‘A fool and his money are soon parted,’ declared Roemer Visscher in a popular emblem book of 1614, illustrated with two fat tulip blossoms whose prices must even then have raised eyebrows. As in any market, prices were driven by desire and scarcity, leading the botanist Joost van Ravelingen to conclude that the most valued tulips were not necessarily the nicest or most beautiful but merely the rarest, especially when owned by one master who could manipulate their value.
The prices charged for ‘Semper Augustus’, one of the most famous flamed tulips of all, bear out this view. An early admirer was the Dutch chronicler Nicolaes van Wassenaer, who named it the foremost beauty for 1623, having seen it growing among a variety of tulips planted around a mirrored cabinet in the Heemstede garden of Dr Adriaen Pauw, the pensionary (leading official) of Amsterdam. Wassenaer was clearly entranced: ‘the colour is white, with Carmine on a blue base, and with an unbroken flame right to the top, never did a Florist see one more beautiful than this’.
The price for one ‘Semper Augustus’ bulb was then quoted at 1,000 guilders (f.1,000), more than a decade before tulip fever had reached its peak. The following spring, with only twelve bulbs of ‘Semper Augustus’ in existence, the price had risen to f.1,200 each, although the single owner – presumably Dr Pauw – held back from selling them for fear of driving prices down. The same happened in 1625, when the price had risen to f.3,000 but still the owner would not sell. By 1633, one bulb reputedly changed hands for f.5,550 and by 1637 – the year of the crash – the asking price was f.30,000 for three bulbs. At a time when average annual incomes were only f.150, a single ‘Semper Augustus’ bulb could buy you the most expensive house on an Amsterdam canal with a small garden and coach house.
Inevitably, the high prices achieved for the rarest tulips attracted a new clientele into the market, the sort of people so roundly condemned by Clusius. But in the main, buyers and sellers came from the ‘middling’ classes: connoisseurs, several important artists and ordinary citizens such as merchants, skilled craftsmen, manufacturers and professionals, often connected by ties of family, religion, trade or location. Their speculative ambitions drew the attention of moralizing pamphleteers, who portrayed the participants to the tulip drama in a fool’s cap or a chariot of fools, while prices continued to rise. In 1636, the year before the crash, one anti-tulip pamphleteer calculated that the price paid for a single ‘Viceroy’ tulip bulb (f.2,500) might more usefully purchase twenty-seven tons of wheat, fifty tons of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, three tons of cheese, a bed with linen, a suit of clothes and a silver beaker.
As the trade was in bulbs, sales took place outside the flowering season, generally between June and October. Some growers commissioned tulip portraits, usually of a single specimen, sometimes named and sometimes priced. Gathered together into tulip albums, these functioned partly as sales catalogues but also as objects of beauty in their own right when painted by notable artists such as Judith Leyster, Antony Claesz and the German Jacob Marrel. Most sales took place in taverns under the auspices of ‘Colleges’ of flower growers, established to govern transactions between buyers and sellers. Prices were agreed either by arbitration or by public auction, after which everyone – buyers, sellers and witnesses – got drunk at the buyer’s expense. The trade was so flourishing that the States of Holland contemplated introducing a tax on tulips, without gaining the necessary agreement from all its constituent members.
Then the unthinkable happened, if the hearsay evidence of the pamphleteers is correct. On Tuesday 3 February 1637, a group of tulip buyers and sellers gathered at a Haarlem tavern to conduct their business. A member of the College began the day’s trading by offering for sale a pound of tulip bulbs priced at f.1,250. No one bid. The auctioneer dropped the price to f.1,100 then f.1,000, but there were still no takers. Rumours had already begun to circulate about the fragility of the tulip trade and news of the failed auction brought it to a standstill. It seems the Jeremiahs were right in their prognosis that once the market was swollen with more sellers than buyers, confidence would evaporate and the market would collapse.
