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of unparalleled magnitude, at least by the standards of the United Provinces. If we accept that van Aitzema was right and that perhaps twenty million guilders’ worth of bulbs were bought and sold in Haarlem and Amsterdam together between 1633 and 1637, then even supposing that the trade in each of the other ten known centers of the mania amounted to no more than a tenth of that in those two great centers, the nominal turnover of the Dutch bulb trade as a whole in those four years can hardly have been less than forty million guilders. And if the florists of Holland really did trade as compulsively and as irresponsibly as the critics of the bulb trade maintained, and if the number of people involved was not thousands but tens of thousands, then the total could conceivably have been twice that figure or even more. By way of comparison, the total sum deposited by rich merchants with accounts at the Bank of Amsterdam in the years 1636–37 was probably only about 3.5 million guilders, and the all-powerful Dutch East India Company—which was the greatest trading organization in the whole of Europe at the time—was capitalized at 6.5 million guilders.

It was left to a contemporary pamphleteer, writing around December 1636, to give perhaps the most vivid impression of what the prices paid for tulip bulbs actually meant to the Dutchmen of the time. A flower worth three thousand guilders, the writer pointed out, could have been exchanged for a gigantic quantity of goods:

Eight fat pigs 240 guilders

Four fat oxen 480 guilders

Twelve fat sheep 120 guilders

Twenty-four tons of wheat 448 guilders

Forty-eight tons of rye 558 guilders

Two hogsheads of wine 70 guilders

Four barrels of eight-guilder beer 32 guilders

Two tons of butter 192 guilders

A thousand pounds of cheese 120 guilders

A silver drinking cup 60 guilders

A pack of clothes 80 guilders

A bed with mattress and bedding 100 guilders

A ship 500 guilders

3,000 guilders

From this perspective, it is evident that the tulip trade really was not merely healthy but positively booming in Holland in the autumn and winter of 1636–37. Yet even as the mania reached its peak, there were disturbing indications that all was not well in the tavern colleges.

One warning sign was the florists’ restless search for novelty. Although most seem to have agreed that one or two varieties, such as Viceroy, stood apart from their many rivals, there was very little consensus as to which tulips deserved to stand in the second rank—a problem that was exacerbated by the considerable similarities that existed between many of the more popular flowers. One college or town favored one variety, others another; furthermore, fashions and opinions changed, and new tulips continued to come onto the market to challenge the established favorites. Because of this the trade in bulbs was not just unstable but inherently illogical. No market can flourish for long if it does not possess elements of stability and predictability. The Dutch tulip trade had neither.

A notorious example of the florists’ restless desire to find something new and different was the quest for the black tulip, a flower of such fabled rarity that it would certainly have been worth considerably more than even Semper Augustus if only an exemplar could have been found. The French novelist Alexander Dumas even wrote a novel titled The Black Tulip, in which a young physician named Cornelius van Baerle seeks to win the huge prize offered to the first man to grow such a flower. Dumas was most likely inspired by an old Dutch account of an incident that allegedly took place at the height of the mania. According to one version of this story, a syndicate of Haarlem florists heard that a cobbler living at The Hague had succeeded in breeding a black tulip and determined to purchase the solitary flower that he possessed. They visited him in his shop, and after a certain amount of bargaining, the cobbler agreed to accept fifteen hundred guilders for his tulip and handed over the bulb. To his complete astonishment the Haarlem florists immediately hurled