Every year gardeners across the world go to extravagant lengths to grow the perfect tulip, putting them in the company of erstwhile Ottoman pashas and sultans, writes David Tresilian in Amsterdam Aside from their dykes and windmills, the one thing that everyone knows about the Dutch is their love of tulips, thousands of varieties of this spring flower being grown across Holland every year for a booming home and export market. In fact, so successful has the Dutch tulip industry become that each year the country exports an estimated ten billion bulbs to markets worldwide, the annual flower show at Keukenhof outside Amsterdam being one of the world's largest tulip fairs, attracting growers from across Europe as well as tens of thousands of visitors. This year's fair, which closed with the tulip season at the end of May, was no exception, with bus loads of visitors leaving Amsterdam some 40 minutes away for the annual pilgrimage. However, how many of these tourists, clutching cameras and guides to the latest varieties, will have been aware of the tulip's long and fascinating history, one that has seen the spread of what was originally a Central Asian wild flower to gardens worldwide? How many visitors, too, may have been aware of the tulip's intriguing role in international contacts between east and west, the flower having been originally cultivated by Ottoman pashas and sultans before being introduced into Europe as a result of trading links with the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century? Tulips, now associated perhaps above all with the Dutch, were once an emblem of the Ottoman Empire, with tulip motifs spreading across Ottoman textiles, ceramics, tiles and architectural elements, eventually giving rise to a "tulip age," the lale devri, during the Empire's long 18th century. While tulips do not seem to have spread outside of the Ottomans' Turkish-speaking Anatolian heartlands, they nevertheless became a recognisable marker of Ottoman culture Empire- wide, along with the characteristic forms of Ottoman religious and secular architecture that still mark the Empire's former Arab provinces. Iznik ceramics, marked by the characteristic Ottoman tulip motif, would once have been shipped throughout the southern Mediterranean, with Ottoman ceramic tiles bearing floral and tulip motifs being used to decorate Ottoman buildings. Such motifs will not be lost on contemporary visitors to Istanbul. Perhaps there are traces, too, of the Ottomans' love of tulips in the nooks and crannies of Ottoman-period architecture in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. From Central Asia to Istanbul: There are an estimated 120 species of tulip, cultivated to produce many thousand varieties. However, despite the wide variety of modern tulips, they all have common ancestors in flowers that grew in the mountains of Central Asia, modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, spreading from here through Iran and Anatolia and to eventual cultivation in gardens in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities. Even before the Ottoman conquest of what was then Constantinople and the final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 CE, tulips had taken up an important place in Ottoman and Persian literature and culture, the mediaeval Persian poet Sa'adi writing of visionary gardens, images of paradise, full of multi-coloured tulips and roses. Tulip-decorated tiles have been excavated from palace complexes built by the Seljuk Turks in the Anatolian city of Konya as early as the 12th century CE. Following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the sultan Mehmed II laid out gardens across the city that contained stunning displays of tulips. According to British garden historian Anna Pavord, from whose work these details are taken, Mehmed's new palace of Topkapi Saray, laid out on one of the city's hills, contained pleasure gardens full of tulips, 920 gardeners being employed to maintain the palace's gardens, water channels and pavilions. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the early 16th century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith, with the conquests of Mamluke Egypt in 1517 and in eastern Europe vastly increasing Ottoman territories, tulips became an integral part of Ottoman court culture, tulip motifs appearing on the tiles that covered the walls of religious and secular buildings and on ceramic plates and dishes and textiles. Particularly fine single flowers were given as presents. According to Pavord, the sultan Murad III, a "besotted gardener," ordered tens of thousands of bulbs to be sent to the court in Istanbul from eastern Anatolia in 1593, echoing an earlier order for 50,000 tulip bulbs from the grand vizier for the sultan Selim II's pleasure gardens in 1574. The nakkasan (painters) of the Ottoman court "had a great influence on the work of other artists and craftsmen in the capital," she says. "As their designs spread, a new national style was established. Tulips bloomed everywhere, painted with the same three confident brush strokes to create an elegant, waisted flower with petals that flipped out at the top." Eventually, news of Ottoman gardens and tulips spread to western Europe, 16th-century European travelers sending back news of the flowers. Around the middle of the century, Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Hapsburg ruler Ferdinand I to the Ottoman court, brought examples of Ottoman tulips to Vienna, from where they were taken to Holland and cultivated by botanists in the towns of Amsterdam and Leiden. Tulips in Ottoman court culture: According to Pavord, Ottoman florists such as Sari Abdallah Effendi, described as florist-in-chief ( ser sukurfeci ) to the 