by Mike Dash
Nevertheless, the Ottoman sultans gradually increased their stock of bulbs and used tulips and other flowers to adorn their palaces and gardens. Some of these blooms were grown in Istanbul, where there were, by the 1630s, about eighty flower shops and three hundred professional florists. Others were imported, sometimes in great bulk. New varieties of tulip came from the Black Sea coast and Crete, or from Persia, taken by force during the interminable campaigns the Ottomans fought there. In 1574 Süleyman’s son, Selim II—a keen gardener whose other passion, alcohol, led to his becoming known to history as Selim the Sot—instructed the sheriff of Aziz, in the Turkish province of Syria, to send him fifty thousand tulip bulbs for the imperial gardens. “I command you not in any way to delay,” the sultan added. “Everything should be so well and quickly done that it should give rise to no disappointment.” Even though Selim made it clear that money to pay for the purchases could be had from the treasury in nearby Aleppo, such orders must have caused great consternation in those receiving them, as perhaps the sultan intended.
Of all the sultan’s gardens, those hidden within the walls of his own home, the Topkapi palace, were by far the most magnificent. But then everything about the Abode of Bliss was meant to demonstrate the magnificence, wealth, and taste of the Ottoman royal line. Even the public portions of the palace were built on the grandest scale, and the private quarters, which only the highest-ranking Turks and their personal servants usually saw, were of a size and complexity unrivaled in the West.
In order to reach the inner sanctums where the sultan’s tulips were displayed, a visitor would have had to approach the Abode of Bliss via a thoroughfare that led past the Hagia Sofia mosque and opened onto a plaza. Once there he would have seen the palace’s outer walls, bristling with fortifications and guards and pierced by a huge outer gate, above which the sultan’s lengthy official title was inscribed in golden script. This gate led into the first of the four great courtyards of the palace, each of them more sacred than the last. The outer courtyard, through which all visitors to the inner portions of the palace had to pass, was open to all the sultan’s subjects and seethed with an indescribable mass of humanity. Any Turk had the right to petition for redress of his grievances, and several hundred agitated citizens usually surrounded the kiosks at which harassed scribes took down their complaints. Elsewhere within the same courtyard stood several armories and magazines, the buildings of the imperial mint, and various other arms of the Ottoman government, even stables for three thousand horses. Also present were a pair of white marble pillars on which were placed the severed heads of notables who had somehow offended the sultan, stuffed with cotton if they had once been viziers, or straw if they happened to have been lesser men. Reminders of the sporadic mass executions ordered by the sultan were occasionally piled by the entrance gate as an additional warning: severed noses, ears, and tongues.
A sturdy double gate led from this circle of hell into the second, quieter court, forbidden to all but Ottoman functionaries, soldiers, and important visitors. This courtyard held the Hall of the Divan—the Ottomans’ council chamber, where the sultan lay on a sumptuous chaise longue, concealed from the gaze of his subjects by a shimmering green silk curtain, to hear the reports of his senior officials or receive the ambassadors of foreign powers.
Beyond this second court, and through a third gateway known as the Gate of Felicity, lay the monarch’s private chambers and the imperial harem, guarded by black eunuchs brought to Istanbul from Africa. The third courtyard was a place so sacred that no Westerner, and practically no Ottomans, could claim to have actually set foot in it for almost one hundred years after it was built. Finally, a fourth locked double gateway led from the seraglio into the imperial gardens, which lay at the extreme end of the entire palace complex and commanded magnificent views across the glinting waters of the Bosporus. Their position, at the very heart of the principal symbol of Ottoman power, underlined the regard the Turks had for their plants and flowers.
The grounds of the Topkapi were not merely magnificent but extensive. The enormous palace complex contained every sort of garden, as well as flower beds and fountains, pools and orchards. The imposing Second Court, where the Turks’ elite troops assembled each month to be paid in cash from great sacks of money, even contained some quite extensive areas of woodland, where deer wandered between the cypress trees and across shaded walks; to the north of the palace, where the land sloped down to the famous harbor known as the Golden Horn, the gardens also extended beyond the walls all the way down to the water.