An auction did in fact take place two days later, at Alkmaar, when the average price paid per bulb was a little under f.800 (equivalent to nearly two years’ pay for a master carpenter in Leiden) and a few prized bulbs achieved much wilder prices: a ‘Viceroy’ reportedly sold for f.4,203 and an ‘Admirael van Enchuysen’ with an offset for f.5,200. But it seems unlikely that the sellers, the orphans of Wouter Bartholomeusz Winckel, ever realized their profits. Threatened with ruin by the failed auction at Haarlem, growers hastily convened a conference in Amsterdam for 23 February at which they hoped to resolve the crisis by agreeing a cut-off date of November 1636 for tulip contracts. All contracts drawn up prior to this were deemed bona fide and therefore enforceable, while contracts agreed after November could be annulled on payment of 10 per cent of the agreed price. Holland’s High Court subsequently overturned this decision, declaring all uncompleted transactions invalid since the beginning of 1636, and entrusting local magistrates with the task of untangling any resulting legal wrangles.
The demise of tulip fever inevitably claimed some casualties, although Anne Goldgar’s careful sifting of the records suggests that reports of individual bankruptcies were much exaggerated, most vociferously by the anti-tulip pamphleteers whose tirades have coloured subsequent reports. Some individuals undoubtedly lost money, among them the landscape painter Jan van Goyen, who famously spent large sums on tulips in the last few weeks of the craze and died in penury twenty years after the crash. But van Goyen also speculated heavily in land, and documented bankruptcies attributable solely to tulip fever were few. The Dutch economy as a whole was not seriously undermined, despite the more lasting damage to the Dutch psyche.
As a mark of its resilience, the tulip lived on in the gardens and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, undergoing no more than a modest retreat as painters counted the cost of their own, and their clients’, failed investments. Despite an inevitable sharp drop after the giddy heights of 1637, fine varieties of tulips still commanded decent sums. ‘Incredible prices For tulip rootes,’ wrote Peter Mundy when he travelled around the Low Countries in 1640, three years after the crash. The year after the fever had abated, the Dutch artist Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp painted a whole field of flamed and feathered tulips against a flat Dutch horizon, attended by a butterfly and a pair of admiring frogs. Had his tulips all been ‘Semper Augustus’, their combined value might at one time have bought him a whole street of Amsterdam’s finest canalside houses. Elsewhere in Europe, prices for fine new varieties remained high, and the French writer Alexandre Dumas opened his novel The Black Tulip in The Hague in 1672 as if the crash had never happened.
EUROPE WAS CURED, perhaps, but less than a century later a second bout of tulip fever erupted, this time in Ottoman Turkey during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) and especially the years from 1718 when the sultan’s son-in-law Ibrahim Pasha of Nevshehir shared the reins of power as grand vizier. The country that had given Europe the tulip now suffered the consequences of its own obsession with this most fateful of flowers. Later historians called it ‘Lâle Devri’ (‘the Tulip Era’) to reflect the floral preoccupations and cultural excesses of the sultan and his grand vizier, whose shared passion for the tulip coloured every aspect of Ottoman public life.
The two men were well suited to each other. Cultured, hedonistic and exceptionally greedy, the sultan left affairs of state to his grand vizier, devoting himself instead to pleasure and to a series of construction projects in a style that blended Ottoman baroque with French rococo. Mosques, mausoleums and fountains sprang up all over Istanbul, while new palaces (yalis) with their kiosks and fine gardens turned the waterfronts of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn into an earthly paradise. Refined and cultured in his turn, Ibrahim Pasha looked to satisfy his sultan’s prodigal whims, bringing an initial peace to t
he Ottoman Empire and making overtures to the West that caused resentment among more conservative elements of society, as did his tight grip on the machinery of state.
With the advent of Ibrahim Pasha, the tulip came to symbolize the continuous festivities and extravagances of Sultan Ahmed III’s court. The flower had by now transformed itself into the elegant almond shape prescribed by Sultan Ahmed III’s chief florist, Seyh Mehmed Lâlezarî, its tepals stretched into daggers with pointed tips. For a century or more it had been the task of the sultan’s chief florist to oversee the raising of new tulips and narcissi, presiding over a council of expert florists who examined the new cultivars, selecting and naming only those judged to be faultless, and entering their details in the council’s catalogue. Unlike Dutch cultivars, new varieties rarely received the name of their grower, but rather celebrated the tulip’s grace or distinctive features, such as ‘Slim One of the Rose Garden’, ‘Scarlet Swallow’, ‘Light of Paradise’ and ‘Bringer of Joy’.