17th-century sultan Ibrahim, developed an official naming system for tulips designed as a register of new varieties. Unlike the varieties being developed at the same time in Holland, which favoured a cup-shaped flower and strong colours, Ottoman tulips, given names like peymane-i gulgan (rose-coloured glass) and ferah-efza (increase of joy), were tall and thin with dagger-shaped petals, the sharper and more pointed the latter the better. Later in the century, Dutch varieties were re- imported back to Istanbul by the Austrian ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Schmid zum Schwarzenhorn. It was during the reign of sultan Ahmed III, who ruled from 1703 to 1730, that a kind of mania for tulips took off in Ottoman court culture, Ahmed's reign being dubbed the "tulip period," lale devri, of Ottoman history and by common consent one of the most colourful periods in the later history of the Ottoman Empire. According to his biographer, I. Melikoff, writing in the respected Encyclopaedia of Islam, Ahmed, "a cultured man, a poet and calligrapher, but also a man of exceptional greed... took no interest in any aspect of government," leaving all affairs of state in the hands of his grand vizier Nevshehirli Ibrahim Pasha. The latter, having put an end to the conflicts that had threatened the Empire's borders at the beginning of the 18th century and scored what turned out to be a temporary military victory over the Ottoman's great rival dynasty in neighbouring Persia, gave himself over to satisfying the "hedonistic nature and avidity of the sultan." "Over a period of almost 13 years, Ibrahim Pasha procured an ambience of continuous festivity, symbolised by the tulip," Melikoff writes. "Gardens and window-frames were decorated with tulips; different varieties proliferated; 839 were enumerated in 1726. Competitions were organised. Bulbs became so expensive that the government was obliged to control prices in order to prevent speculation... At times when the flowers were in bloom, Ahmed III used to change his place of residence, proceeding majestically to his yalis [sea-side palace]. The people resorted en masse to the tulip promenades, and barges sailed to Sa'dabad and other places of recreation." Melikoff gives extraordinary and fantastic details of the atmosphere of tulip mania reigning in Ottoman court culture at the time. In the gardens of the Ciraghan Palace in Istanbul, burning night-lights or candles would be placed beneath each tulip bloom. Tortoises could be seen meandering through beds of tulips bearing night-lights on their shells. The Ottoman poet Nedim records memories of such festivities, enjoining readers to "laugh, be glad, make merry" before setting sail for Sa'dabad. Over time, the festivities became ever more extravagant, Melikoff says. "The sultan's palace was crammed with tulips at the height of winter and also with odiferous shrubs; thousands of birds sang in gilded cages; pleasure was the sole purpose of living; the sultan and grand vizier, both of them poets and calligraphers, wrote love poems addressed to each other." It was all too wonderful to last. According to Melikoff, the unbridled expenditure, lax morals and atmosphere of hedonism and excess "caused discontent among the people, in particular the fanatical and reactionary ulema," or religious authorities. Setbacks at home and abroad led to revolts among the sultan's janissary soldiers, not helped by the fact that the sultan and leading officials of the state were away at the time, leaving the governor of Istanbul, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, busily tending his garden on the Bosphorus, to handle the revolts alone. "The court did not return to Istanbul until the night of 29 September 1730, two days after the outbreak of the revolt. On the morning of the 30th, Ahmed sought to negotiate with the rebels: feeling themselves in a position of strength, the latter demanded that the Grand Vizier and the Ketkhuda Kaymak Mustafa Pasha and the Kapudan Pasha be handed over to them." "The sultan tried in vain to rescue his favourite, [but] on the night of 30 September, fearing for his own life, he ordered the strangling of Ibrahim Pasha and his two sons-in-law [Ketkhuda Kaymak Mustafa Pasha and Kapudan Pasha], and at dawn their bodies were surrendered to the rebels." The Ottoman tulip age, born aloft on a wave of hedonism and excess, seemed at least temporarily to be over. Dutch tulip mania: However, this was not the first time that tulips had been linked to a period of excess, the Dutch "tulip mania" of the 1630s providing a western European example that perhaps parallels the eastern story. Introduced into Holland at the end of the 16th century and becoming familiar to the population as a whole from the 1620s onwards, the early Dutch mania for tulips coincided with the country's "golden age," a period spanning roughly the 1580s to the 1670s when Holland's wealth, social structure, science and culture were among the most admired in the world. Dutch merchants, trading out of the port city of Amsterdam, had a dominant position in European trade, the Dutch East India Company, financed by shares traded on the world's first modern stock exchange, having a monopoly on Asian trade and being a prototype for the English and French companies that were to follow. Among these was the famous East India Company that eventually swallowed up vast tracts of India. Tulips, at first an exotic specimen for the connoisseur and then a commodity crying out to be generally traded, became the focus for a game of buying and selling that soon took on the character of one of the world's earliest recorded speculative bubbles, with tulip bulbs being traded at ever-higher prices. As contracts were concluded