Flower beds were planted chiefly in the Fourth Court, where they were often enjoyed by the sultan alone. The only windows that overlooked them were those of the Treasury and a building called the Hall of the Pantry, which housed the royal larders; and these could be shuttered if the Grand Turk so decreed. The gardens of the Fourth Court were the sultan’s principal retreat from the cares of state, and successive monarchs vied with each other to make them ever more beautiful. The rose, the carnation, the hyacinth, the narcissus, and of course the tulip were all planted in great profusion in this part of the grounds, particularly on the slopes that led to the highest point of the whole Topkapi complex, a hillock at the northern end that commanded unrivaled views across the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. Upon this promontory and elsewhere in the gardens, the Ottomans built wooden pavilions called kiosks. They could be used as meeting places or as the focal points of festivals, but they were also provided with solitary divans positioned to catch each passing breeze and offer breathtaking views when the gardens were in flower. Here, more than at any time in his crowded and often violent life, an Ottoman sultan might feel alone and at peace.
Everything about the Abode of Bliss was designed to impress visitors with the extent of Turkish power. The palace’s scale was tremendous, its architecture was magisterial, its apartments were decorated in the most opulent fashion. Even the most cosmopolitan European merchants would have been awed by the cosmopolitan stream of supplies required to feed the imperial court: cartloads of rice, sugar, peas, lentils, pepper, coffee, senna, and macaroons all trundled through the Topkapi’s gateways, as well as plums preserved in lemon juice, 199,000 hens, and 780 wagons of snow each year.
In Süleyman’s time no fewer than five thousand servants toiled among the four courtyards. They ranged from humble watchmen to exotic specialists such as the chief turban folder and the chief attendant of the napkin, whose staff in turn included a full-time pickle server. Among these servants of the sultan were a considerable body of gardeners, the bostancis, almost a thousand strong. Their duties in the palace were actually many and varied and extended far beyond weeding the sultan’s tulips—though certainly they performed that function too. Bostancis worked as guards, porters, and removers of refuse. The five thousand additional members of the corps who worked outside the Topkapi itself formed a royal bodyguard and acted as makeshift police and customs men around the capital.
Most unusually of all, the bostancis doubled as the sultan’s executioners. It was the royal gardeners, for example, who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosporus. The tread of an approaching group of red-skullcapped bostancis, wearing their traditional uniform of white muslin breeches and cut-off shirts exposing muscular chests and arms, heralded death by ritual strangulation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years.
When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the sultan’s head gardener, the bostanci-basha, in person. The bostanci-basha also held the post of chief executioner, and he was required to play a leading role in what was surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history. This was the race held between a condemned notable—a deposed vizier or a chief eunuch—and the man commanded to kill him. As soon as sentence of death had been passed, it was the practice to allow the condemned man to run as fast as he was able the half mile or so through the gardens and down to the Fish-House Gate, which stood at the extreme southern end of
the Topkapi and was the appointed place of execution. If he reached the Fish-House before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. If, on the other hand, the condemned man found the bostanci-basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.*
One of the bostancis’ less fearsome duties was the provision of cut flowers to decorate the living quarters of the palace. In general the Turks rarely displayed plants in this way, preferring to leave them in the gardens in which they were grown. But the custom flourished within the walls of the Abode of Bliss. Paintings show the sultans’ favored rooms brightened by a profusion of flowers, displayed singly or, more rarely, in small groups. Tulips, of course, featured heavily in such arrangements. They were placed in fine glass vases that were often embellished with filigree using a technique known as cesm-i bulbul—“the nightingale’s eye”—and scattered about a series of low tables.
