Tulipomania - Mike Dash [91]
Yet the world had not seen the last of tulip mania. Like bubonic plague, it was a strange and complex disease that could rage for a while and then seem to disappear when—like plague—it was really only lying dormant. And like plague, it could reappear miles away and decades later, as virulent as ever.
Thus it was in the Ottoman Empire. During the first half of the seventeenth century the tulip lost some of its luster for the Turks. The decline set in around 1595 with the accession of a womanizing sultan, Mehmed III, who was less interested in flowers than in seducing two or preferably three of the ladies of the harem each night. The rulers who followed in Mehmed’s wake—from the fantastically misogynist Mustafa I, who ended his reign locked, as a sort of punishment, in a dungeon with only two naked female slaves for company, to the unfortunate Osman II, who suffered an agonizing death “by constriction of the testicles” at the hands of his own soldiers—were on the whole either short-lived inadequates or butchers. At best they displayed only sporadic interest in the gardens of the Abode of Bliss.
It was not until the sultanate of Mehmed IV, who reigned from 1647 to 1687, that some degree of stability returned to the Ottoman Empire. Although his own father, Ibrahim the Mad (a libertine who once had all 280 women in his harem drowned simply so he could have the pleasure of selecting their replacements), was noted for his love of tulips, Mehmed was the first sultan in half a century to devote himself to horticulture in a significant way. It was he who planted an imperial garden solely devoted to tulips in the Fourth Court of the palace, where it was to flourish for a century, and he who decreed that each new species of the flower should be registered and classified. To supervise this process, the sultan established a formal council of florists that sat in judgment on new cultivars, noted their special characteristics, and assigned to the most flawless ones poetic names—the Pomegranate Lances and the Delicate Coquettes beloved of the Turks. This council long outlived its master and continued to hand out verdicts on new tulips for another hundred years.
Unfortunately for Mehmed, his empire proved more difficult to manage than his flowers. The last years of his reign were marked by a series of military disasters in the Balkans that severely weakened his authority. Worse still, bread prices in Istanbul quadrupled and led to unrest in the capital itself. At the end of 1687 the sultan’s own ministers arranged for him to be deposed and replaced by a pliant half brother.
There was a good reason why the Turks, throughout the seventeenth century, were cursed with a long line of mad or bad sultans who threatened to ruin the Ottoman Empire. Things had changed in Istanbul since the days of Süleyman the Magnificent. Much of the vigor of the Turkish royal line had dissipated when it proved necessary to abandon the old ways of securing the imperial succession. Ever since the time of Bayezid, the victor of Kosovo, the sultanate had gone to whichever royal prince could seize it first; and—following Bayezid’s bloody example—the new sultan would inaugurate his reign by having every one of his brothers executed so they could not plot to usurp him. Under Mehmed the Conqueror, this lethal tradition had actually been codified as law, so that on the accession of Mehmed III in 1595, no fewer than nineteen of the new sultan’s siblings, some of them still infants at the breast, had been dragged from the harem and strangled with silk handkerchiefs—having first been circumcised to ensure they would receive a welcome in paradise. Brutal as the system was, it produced a series of bold, decisive sultans famous for their ruthlessness. In 1607, however, the reigning sultan, Ahmed I, could no longer stomach the prospect of one of his beloved children murdering all the others. He arranged for the old policy of