In his manual of flowers (Mizanü ‘l-Ezhar), Seyh Mehmed Lâlezarî set out twenty rules governing the perfect tulip. In essence, these required that its six petals should be long and equal in length, neither jagged nor double, the outer and inner segments closing neatly to conceal both filaments and blotches. Colours should be pure and clear, and only white was allowed for the background of variegated sorts (rarely shown in tulip albums, so perhaps less prized). Further rules covered pollen (which should not soil the flower); stems (long and strong); bulbs (neither too large nor too small); and leaves (long but not so long as to hide the flower).
In all, some 1,500 ‘Istanbul tulips’ were recorded. Grown by only a handful of tulip enthusiasts, these have now completely disappeared. As in Europe, prices began to rise dramatically: a single bulb of the much coveted cultivar ‘Mahbud’ (‘Beloved’) might fetch between 500 and 1,000 Ottoman gold coins and, to prevent speculation, the state began officially to control prices by issuing fixed price lists. For the two years 1726 and 1727, when the number of varieties listed increased from 239 to 306, the most expensive bulb was ‘Nize-i Rummânî’, ‘Pomegranate Lance’, priced at a mere 7.5 Ottoman gold coins.
No such attempt was made to curb the flamboyance of the sultan’s tulip festivities, however. At tulip time, Ahmed III would proceed majestically to his palaces built on the edge of the water, accompanied by mass promenades of the people. Barges sailed to the new Sa’dabad palace on the Golden Horn, built to French plans, and to other places of recreation. Most famous of these was the Ciraghan, the ‘Palace of Candles’ on the European side of the Bosphorus, begun by Sultan Murad IV for his daughter and magnificently reconstructed by Ibrahim Pasha for his wife, the sultan’s daughter. The sultan came here often to enjoy the festivities, when small night lights illuminated the tulip gardens, and tortoises with candles on their backs meandered through the flowers. In the sultan’s own tulip garden, guests were required to wear costumes that harmonized with the flowers; one night the women of the harem played at shopkeepers, serving the sultan as their only shopper. Out of season the festivities continued unabated, and the sultan’s palace was adorned with tulips and pinks even at the height of winter.
Such unbridled and unpopular extravagance could not last, especially as the empire itself was beginning to crumble. Outright revolt was finally provoked in September 1730 after Persia had regained land occupied by the Turks, and Persian soldiers massacred a Turkish garrison stationed at Tabriz. The sultan and his grand vizier were both on holiday and Ibrahim Pasha’s two sons-in-law were busy tending their gardens on the Bosphorus. The court did not return for an other two days. Fearing for his own skin, the sultan eventually ordered the strangling of the grand vizier and his sons-in-law but it was too late; the sultan himself was forced to abdicate in favour of his nephew, Mahmud I, who had the ringleaders of the revolt executed in turn.
The tulip, so inextricably identified with the excesses of the sultan’s regime, had played its course. The gardens and palaces of recreation were all destroyed, and although the tulip would return to Istanbul – and even now is celebrated in an annual festival, when Gülhane Park below the Topkapi Palace glows with masses of bowl-shaped and pointy tulips, and the Bosphorus at Emirgan echoes to the sound of concerts and folk dances that keep alive a memory of the sultan’s fabulous festivities – a European visitor to Istanbul in the early 1930s reported that ‘the cult of the Tulip has gone’. Ibrahim Pasha’s famous garden was turned into a Ford car factory, and nothing was left of the Ciraghan or ‘the quaint old wooden overhanging Yalis, with their dainty gardens which skirted the shores of the Bosphorus, from the Marmora to the Black Sea’.
THESE TWO OUTBREAKS of tulip fever, one Dutch, one Turkish, reveal the flower’s extraordinary power to attract devotees through beauty alone. While Ottoman culture had embraced the tulip as a symbol of Paradise, touched with divinity, in Europe it was generally stripped of religious associations; and when the apothecary Thomas Johnson equated tulips with the ‘lilies of the field’ of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, it was on account of their ‘wondrous beautie’ and ‘infinite varietie of colour’, greater than that possessed by any other sort of flower.