It was thus, in all likelihood, that Westerners first encountered the cultivated tulips of Istanbul. They came as ambassadors and envoys first, responding to the terrifying successes that Süleyman’s armies enjoyed as they captured Rhodes, the apparently impregnable stronghold of the crusading Knights of St. John, in 1522, then crushed the armies of the king of Hungary in 1526 and besieged Vienna three years later. This string of almost unbroken victories elevated the Ottomans to the rank of the greatest power in the Mediterranean and forced the Christian monarchs of Europe to negotiate with them. Later, mercenaries and merchants also made their way to Istanbul to enlist with the Turks or seek permission to trade with them. It was one of the minor consequences of the rise of Ottoman power that by the time of Süleyman’s death in 1566, many hundreds of travelers such as these had journeyed to Turkey, a country that had for several centuries been all but closed to the West.
The Westerners found much to remark on. Everything about the Ottoman Empire seemed exotic, from the rowdy vigor of the bazaar to the sensuous grace of Istanbul’s mosques. The Turks’ passion for flowers, and the remarkable skill with which they tended them, were among the novelties that drew comment; even the cultivation of plants purely for their beauty seemed strange to visitors accustomed to think of them as things to eat or pound into primitive herbal medicines.
The slender and irresistible tulips displayed in every fashionable garden could not fail to attract attention. Whether the travelers who found themselves gazing on the splendid Ottoman gardens were ambassadors or army officers, whether they loved flowers or were indifferent to them, they could hardly fail to see that the Turks favored this one bloom above all others.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, at the latest, the tulip had come at last to Europe’s notice. It was ready to resume its journey west.
*Flowers systematically cultivated and improved by man.
*The last man to save his neck by winning this life-or-death race was the grand vizier Haji Salih Pasha in 1822–23.
CHAPTER 4
Stranger from the East
The sailing ships that limped into Goa, the capital of the Portuguese possessions in India, late in October 1529 were in a very sorry state. They were badly battered about and manned, almost literally, by skeleton crews, having lost upward of two thousand men to a combination of fever and starvation on the long voyage out from Lisbon. The commander of the flotilla, a noble named Nunho da Cunha, had survived, however—and his arrival was extremely bad news for Lopo Vaz de Sampayo, the governor of Portuguese India.
Da Cunha carried instructions from the king of Portugal that named him governor in place of Lopo Vaz. Worse, Vaz himself was summoned home in disgrace. The recall had been ordered because word had finally reached Lisbon that Vaz had usurped the royal favorite, who was supposed to have been appointed governor, and ruled the Portuguese enclaves on India’s west coast for two years in his stead. Lopo Vaz returned home a prisoner and languished in jail until 1532, when he was banished to Africa for a while to await an eventual pardon.
All this matters because Lopo Vaz de Sampayo is said to be the man who introduced the tulip to Western Europe. The horticulturist Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul, in his Le Floriste François, published in 1654, says that Vaz brought the tulip home with him from Ceylon, and several other seventeenth-century authorities make an identical claim.
It is, however, difficult to see how Lopo Vaz could have accomplished this feat, given the circumstances of his return. To begin with, tulips do not grow in Ceylon, and the island is hundreds of miles off the route Portuguese ships took when they were sailing home. And though it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the Portuguese in Goa had acquired the flower—either from the Persians they sometimes dealt with in the gulf, or from Indians who had them from one of Babur’s gardens in the north of the subcontinent—the voyage to Lisbon was an arduous one that took about six months when the conditions were good, and anything up to two and a half years when they were not.
If the story about Lopo Vaz is true, then, he must have been a tulip maniac of some distinction—keen enough on flowers to persuade his captors to allow him to take his bulbs on board and perhaps even cultivate them in pots on the appallingly crowded and squalid little ships that the Portuguese used to sail to India and back. This is not quite impossible; prisoners of quality got decent treatment in those days whatever their crimes, and Vaz was certainly not carried back to Lisbon in chains. But it is improbable enough for us to doubt that this undistinguished and unlucky noble really deserves to be remembered as the man who first brought the tulip to Europe.
