by Mike Dash
Clusius was not the only botanist spreading bulbs and seeds about the continent in this way—some of the tulips he grew for himself in Mechelen had been sent to him by his friend Thomas Rehdiger from Padua—but he was probably the most active, not least because his repeated and lengthy absences abroad meant he rarely kept a garden of his own. Instead, he took pleasure in stocking the gardens of his friends, and they in turn provided him with a host of experimental seedbeds with which to investigate the properties of the plants he had discovered.
Clusius made full use of his friends’ gardens in preparing some of the masterful botanical studies to which he devoted much of the latter part of his life. These books, which included detailed studies of the flora of Spain, Austria, and Provence, were among the first to assume that plants are more than simply potential ingredients in the dubious medical preparations of the day and are worthy of study in their own right. Because of this Clusius has always been considered one of the fathers of botany, not least because he developed a system for classifying plants in groups according to their characteristics—an idea that would later be taken up by Carl Linnaeus and turned into one of the foundation stones of modern science.
In May 1573, while Clusius was still living in Mechelen and busy distributing tulip bulbs and other plants throughout Europe, he was asked by the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian II, to go to Vienna and establish an imperial hortus—or botanic garden—there. This was a tempting offer. Clusius’s father, whom he had been supporting, had just died at the age of eighty-one, freeing his son from the burden of caring for him. The proposed salary of five hundred Rhine guilders a year would let Clusius—who had been embarrassingly dependent on the charity of friends for years—live comfortably at last. And Maximilian wanted a garden to outshine those his princes and nobles had been cultivating. Clusius, whose poverty and scanty claim to the ranks of nobility had left him with something of an inferiority complex, was flattered by the attention and grateful that the emperor offered formal acknowledgment of his status as a noble. In addition, he already knew a little about his prospective patron, who was one of the few emperors ever to show sympathy toward the Protestant faith; his friend and regular correspondent Johannes Crato von Krafftheim was Maximilian’s personal physician. The reports he received were positive and the task certainly seemed an interesting one. So he accepted the proposal.
Today Vienna is a central European city noted for its culture. In Clusius’s day, though, it was very much a frontier town. Although it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the home of the imperial court, it was also only fifty miles from the Ottoman border and was known, not merely to the empire, as “the front line of Christendom.” Under Süleyman the Turks had laid siege to Vienna with a quarter of a million men in 1529, and they would return again in 1683. So for all the elegance of the imperial residence, the palace of Schönbrunn, the beauty of the broad sweep of the Danube, and the bustle of the narrow, crowded streets in the center of the town, the state of the gates and the walls mattered more than the addition of a few flower beds. Gardens were something of a luxury.
From the moment Clusius arrived, he discovered that while there were advantages to working for an emperor, his job was attended by many frustrations. Maximilian was busy, and Clusius had to wait two months for an audience and more than a year for any sign of activity at the site chosen for the garden. Worse, the imperial chamberlain in charge of both the finances for the hortus and arranging Clusius’s own pay turned out to be a strict Catholic who made life as difficult as he could for the Protestant botanist. On the other hand, Clusius did begin to receive regular parcels containing the bulbs and seeds of many plants from the imperial ambassador at Istanbul, and he struck up a botanical friendship with Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, who was now back at court. The two men exchanged presents of plants, and when Busbecq left for France in 1573, he presented his friend with a large quantity of seed. Clusius did not get the opportunity to plant it for another two or three years, by which time Busbecq’s gift had shriveled so badly that he feared the seed was dead; but it did germinate eventually and turned into a spectacular profusion of tulips— a suitable mark indeed of the friendship between two champions of the flower.
For all that, the garden project continued to languish, and by the summer of 1576 Clusius’s pay was eleven months in arrears. Then Maximilian died suddenly, and matters took a turn for the worse. The new emperor, Rudolf II, was a Catholic zealot who dismissed every Protestant serving at his court. Worse, he had little interest in flowers, and the fledgling hortus was torn up so the land could be turned into a riding school. Clusius was horrified. Although his services were always in demand, he never in his life worked for another monarch.
He stayed on in Vienna for a while, disillusioned and plagued by repeated thefts of rare plants from the private garden he still maintained there. At a time when much-coveted plants might exist in only one or two gardens in the whole of Europe, the organized theft of specimens was, if not exactly commonplace, then certainly far from unknown. Like antique thieves today, the men who carried out these crimes were often knowledgeable connoisseurs in their own right and knew exactly what they were looking for. (Those who didn’t simply bribed the ill-paid servants who acted as gardeners for the necessary information.) The plant thieves generally worked for nobles and merchants who wanted an enviable garden of their own for minimal effort. Miscreants such as these seldom made any effort to conceal the evidence of their activities, but there were no police to investigate such crimes, and the authorities were not remotely interested in prosecuting the well-connected for such trivial offenses. On at least one occasion Clusius was forced to grind his teeth while a Viennese noblewoman proudly conducted him around flower beds she had stocked with plants stolen from his garden.