Yet dissenting voices were raised even then, perhaps because the much vaunted tulip is curiously hard to love. Resplendent and dazzling on the one hand, cultivated tulips can also appear stiff and unbending, a masculine sort of flower in contrast to the feminine softness of the rose. The tulip showed this other face in Antheologia, or the Speech of Flowers, a tiny anonymous work that appeared during the strait-laced Commonwealth years under Oliver Cromwell. Delicately subversive in tone and generally attributed to the lukewarm royalist Thomas Fuller, best known for his Worthies of England, it contains a light-hearted dialogue between the flowers of a garden in Thessalonia, then under Turkish occupation.
First to speak was the rose, lamenting that she had been displaced by the tulip, despite her own acknowledged precedence ‘under the Patent of a double Sence, Sight, smell’ and her even more sovereign virtues when dead, in curing a host of ailments with her cordials and conserves. What is this upstart tulip, asked the rose, but ‘a wellcomplexion’d stink, an ill favour wrapt up in pleasant colours’? As for its use in medicine, no physician had honoured it with a mention, or a Greek or Latin name. And yet ‘this is that which filleth all Gardens, hundreds of pounds being given for the root thereof, whilst I the Rose, am neglected and contemned, and conceived beneath the honour of noble hands, and fit only to grow in the gardens of Yeomen’.
The tulip’s reply was suitably haughty, dismissing the rose’s complaint as that of a mere vegetable, which should not presume to raise itself above the judgement of ‘Rationable creatures’. Surely men were the best judges of the ‘valew of Flowers’, said the tulip, and while no healing virtues had yet been discovered, that did not mean it had none.
And this I am confident of, that Nature would never have hung out so gorgious a signe, if some guest of quality had not been lodged therein; surely my leaves [petals], had never been feathered with such variety of colours, (which hath proclaimed me the King of all Lillies) had not some strange vertue, whereof the world is yet ignorant, been treasured up therein.
In the debate that followed, the violet upheld the rose’s complaint; the flowers had paid tribute to the rose as ‘our Prime and principall’ for as long as they could remember, while the tulip had been in gardens for sixty years at most. A native of open fields, of reputed Syrian extraction, it was little better than ‘a gentler sort of weed’. By solemn vote, the flowers concluded that the tulip should be rooted out of the garden and cast on the dunghill as a foreign interloper.
BUT THE TULIP was not quite finished. Although the rose would eventually regain her crown, fantastically coloured tulips retained a British following as one of the original florists’ flowers grown by dedicated flower fanciers, first under the aegis of florists’ societies and later in the floriculture of the Victorian age, which flourished at all levels in society, from th
e gentry to the labouring classes, spawning societies dedicated to horticulture in general and to particular classes of flowers. It was to be the tulip’s last great reincarnation.
In use since the 1620s at least, the term ‘florist’ then referred to enthusiasts who grew flowers for their beauty rather than their utility, much like the amateur flower lovers in Clusius’s circle. They concentrated on certain flowers only, which they grew to defined standards, testing their skills in competition with their fellows. The original florists’ flowers (tulips, carnations, anemones and ranunculuses) were later joined by auriculas, hyacinths, polyanthuses, pinks and, in the 1830s, by pansies and dahlias. All shared common characteristics: their flowers were circular in outline, bearing smooth-edged petals that were neither fringed nor jagged, neat if double and variegated whenever possible. All were capable of producing seed and of vegetative propagation, allowing their growers to develop and reproduce new kinds.
Britain’s florists’ societies were following the lead set by similar Dutch societies, convened to hold ‘sweet Conversation and pleasant Consortship’ under the protective eye of St Dorothea, patron saint of flower lovers. First recorded in the 1630s in Norwich, home to successive waves of Huguenot exiles from the Low Countries and France, British florists’ feasts reached their peak in the 1770s and 1780s. Gatherings were held in taverns, like the Dutch tulip auctions, and the winning flowers passed around the dinner table. But by the end of the century, the feasts had descended into drinking parties, their decline further hastened by the economic gloom cast by the Napoleonic Wars.
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