Tulipomania - Mike Dash [93]
Perhaps the most elaborate of Ottoman festivals were those that marked the ritual circumcision of the sultan’s heirs. These were generally organized a year or more in advance, dragged on for weeks, and culminated in the presentation to the princes’ mothers of golden plates bearing their sons’ severed foreskins. In 1720 Ahmed III held such a festival to mark the circumcision of four sons and the marriage of two more of his daughters. It lasted for fifteen days and nights and involved the construction of forty-four nahils for each young prince, the simultaneous circumcision of five thousand other Turkish boys, and the driving of carriages across tightropes slung between some of the ships that crowded into the Bosporus to join the celebrations. But such affairs were necessarily rare. In the absence of more daughters to marry and more sons to circumcise, Ahmed and his ministers devoted much of their attention to annual tulip festivals, held in the gardens of the Topkapi’s innermost courtyard.
The tulip festivals took place in April, when the flowers were in bloom, and occupied two successive evenings during the full moon. They were purposely spectacular. On the first evening the sultan sat in state in a kiosk built within the garden and received the homage of his ministers to the accompaniment of songbirds chirping in an aviary suspended in the trees, while other guests—all strictly forbidden to wear clothes that clashed with the flowers—wandered through tulip beds illuminated by candles fixed to the backs of slow-moving tortoises. On the second evening the male guests were banished while the sultan entertained the ladies of the harem and organized treasure hunts among the flowers. Sometimes the prizes were candies; sometimes, precious stones. At the end of each evening’s entertainment, the chief white eunuch—a Christian slave who acted as palace chamberlain while his Abyssinian colleague, the chief black eunuch, took charge of the harem—distributed gifts of robes and jewels and money to those who basked in the sultan’s favor.
Ahmed’s passion for tulips—not the varieties that the Dutch had coveted, but slender, needle-pointed Istanbul tulips—was such that the flower soon found new favor among all classes in the capital. Barbers and shoemakers cultivated bulbs. So did the sheikh-ul-islam, the most senior cleric in the Ottoman Empire. Demand for the finest tulips was considerable—a single bulb of the cultivar Mahbub, “Beloved,” could change hands for as much as a thousand gold coins—but, perhaps learning a lesson from the Dutch, Ahmed averted a trading mania by limiting the number of florists who were permitted to operate in the capital and by fixing the prices of the most coveted blooms by imperial decree. Even firmer measures were taken to dampen speculation in the Ottoman provinces. Eventually it became a crime punishable by exile to sell tulip bulbs outside the walls of Istanbul.
Centuries of effort had produced a startling diversity of tulips by Ahmed’s day. One of the official price lists fixing the value of the best-known cultivars named more than 820 species, and fresh varieties of tulip continued to be developed throughout the reign. Such was the interest in the flower that the first appearance of a new cultivar was often memorialized in poems known as chronograms, which recorded the auspicious date in the letters of the final verse.
In important respects it was all too little, too late. The neglect that the tulip had suffered during much of the seventeenth