Tulipomania Read Free Page A

chronicler, recalling a battleground thickly covered with the fallen and strewn with severed heads still wearing brightly dyed turbans, wrote that he was put in mind of a gigantic bed of tulips, their gaudy red and yellow petals echoing the brilliant colors of the Turkish headdresses.
    In fact, it is quite possible that tulips really were present at the battle of Kosovo—not merely in the poetic phrase of the chronicler but in the more physical form of talismans. In the course of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans seem to have adopted this most holy of flowers to guard themselves against misfortune. They used it in a slightly peculiar way. Partly for protection and partly because the religious proscription against images of living things still had force, the tulip was embroidered not onto banners and surcoats but onto underclothes. The Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul still displays a simple cotton shirt—made to be worn beneath armor and richly decorated with verses from the Koran on the front and embroidered tulips on the back—that was taken from the tomb of one of the Ottoman generals who fought at Kosovo. This was Sultan Murad’s second son, Bayezid, a young prince who had scarcely reached manhood when he led a division of the Turkish army againstPrince Lazar. Bayezid is the first man in history who can be personally identified with the tulip.
    He is supposed to have donned the shirt as a protection against evil but also as a good luck charm. If that is so, the flower served him well at Kosovo. Acclaimed as sultan by his men, Murad’s younger son succeeded his father on the Field of Blackbirds while the battle against the Serbs still raged. He began his reign as he would go on—quite ruthlessly—by ordering the execution of Yakub, his elder brother and chief rival for the throne. This unfortunate prince was quickly garrotted with a silken bowstring in compliance with Bayezid’s decree. The new sultan thus secured the Ottoman succession for himself in the most testing of circumstances.
    Bayezid proved to be a ruler of immense energy and ambition. He tightened the Ottomans’ grip on the Balkans and, in 1396, utterly defeated the last great crusading army, a force of some sixteen thousand men, at Nicopolis in Bulgaria. After the battle the sultan personally supervised the beheading of about three thousand Christian captives. It was hardly surprising that his subjects began to call him Yildirim, the “Thunderbolt.”
    For fully thirteen years, in fact, Bayezid triumphed at every turn, crushing Christian resistance in the Balkans and slaughtering Persians in the east. But the power of his talisman had now exhausted itself. In 1402, near Ankara, he fought a ruler even greater and more implacable than himself: Tamerlane, a crippled Mongol born in the shadow of the Pamirs, a soldier almost as able as Genghis Khan but even more bloodthirsty. Bayezid’s army was scattered, and the sultan himself was overtaken by Mongol archers as he fled the field, and he was brought to grovel at the feet of his conqueror in Tamerlane’s own tent.
    The tulip king was shown no mercy. Tamerlane seized the women of the sultan’s harem for himself and forced Bayezid’s wife Despina to wait on him, naked, at his table. The sultan he confined within aniron cage, which the Mongols took with them as they traveled. On state occasions Tamerlane had the once-proud Bayezid dragged before him so he could use him as a footstool.
    Bayezid survived only eight months of this treatment. His end remains obscure; some say he died of apoplexy, but the playwright Christopher Marlowe, in
Tamburlaine the Great
, has him dash out his own brains against the bars of the cage in despair at his plight. At any rate he was dead before the tulips flowered in 1403.
    The sultan’s capture temporarily halted the tulip’s westward progress and left the fledgling Ottoman Empire in a state of chaos, from which it took the Turks half a century to recover.