Tulipomania - Mike Dash [8]
Later Ottoman rulers more than matched Mehmed the Conqueror both in cruelty and in their enthusiasm for exquisite palaces and gardens. The greatest of them all—Mehmed’s great-grandson Süleyman the Magnificent, who came to the throne in 1520 and stretched the Turkish empire from the gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea—was a byword for ruthlessness among those Christians unfortunate enough to encounter his armies. To Europeans he was the “Grand Turk,” the title by which subsequent sultans were also known to the West, and he was acclaimed, among his many other titles, “Possessor of Men’s Necks.” But Süleyman’s subjects revered him as “the Lawgiver,” and he was a pious man who—exceptionally for an Ottoman—had little use for the harem and lived a chaste life with his favorite wife.
By Süleyman’s day, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the tulip had established itself as the quintessential Turkish flower. It was still unknown in Europe, but its popularity among the sultan and his servants was such that—now that the old proscription on the portrayal of living things was being relaxed—it had become one of the favorite motifs of Ottoman artists and artisans, appearing with increasing frequency on flower vases and tiles. Tulips graced the sultan’s robes, and not merely his underclothes as they had done in Bayezid’s time: Süleyman’s imperial cream-colored brocade gown, which still survives, was embroidered with hundreds of blooms. The royal armor, worn on campaigns in Hungary and Persia, was embossed with a single glorious tulip, nine inches long, and the sultan’s helmet, a masterpiece of the armorer’s craft, was adorned with tulips shaped in gold and set with precious stones.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, tulips were becoming much more commonplace within the Ottoman Empire, and other Turks besides the sultan were making copious use of the flower’s image. They were embroidered onto the prayer rugs sewn by brides for their trousseaux and painted onto water bottles or woven into the velvet coverings that ornamented elaborate Turkish saddles. And just as gardeners planted tulip bulbs to help their souls ascend to paradise, so the women of the Turkish empire sewed thousands upon thousands of images of the flower as religious tokens and offered them up with prayers for a husband’s safe return from war.
It was under Süleyman, it seems, that the Turks first began to cultivate the tulip and to breed new varieties to suit their tastes. The wildflowers that had been grown in Istanbul since Mehmed’s day were short and rounded, almost egg-shaped, not unlike many of the varieties still popular today. Perhaps as early as the late sixteenth century, however, the Ottomans began to look with favor on new cultivars* that the capital’s gardeners had begun to produce. These “Istanbul tulips,” as they became known, may have been bred from species that the Turks had discovered on the northern shores of the Black Sea, in the land of their allies the Crimean Tatars. Istanbul tulips—of which there were eventually as many as fifteen hundred varieties—were more delicate and far more elegant than their predecessors. Their petals were enormously long and slender, and needle-pointed at the tip. The most sought-after varieties were shaped like almonds, with daggerlike petals. They were colored vermilion or russet or sulfur.
The first gardeners to devote themselves entirely to tulips lived in Süleyman’s time and grew some of the earliest cultivated tulips. One, named Seyhulislam Ebusuud Efendi, is known to have possessed a particularly beautiful flower known as Nur-i-Adin, “The Light of Paradise.” Other varieties of the flower were given equally evocative titles that reflected their value and their beauty: Dur-i-Yekta, “The Matchless