Tulipomania Read Free

crossed with other strains, or otherwise improved by man. As late as the early sixteenth century, when the Turkish warlord Babur counted thirty-three different varieties of wild tulip as he passed south through Afghanistan, the old nomad peoples do not seem to have encountered any garden hybrids. When Babur—who overthrew the kingdoms of northern India and established the dynasty of Moguls, whose name remains a byword for luxury and opulence—planted tulips in the innumerable formal gardens he created, the bulbs he sowed were wildflower bulbs.
    Yet of all the blooms in a Muslim garden, the tulip was regarded as the holiest, and the Turkish passion for this flower went far beyond mere appreciation of its beauty. For the Ottomans as for the Persians, it had a tremendous symbolic importance and was literally regarded as the flower of God because, in Arabic script, the letters that make up
lale
, the Turkish word for “tulip,” are the same as those that form
Allah
. The tulip also represented the virtue of modesty before God: When in full bloom, it bows its head. After the proscription on images of living things was finally relaxed, in the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, tulips were often depicted inOttoman illustrations of the Garden of Eden, blossoming beneath the fruit trees where Eve was tempted. Turks who willingly gave their lives in battle, believing that death in the service of Islam was the surest passport to a paradise of meadowlands where divinely beautiful houris would serve them the wine they were denied on earth, fully expected to find their heaven strewn with tulips. To an Ottoman gardener, therefore, it was one of the handful of flowers of the first value, and only the rose, the narcissus, the carnation, and the hyacinth were worthy to be classed alongside it. All other blooms, however rare, however beautiful, were considered “wildflowers” and were cultivated only occasionally. For this reason it is not hard to believe that tulips accompanied the Turks as they swept westward from Asia into Europe.
    * The reason was that it was thought insulting for man to attempt to capture—imperfectly—one of the perfect creations of God.

C HAPTER 3
Within the Abode of Bliss
    T wo hundred and fifty years before Dutchmen bid for bulbs in the taverns of Holland, the tulip came to the plain of Kosovo in the southern marches of Serbia. There, at a place called the Field of Blackbirds, a Christian army of fifteen thousand men led by a man named Prince Lazar stood and faced twice that number of Ottoman Turks under the command of their sultan, Murad I. The great battle that Murad and Lazar fought on St. Vitus’s Day in 1389 helped to seal the fate of the Balkans for the next five hundred years.
    The day did not begin well for the Serbs. The charge of the best and bravest Christian knights that opened the battle was beaten back, and Lazar himself was captured in the confusion. On the Turkish side, meanwhile, Murad directed his men with the skill to be expected of a sultan who had spent most of his thirty-year reign on campaign. His position at the center of the Ottoman army seemed secure; he was screened by three lines of camels, chained one to anotherto present an impenetrable obstacle to the Christian cavalry, and intended, like Hannibal’s elephants, to terrify an enemy that had never encountered such exotic creatures before. And yet somehow one Christian soldier did reach the sultan. According to legend, this man was a Serb whom Lazar had publicly accused of treachery on the previous evening, and who now proved his loyalty by impaling Murad with such force that the dagger he thrust into the Turk’s chest sprouted from his back.
    The sultan fell, mortally wounded, but he remained alive just long enough to summon the captive Prince Lazar and order his immediate execution. Thus the Christian and the Turk joined the thousands of their men who lay dead upon the Field of Blackbirds. And a Muslim