and deals made that gave buyers and sellers larger and larger paper fortunes, new participants rushed in to join the fray, increasing demand and further driving up prices, the speculation eventually building on itself and providing its own momentum. According to the British journalist Charles Mackay, credited with the first modern treatment of the 17th-century Dutch tulip mania in his 1852 work Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the demand for tulips became so great among those convinced that buying tulip stocks was the way towards making an easy fortune that a gambling mania set in on the recently established Amsterdam Stock Exchange, jobbers speculating in the rise and fall of tulip-based securities by buying when prices fell and selling when they rose. "Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other they rushed to the tulip- marts like flies around a honey-pot." Prices, it seemed could only rise, newly developed financial products, such as contracts for futures and options, being developed to take advantage of movements in the market. "Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips," like so many modern day-traders. "People of all grades converted their property into cash and invested it in flowers." No one could believe that the market would collapse, turning euphoria into fear and panic. Enormous debts were wracked up on the basis of vegetable assets utterly out of scale to their underlying value. When the crash came in 1637, panicked selling reduced the value of tulip contracts to almost nothing. "Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption." Writing on the tulip mania in his Embarrassment of Riches, an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, the Anglo-American historian Simon Schama says that while much has been made of the "apparent incongruousness between the banality of the flower and the extravagance of its treatment," single bulbs of particularly prized tulip varieties selling at the height of the craze for the price of large farms or townhouses, the culprit behind the speculation that undid so many was the development of the paper obligations that gave rise to a secondary market. Few of those dealing in tulip futures would ever have seen a physical tulip bulb, the flower being merely an excuse for speculative trading. "In an international entrepot like Amsterdam, where a glut of capital washed around looking for places to settle, and where rumour and gossip made and ruined fortunes, it was virtually impossible to stifle impromptu speculation," despite the warnings against it. Commenting on the outcome of the Dutch tulip mania in his Short History of Financial Euphoria, the late US economist J.K. Galbraith says that "speculation comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance," in this case the Ottoman-imported tulip. "The small bulbs leveraged large loans," causing those ruined in the eventual crash to turn to bail-outs from the state. "Alas," Galbraith notes dryly, "the only remedy would have been to restore the price of bulbs to the pre-crash level, but this was manifestly impractical, and so the so recently rich were left with their losses." At least they did not end up strangled, like the unfortunate Ottoman grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha. Visiting Kerkenhof: Visitors to the world's best-known tulip show, Kerkenhof, today, perhaps taking the handy bus line that makes the trip every 20 minutes or so from Amsterdam during the flowering season, can be taken through fields of waving tulips on their way to the show grounds, enough to drive any lingering memories of tulip mania, Dutch golden age speculation or Ottoman pashas and sultans far from their minds. This year's show, oddly dedicated to "Germany, land of poets and philosophers" on the grounds that Germany is Holland's largest export market, was perhaps typical of many, with Keukenhof's various exhibition pavilions hosting displays of blooms and innovative and traditional arrangements together with a small museum detailing the tulip's Central Asian and Ottoman origins and a disappointing German-Dutch exhibition pavilion for some reason given over to football. Presumably, this cannot have been of interest to the busloads of respectable-looking Dutch and German ladies descending to view this year's displays. Even stranger was the organisers' decision to scatter images of German poets and philosophers amid the woods and lakes of the Kerkenhof showgrounds: turning a corner while gazing admiringly at the tulips among the trees, one could easily be confronted by an image of a severe-looking 19th-century German philosopher, perhaps exhorting levity in stentorian tones. A valuable feature of this year's show was a display showing how tulips would have been planted during the 17th century at the height of the Dutch speculation, individual tulips being planted at wide intervals in formal beds or parterres. Today, the fashion is quite the opposite, with tulips particularly in public gardens being planted abundantly and in mixed beds. According to information made available at the show, this year's trends include "rugged, honest gardens, as well as cheerful sparkling gardens." Diversity in planting is increasing. This year's colour is yellow. The Netherlands today grows ten billion bulbs a year, 70 per cent of world production, grown on 20,000 hectares of land, the equivalent of 40,000 football pitches. Most of these ten billion bulbs are exported to more than 100 countries, one of the most important being Japan. Some 15,000 people are employed directly in the tulip industry, realising profits of 600 million euros. Not bad for the humble tulip. Keukenhof tulip and bulb fair, Lisse, Holland, to 20 May.