Carolus Clusius was a very old man now, over sixty and half crippled by a bad fall in his bath. He suffered from undiagnosed stomach complaints and had lost all his teeth; and now that his imperial salary had been stopped, he was badly off again and needed some way to supplement the meager income from his lordship and the occasional food parcels he received from his friends. He yearned, too, for some sort of academic recognition of his life’s work. And in the end it came.
CHAPTER 6
Leiden
It was in January 1592 that a large sealed package arrived at the lodging house where Clusius was living. It was a letter from Marie de Brimeu containing the news that he had been offered a post in the medical faculty of the University of Leiden.
Leiden was a large industrial town in the United Provinces of the Netherlands—not a place that Clusius would normally have chosen to live. But de Brimeu’s letter arrived at a particularly opportune moment. After leaving Vienna, the old botanist had retreated to Frankfurt to be close to his friend and patron, the landgrave of Hesse. But the landgrave had just died, his heir had canceled the small yearly pension on which Clusius relied, and deprived of his principal source of income, he badly needed to find work. The post at Leiden offered not just recognition of his life’s work but a salary of 750 guilders a year plus his travel expenses; in addition, several of his correspondents already worked at the university, and the man who had actually proposed him for a professorship, Johan van Hoghelande, was a friend with whom he had exchanged flower bulbs for years. After some consideration, and not without reluctance, Clusius decided to accept van Hoghelande’s offer.
Thus it was that the man who had done more than anyone to popularize the tulip made his way to the Dutch Republic, where the flower would become truly famous. Clusius reached Leiden on October 19, 1593, bringing with him many of his precious plants. Among his baggage was his extensive—and by now quite valuable—collection of tulip bulbs.
The botanist’s new home was a substantial town of perhaps twenty thousand people that stood more or less in the center of the United Provinces. The city was built around the ruins of a medieval castle and was noted as a busy center of the textile trade. Yet when Clusius arrived there, civi
c confidence was in a fragile state. Leiden might have been a large town by Dutch standards, and the university was its pride and joy, but the town was only just emerging from a century of stagnation to embark on a period of rapid expansion that would culminate in its becoming one of the two biggest cloth towns in Christendom. Really there seemed to be no reason why anyone who lived outside Holland should have known or cared much about it. Yet as Clusius himself would have been well aware, in the closing years of the sixteenth century Leiden was actually one of the most celebrated places in Europe.
The town’s fame rested on the heroic role it had played in one of the defining events of the century: the Dutch Revolt. For much of the sixteenth century all seventeen provinces that made up the Low Countries—both the south, which is now Belgium, and the north, which became the United Provinces and is now the Netherlands—were among the ancestral lands of the king of Spain. The king (and between 1556 and 1598 it was the same Philip II who loosed the Spanish Armada on England) was the most powerful monarch in Europe, controlling a world empire that already included much of South and Central America. He was fighting the Turks in the Mediterranean and the English in the Caribbean, as well as confronting the French in Europe. The southern provinces of the Netherlands were centers of commerce and important strategically in any conflict with France, but the lands to the north were a long way down on Spain’s list of priorities. Certainly the king was disinclined to listen to protests from the Netherlands about the high rates of tax being imposed to pay for his wars or the presence of large numbers of Spanish troops there who were being fed and watered at Dutch expense. As a fervent Catholic, he was even less willing to tolerate the rise of Protestantism in his possessions, and from the 1550s there was considerable persecution of the new religion throughout the seventeen provinces.
By the 1570s popular feeling was running against Spain in many parts of the Netherlands, but particularly in the seven predominantly Protestant provinces that lay to the north of the rivers Waal and Maas. These provinces—they were Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Groningen, Overijssel, and Friesland—were poorer than their ten brothers in the south, but they occupied lands that were difficult to attack. When open revolt finally broke out in 1572, even the vaunted armies of Spain proved incapable of conquering them.
The spark for the revolt was provided, inadvertently, by Queen Elizabeth of England. For several years she had been harboring a group of Protestant Dutch pirates known as the Sea Beggars in her Channel ports. Under pressure from Spain she finally expelled them in April 1572, and with nowhere else to go, the Beggars went marauding along the Netherlands coast until they came upon the little port of Brill. Discovering that it had been temporarily left without its Spanish garrison, they occupied the town, to the general acclaim of its inhabitants. Five days later the Beggars sailed down the Zeeland coast and seized Flushing, a strategically vital port that among other things controlled Antwerp’s access to the sea.
From there revolt spread quickly across the Netherlands. By July almost the whole of the province of Holland, with the exception of Amsterdam, was in the hands of the rebels. At Leiden popular opinion was so in favor of the Beggars that the town went over to the revolt spontaneously, before any Protestant troops could be sent to form a garrison. The citizens of the town chased out the few loyalists there, then thoroughly pillaged the Catholic churches, thus earning the undying enmity of the Spaniards.
One of those who reacted most quickly to the news of the uprising was William the Silent, the Calvinist prince of Orange, who soon became the main figurehead of the revolt. He had himself proclaimed stadholder—a title roughly equivalent to governor—of Holland and then “protector” of the Netherlands as a whole. Before long William had put himself at the head of a substantial army and was preparing to resist the inevitable Spanish counterstroke.
