraecken, Gaergoedt relates that in the colleges he attended, so many bulbs were bought and sold at high prices that drietjens—the maximum three-guilder sums paid as wine money when a deal exceeded 120 guilders—“fell like drops of water from thatched roofs when it has rained.” “I have often been to inns and eaten baked and fried fish and meat,” the florist adds. “Yes, chickens and rabbits, and even fine pastry, and drunk wine and beer from morning to three or four o’clock at night, and then arrived home with more money than when I left.” When the chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema guessed that ten million guilders’ worth of tulips changed hands in a single Dutch town in the course of the mania as a whole, then, he may actually have been underestimating the true extent of the trading frenzy.
What, then, did the mania amount to? It is hard to resist the conclusion that in crude financial terms it really was an event