Tulipomania - Mike Dash [96]
A nephew, Mahmud, was plucked from the cage and placed on the throne in Ahmed’s place. His accession was a turning point for both the empire and the tulip, for though Mahmud soon dealt ruthlessly enough with the rioters who had deposed his uncle and run wild through Istanbul, burning the wooden tulip kiosks that had symbolized Ahmed’s reign, the new sultan’s real interests lay elsewhere. He was a keen voyeur who liked nothing better than to hide behind a grille in the harem and spy on the women of the palace. On one occasion the sultan even had the stitches of the flimsy clothes the ladies wore while bathing secretly removed and the garments reassembled with glue, knowing that it would melt in the heat of the steam room and expose each woman, naked, to his gaze.
Such a monarch could never accord a mere flower the exaggerated respect it had enjoyed in the time of Ahmed III. Though flower festivals continued to be held each spring, they were far more modest than they had been during the lale devri, and the tulip’s second decline in Turkey dates from the reign of Mahmud I. In the end it was so complete that the whole gorgeous panoply of Istanbul tulips—all thirteen hundred varieties and more—slowly vanished from the gardens of the empire and the memories of men. Today not a single specimen survives.
And what of the sultan who presided over the tulip’s late flowering? He was permitted to live, but only after a fashion. Ahmed, the tulip king, was returned to his cage to gaze once more over the Ottomans’ fig groves—and to while away his nights in dreams of dagger-petaled flowers bathing in the full moon’s light and throwing needle-pointed shadows about the secret gardens of the Abode of Bliss.
CHAPTER 16
Late Flowering
That was the end of the tulip mania. When the door of the Ottoman cage slammed shut for the last time on Ahmed III, the flower began to fade from the history books. Its greatest years had passed; never again would it so captivate a king, or enslave half a nation with the promise of easy money. In time people would come to wonder how such a mania could ever have occurred at all.
But if the tulip ceased to be a public craze, it remained a private passion. The collapse of the bulb trade did not end all interest in tulips, even though prices plunged and then remained uniformly low in reaction to the excesses of the Dutch and the Turks. On the contrary, large sums were still demanded for the bulbs of a very few rare and highly regarded varieties.
It took only a year or two for the Dutch bulb trade to regain some sort of equilibrium. The speculators had gone, but there was still a market for the flower; the purchasers were the same patrician collectors who had stayed aloof from the tavern trade, and they continued to value the tulip for purely aesthetic reasons. Even in the summer of 1637, less than six months after prices crashed, a Haarlem connoisseur named Aert Huybertsz. paid 850 guilders for a single bulb of the fine Rosen variety Manassier. Jacques Bertens, the dealer from whom he purchased the tulip, had earlier paid 710 guilders for the flower and thus profited to the tune of 140 guilders, or about six months’ wages for a local artisan.
The fashion among tulip connoisseurs in the postmania years was to cultivate single specimens of as many different tulips as possible. This meant there was still at least a limited demand for many of the most attractive varieties of flower. In an odd way the infamy that the mania had attracted helped too; the whole of Europe had heard of tulips now, and many people wanted to see for themselves the flower that had generated such passions. Dutch florists were thus able to offset their domestic catastrophe by developing an export business. A fair number enjoyed considerable