Tulipomania - Mike Dash [95]
The illuminations, Villeneuve added, continued nightly at Damat Ibrahim’s personal expense, “so long as the tulips remain in flower.”
Using his ambassadors’ rapturous reports of the French royal palace at Fontainebleau and Louis XV’s château at Marly as his guide, the grand vizier built a villa for himself in a quasi-European style. It stood on the Bosporus just above Istanbul, and when Damat Ibrahim entertained Ahmed there in the spring of 1721, the enraptured sultan immediately ordered the construction of a new royal palace in similar style nearby. The place chosen was a spot where two streams known as the Sweet Waters of Europe ran through meadows down to the sea. Here Ahmed’s architects constructed a sumptuous pleasure palace called the Sa’adabad (“the Place of Happiness”). It took them just three months, in the summer of 1722. Perhaps for the first time in the Ottoman Empire, the gardens were planted in the more formal European style, with avenues of trees leading to square and regimented beds of tulips. The Sweet Waters themselves were turned into marble-banked canals that fed fountains and cascades surrounding a central ornamental lake.
By keeping the people of Istanbul supplied with cheap bread, and the sultan sated with festivals, Damat Ibrahim remained in office throughout the 1720s. But eventually even he ran out of luck. Events far beyond the gardens of the Sa’adabad were moving beyond his control; ruinous taxation, necessary to fund not just the ostentations of the court but also a war against the Persians that erupted in the early 1730s, combined with famine to set the imperial provinces in turmoil. Worse, Ottoman armies were soon falling back in disarray on the eastern frontier and the hated Persians recovered substantial swaths of land that the Turks had seized from them earlier in the century. When news of these imperial defeats reached Istanbul, the mutterings of discontent that had been circulating in the bazaars turned into outright demands for change.
Not even the grand vizier could keep such bad news from reaching the sultan; not even Ahmed III could afford to ignore it. By the time the Istanbul mob—led by an Albanian secondhand-clothes dealer named Patrona Halil—marched on the Topkapi in the autumn of 1730 clamoring for scapegoats, Ahmed knew that his reign was in grave danger of ending prematurely and that if he failed to placate the crowd, his own life might be forfeit. In this sudden crisis expediency was all to the tulip king, and he ordered his corps of gardener-executioners, the bostancis, to surrender up the heads of Damat Ibrahim and Mustafa Pasha, the ministers most closely associated with the unpopular policies of Westernization and reform.
It was the beginning of the end—for Ahmed and for the tulip era too. The grand vizier was discovered at his official residence, strangled and decapitated. Then the bostancis set off for Mustafa’s waterfront villa near the Sa’adabad. They came upon the grand admiral transplanting tulips in his garden, blissfully unaware of the sudden political crisis in the capital. Perhaps the gardeners who had come to kill the pasha paused for a moment, while their victim prepared himself for death, to cast a professional eye over the forty new varieties of tulip he had created. But if they did, they certainly could not have known that, as the silken bowstring tightened around the grand admiral’s neck and Mustafa began the journey from his paradise-garden to the gardens of paradise, the time of tulips was all but over.
As it turned out, Ahmed had done too little, and acted far too late, to save his throne. The mob would not disperse, and the sultan’s position soon became critical. Perhaps a more resolute monarch, one whose skills ran more to military matters than to organizing tulip festivals, might still have rallied