It came before the end of the year, and when it did, the Spaniards showed that their strategy was to terrorize the Dutch into submission. Several small towns were overrun and their citizens massacred, sometimes almost to a man. Fear of the Spanish terror cowed many of the cities that had declared for a republic, and before long only the provinces of Holland and Zeeland remained committed to the revolt. A huge Spanish army gathered to push north into the last rebel territories and snuff out the rebellion. Standing in its way was Leiden.
The siege of Leiden was the hardest fought, the costliest, and the most decisive of all the actions of the revolt. Had the town fallen, the Spaniards probably would have succeeded in mopping up the remaining Dutch resistance and restoring their rule throughout the northern provinces. The Dutch Republic would have been stillborn, trade and commerce would have remained concentrated in the south, wealth generated by overseas trade would never have flooded into Holland, and the tulip mania could not have taken place.
As it was, Leiden prevailed, but only after a desperate siege that lasted four months. At the end of that time the citizens had run out of food, and in a last bid to save the town, the stadholder ordered the dikes along the Maas to be cut so that the river waters would flood the land around the town and drive out the besiegers. The waters did rise, but not so far as to end the siege. Then in what most pious Dutchmen considered a direct intervention by the Almighty, the wind changed direction, a huge storm arose, heavy rain fell, and the river waters surged forward until the Spanish soldiers were forced to flee. The men of the Beggar fleet were able to relieve the town by sailing their ships over what had been farmland only days before.
The epic resistance of Leiden saved the Dutch Revolt, but the Spanish threat remained a very real one for decades after the first stage of the uprising was successfully concluded. The seven rebel territories formed themselves into a republic—the United Provinces of the Netherlands—with the prince of Orange still in the important role of stadholder and commander in chief. There were several further Spanish invasions of Dutch territory, the last in 1628, and so although the almost incessant conflict was broken by a long truce that ran from 1609 until 1621, the Dutch otherwise faced the expense of maintaining armies in the field and the constant threat of another attack until about 1630. From then until Spain was eventually forced to recognize the United Provinces by the Treaty of Münster, signed in 1648, the threat was all but ended, and the costs of maintaining a substantial army and navy could be cut. The money that was saved was diverted into the Dutch economy, which flourished as never before after 1630.
When Clusius arrived in Leiden decades after the drama of the siege, the university there was the only one in the United Provinces. It was still very new, having been founded only in the spring of 1575. The establishment of such a center of learning was a necessary step for the new nation to take; not only was it expressly intended as a cultural declaration of independence from Spain, but it was needed to produce ministers for the Church and young men fit to govern the United Provinces. At this time most other colleges in Europe gave priority to religious training, and in fact the majority of universities were directly controlled by the Church, which limited the breadth of the education available. But the Dutch government was determined that this should not be the case at Leiden. Teaching was offered in law, medicine, mathematics, history, and other humanist subjects as well as theology, and control of the university was vested in seven curators who were nominated not by the Church but by the provincial parliament and the burgomasters of Leiden.
All this was doubtless much to Clusius’s liking, but the young university’s humanist policy had caused unexpected problems. Between 1575 and the early 1590s, Leiden’s dangerously liberal reputation meant that the leaders of the Reformed Church looked with suspicion on the graduates of its theology school, and Dutch students who planned to pursue a career in the clergy generally chose to enroll at one of the more strictly Protestant north German universities. The ever-present danger that the United Provinces would fall to a renewed Spanish attack deterred scholars from matriculating in other subjects as well, and in its first dozen years Leiden recruited no
more than 130 theology students all told and fewer humanists. It took some dramatic Dutch victories and the easing of the military situation in the early 1590s to make the place more attractive to prospective students. The university that Clusius agreed to join, then, although nominally two decades old, was really only just being born when the old botanist finally arrived in the Dutch Republic.
It was a good time to come to Leiden. Suddenly money was available to improve the facilities, hire more staff, buy more books, and offer grants to more young scholars. Over the next half century, the number of students in residence rose fivefold, from one hundred to five hundred, and the library built up one of the most comprehensive collections available anywhere. The university became particularly famous for its school of anatomy, where dissections of human cadavers were carried out. The mysteries of the body were only just beginning to be explored in this period, and anatomy was one of the most fashionable subjects of the day. At Leiden public interest was so great that dissections were frequently carried out before spectators, and visitors were also encouraged to visit the university’s anatomical museum, where over the years wonders such as an Egyptian mummy, stuffed tigers, a giant crocodile, and an immense whale’s penis were put on display. In the fifty years that followed Clusius’s arrival, this sort of excellence resulted in Leiden’s becoming possibly the best—and certainly the most popular—university in Europe. More students were enrolled there than either at Cambridge or at Leipzig, the next two largest establishments in the Protestant North, and Leiden’s student body was also more cosmopolitan and international than any of its rivals’.”
