Tulipomania - Mike Dash [94]
This stark description, however, scarcely does justice to the uniquely poetic flavor of the Ottoman desiderata. Another of Lale-zari’s manuscripts, which survives in an archive in Berlin and bears the title Acceptable and Beautiful, describes the ideal tulip as “curved as the form of the new Moon, her color is well apportioned, clean, well proportioned; almond in shape, needlelike, ornamented with pleasant rays, her inner leaves as a well, as they should be, her outer leaves a little open, as they should be; the white ornamented leaves are absolutely perfect. She is the chosen of the chosen.” One may be quite certain that the rare species that met these exacting criteria would have found their way to Ahmed’s gardens.
The sultan’s servants soon found it expedient to share his passion for the flower, and many became considerable enthusiasts in their own right. Mustafa Pasha, the admiral of the Ottoman fleet, created forty-four new varieties. Ambitious minor officials discovered they could bribe their way to high office with presents of fine tulips. Nor was it wise to deny the king of kings a flower he particularly coveted. When one rare bulb—the gift of a canny European ambassador—went missing, the grand vizier of the day packed heralds off into Istanbul’s narrow streets to offer huge rewards for its safe return.
Early in his reign Ahmed III had followed the example of his immediate predecessors by working his way through a succession of short-lived viziers—men such as Fazil Pasha: honest, hardworking, last scion of a distinguished line of imperial servants, but also an eccentric who believed there was a fly perched on the end of his nose that returned each time he brushed it away. In 1718, however, the sultan appointed a man named Ibrahim Pasha Kulliyesi as grand vizier of the Ottomans. Ibrahim was a shrewd manipulator of imperial intrigue who made it his business to forge the closest possible relationship with the sultan. His greatest coup was his marriage to Ahmed’s eldest daughter, which earned him the nickname Damat (“Son-in-Law”). In a land where the office of vizier had long been synonymous with short tenure and an often-violent death, Damat Ibrahim clung to power for a dozen years.
The son-in-law’s policy was one of cautious progress—just what the declining but still intensely conservative empire required. It was Ibrahim who induced Ahmed to send Turkish embassies to learn about advances in the West, Ibrahim who set up the first Ottoman fire brigade, and Ibrahim who licensed an official printing press to produce books on science and geography. He levied new taxes, restocked the imperial treasury, and kept most of the empire at peace. Most importantly, however, the grand vizier retained the favor he needed to push through his program of reform by indulging Ahmed’s love of fine flowers.
The French ambassador, Jean Sauvent de Villeneuve, described one royal entertainment, held in Ibrahim’s own tulip garden:
Beside every fourth flower is stood a candle, level with the bloom, and along the alleyways are hung cages filled with all kinds of birds. The trellises are decorated with an enormous quantity of flowers, placed in bottles and lit by an infinite number of glass lamps of different colors. The lamps are also hung on