Tulipomania - Mike Dash [92]
The cage was a suite of rooms to the west of the Fourth Courtyard of the palace that offered tantalizing views of fig orchards, the Ottoman paradise gardens, and the Bosporus. There, with eunuchs for company and sterile concubines for sexual consolation, unwanted princes lived lives that unpleasantly combined the immutable boredom of their daily routine with the nagging terror that execution might, after all, still be their lot. When one Ottoman ruler died, his eldest son would be taken from the cage where he had spent his entire life and acclaimed as the new sultan, while the other men of the imperial line would return to the few pursuits they were permitted—embroidery and the manufacture of ivory rings among them—and their lives of quiet despair.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the succession devolved at last upon a son of Mehmed IV named Ahmed III, who had spent the first twenty-nine years of his life locked within the cage. Ahmed proved to be not only the most sophisticated and cultured sultan since Süleyman the Magnificent himself, but also, without question, the greatest tulip maniac known to history. Having been inspired with a love for the imperial flower by his father, and having spent his days gazing longingly from the cage’s marble balcony across the most gorgeous private gardens in the Ottoman Empire—gardens he was never allowed to wander through or touch—Ahmed came to the Ottoman throne all but bursting with passion for tulips and suddenly equipped with almost unlimited means to indulge that passion.
The most avid bulb dealer in the Haarlem colleges could hardly have competed with Ahmed’s enthusiasm. The new sultan was besotted by the flower, so much so that the tulip became the most prominent feature of his long reign, and the Turkish historian Ahmed Refik was moved to bestow the title lale devri, the tulip era, on the period. From the time of his accession in 1703, tulip mania bust forth again, in Istanbul this time. It was to rage on in the Turkish capital for almost three decades.
In truth, this time of tulips masked the uncomfortable reality that the great empire of the Ottomans was in decline. Turkish power was on the wane everywhere, from the African littoral to the eternally war-torn Balkans, where the Peace of Karlowitz, signed in 1699, had ceded Hungary and Transylvania to the Austrians, ending the era of Ottoman expansionism in Europe and pushing the imperial frontier back to within a few hundred miles of Istanbul. The flower festivals that characterized the tulip era, and the pomp that went with them, were distractions that the sultan’s ministers ordered so as to divert their people from the realities of the political situation and their master from the tribulations of ruling an unwieldy empire.
In fairness, Ahmed was more than simply a tulip maniac. He fought the Russians with success and was a builder and a bibliophile, during whose reign Ottoman embassies—the first of their kind—were dispatched to the capitals of Europe to gather information and ideas from the West, and who left, in the Ahmed III fountain (which stands just outside the Topkapi palace), one of the most gorgeous monuments to adorn the imperial capital. Nevertheless, he unquestionably did preside over an era of hedonism unique even at the Turkish court. For three decades the once-warlike Ottomans gave themselves over to pleasure and disported themselves at the numerous festivals organized by their monarch and his ministers. “Let us laugh,” Ahmed’s closest companion, the court poet Nedim, wrote in setting out the informal philosophy of the reign. “Let us play, let us enjoy the delights of the world to the full.”
Free though he now was to enjoy the trappings of power, Sultan Ahmed found there were disadvantages to being the king of kings. He once complained that he had to dismiss no fewer than thirty-five of the privy chamber pages who routinely crowded into his bedchamber so that he could