The truth is that no one knows exactly how or where or when the flower first left Asia. The Turks and Persians grew so many of the flowers, and the bulbs were so eminently portable, that it would be very surprising if at least a handful of tulips did not find their way west at some point during the Middle Ages. If they did, however, there is no record of them in the illustrations or chronicles produced at the time, so they can hardly have been planted in quantity or spread far, and the same applies to any specimens that may have come to Portugal from India; when European botanists did encounter the tulip in the 1560s they thought the flower a great novelty, something entirely new.
Occasionally, some new piece of evidence suggesting that the tulip was present in Europe before the mid-sixteenth century is uncovered, but none has gone without challenge. There is, for example, the problem of the wild red and yellow tulips of the species T. silvestris and T. australis, that still grow wild in Savoy. It has been suggested that these are survivors of an indigenous European wild tulip that was once linked to its Asiatic cousin by colonies strung across the Balkans. The Savoy tulips, however, have an erratic distribution and are generally found on cultivated land, which suggests that their forebears were planted by people. Then there is a painting, Virgin with Child, showing Mary turning her face to flowers that include garden tulips, which was once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci; but it has now been reassigned to his pupil Melzi, who did not die until 1572. Most remarkably of all, there is a Roman mosaic dating to before A.D. 430 on exhibit in the Vatican Museum that unarguably shows a basket of broad-petaled red tulips. Their arrangement, however, is so evidently eighteenth century in style that it seems the mosaic must have undergone major reconstruction after it was removed from a villa in the suburbs of Rome in the 1700s.
Perhaps the first European to appreciate the beauty of the tulip was Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, the bastard son of a Flemish lord who was for years the most influential Netherlander in the Austrian court. In November 1554 Busbecq went to Istanbul as ambassador of the Holy Roman emperor, and he remained in the Ottoman Empire for almost eight years, making only occasional journeys home. When he did eventually return, he published, in 1581, a book of recollections, written in the form of letters, that described his experiences among the Turks. The letters were packed with intimate and gossipy details and made his name—both in his own day and among historians who still rely on Busbecq to add color to accounts of daily life at the height of Ottoman rule.
They also contain his own account of how he first encountered the tulip.
Busbecq was traveling overland from Vienna to Istanbul, and had just left the Thracian city of Adrianople when he first saw the flower growing in the wild. “We set out,” the ambassador wrote in one letter,
on the last stage of our journey to Constantinople, which was now close at hand. As we passed through this district we everywhere came across quantities of flowers—narcissi, hyacinths and tulipans, as the Turks call them. We were surprised to find them flowering in mid-winter, scarcely a favorable season. There is an abundance of narcissi and hyacinths in Greece, and they possess so wonderful a scent that a large quantity of them causes a headache in those who are unaccustomed to such an odour. The tulip has little or no scent, but it is admired for its beauty and the variety of its colors. The Turks are very fond of flowers, and though they are otherwise anything but extravagant, they do not hesitate to pay several aspres* for a fine blossom.
Indeed, Busbecq complained, when he did reach the capital and was presented with some fine tulips by his hosts, “these flowers, although they were gifts, cost me a great deal, for I had to pay several aspres in return for them.” (Another traveler, George Sandys—a son of the archbishop of York—found the Turks equally anxious to press their precious flowers onto strangers at about this time, though he was even less enamored with the gifts than was Busbecq. “You cannot stirre abroad,” the Englishman grumbled, “but you shall be presented by the Dervishes and Janizaries with tulips and trifles.”)
For many years, it was thought that this account of Busbecq’s was contemporary and referred to his initial journey to Istanbul, undertaken during the winter of 1554. More recently, however, it has been shown that all the letters that make up his book were written long after the fact—probably not until the early 1580s, when the tulip had become reasonably well known in Europe—and that the journey he described could not have been his first, made in the depths of winter. Tulips do not flower at that time of year, even in the Ottoman domain; Busbecq therefore must have been misremembering the details of a second journey out to Istanbul, which he undertook when the tulips were in flower—in March 1558.
