Tulipomania - Mike Dash [9]
Such tulips, however, were great rarities. Even Seyhulislam—who died, at the greatly advanced age of eighty-four, in 1574—would have possessed only a handful of bulbs of the Nur-i-Adin. And in an age when the art of coaxing new varieties from old was barely understood, so that growers who wished to produce crimson flowers might attempt to do so by pouring dark red wine over their tulip beds, cultivation was a slow and somewhat haphazard business, one that failed to interest most Turkish gardeners. The majority of new Ottoman cultivars seem to have emerged by accident rather than by design.
Nevertheless, the Ottoman sultans gradually increased their stock of bulbs and used tulips and other flowers to adorn their palaces and gardens. Some of these blooms were grown in Istanbul, where there were, by the 1630s, about eighty flower shops and three hundred professional florists. Others were imported, sometimes in great bulk. New varieties of tulip came from the Black Sea coast and Crete, or from Persia, taken by force during the interminable campaigns the Ottomans fought there. In 1574 Süleyman’s son, Selim II—a keen gardener whose other passion, alcohol, led to his becoming known to history as Selim the Sot—instructed the sheriff of Aziz, in the Turkish province of Syria, to send him fifty thousand tulip bulbs for the imperial gardens. “I command you not in any way to delay,” the sultan added. “Everything should be so well and quickly done that it should give rise to no disappointment.” Even though Selim made it clear that money to pay for the purchases could be had from the treasury in nearby Aleppo, such orders must have caused great consternation in those receiving them, as perhaps the sultan intended.
Of all the sultan’s gardens, those hidden within the walls of his own home, the Topkapi palace, were by far the most magnificent. But then everything about the Abode of Bliss was meant to demonstrate the magnificence, wealth, and taste of the Ottoman royal line. Even the public portions of the palace were built on the grandest scale, and the private quarters, which only the highest-ranking Turks and their personal servants usually saw, were of a size and complexity unrivaled in the West.
In order to reach the inner sanctums where the sultan’s tulips were displayed, a visitor would have had to approach the Abode of Bliss via a thoroughfare that led past the Hagia Sofia mosque and opened onto a plaza. Once there he would have seen the palace’s outer walls, bristling with fortifications and guards and pierced by a huge outer gate, above which the sultan’s lengthy official title was inscribed in golden script. This gate led into the first of the four great courtyards of the palace, each of them more sacred than the last. The outer courtyard, through which all visitors to the inner portions of the palace had to pass, was open to all the sultan’s subjects and seethed with an indescribable mass of humanity. Any Turk had the right to petition for redress of his grievances, and several hundred agitated citizens usually surrounded the kiosks at which harassed scribes took down their complaints. Elsewhere within the same courtyard stood several armories and magazines, the buildings of the imperial mint, and various other arms of the Ottoman government, even stables for three thousand horses. Also present were a pair of white marble pillars on which were placed the severed heads of notables who had somehow offended the sultan, stuffed with cotton if they had once been viziers, or straw if they happened to have been lesser men. Reminders of the sporadic mass executions ordered by the sultan were occasionally piled by the entrance gate as an additional warning: severed noses, ears, and tongues.
A sturdy double gate led from this circle of hell into the second, quieter court, forbidden to all but Ottoman functionaries, soldiers, and important visitors. This courtyard held the Hall of the Divan—the Ottomans’ council chamber, where