Tulipomania Read Free Page B

The principal beneficiaries were the shattered remnants of the Christian states that had ruled the Balkans before the sultan’s time, particularly the Greeks of Byzantium. Bayezid’s greatest ambition had been to take Constantinople and make it the new center of his empire, and he had even besieged the city for five years at the end of the fourteenth century, but he was never able to break down the massive fortifications that enclosed it.
    Admittedly Constantinople was something of a shadow city by 1400, its decline reflecting the fading fortunes of its Byzantine rulers. In fact it was more than half empty, the seven long miles of its walls enclosing a town of no more than fifty thousand people, scattered now among what were effectively large villages separated by ruins, working farms, and orchards. But in size and situation and repute, it was still the greatest city in the world. It was fit to be the capital of the Ottoman Empire—and the new home of the tulip too.
    Bayezid’s demise did not save the Byzantines; it merely postponed their end. Within half a century the Ottomans had regrouped and returned under the command of the dead sultan’s great-grandson, Sultan Mehmed. This time Constantinople was weaker, and the Turkish army considerably larger and equipped with the latest cannons and catapults. In 1453, after a desperate siege lasting less than twomonths, Mehmed’s troops forced a breach in the walls, and the Turks poured into Constantinople. The last Byzantine emperor threw away his imperial insignia and sought an anonymous death in the press of the fighting. Then amid terrible scenes of massacre, the Ottomans took Constantinople and made it Istanbul.

    Even by the remarkable standards of the Ottoman sultans, Mehmed—who was henceforth always known as Mehmed the Conqueror—was a complicated character. Warlike but cultured, sensuous but implacable, he was a ruthless monarch but a humble man. When he gave thanks for his victory at the Byzantine cathedral of St. Sophia on the day Constantinople fell, he knelt and scattered a handful of earth over his turban as an act of obeisance to God. He was also the author of a gloomy Turkish couplet:
    Footman, pour me some wine, for one day the tulip garden will be destroyed;
    Autumn will come soon, and the spring season will be no more
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    But realist though he may have been, the sultan had no intention of relinquishing the Ottomans’ hold on their new capital just yet. On the contrary, the once-great city began to recover under his rule. New buildings appeared on the skyline; four huge minarets rose alongside St. Sophia, which became the Hagia Sofia mosque; the land walls were repaired, and new palaces were begun. And in places that had been abandoned to ruin under Byzantine rule, the Turks built a myriad of gardens.
    Blessed though it was by one of the most perfect physical situations in the world, Istanbul craved such adornment. It had been built at the very edge of Europe, with water on three sides, and it containedseven great hills; even as the Byzantines had left it, the city offered gorgeous views at every turn. Taking full advantage of its emptiness, the Turks planted trees and flowers so that their natural beauty complemented and offset the city’s buildings, old and new. Within a few decades of the conquest, the Ottoman sultan alone could enjoy more than sixty private gardens scattered along the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. Dozens more kitchen plots supplied fruit and vegetables to his palaces. Other Ottomans built sunken gardens that offered shade in the heat of the summer, terraced gardens full of vines, pleasure gardens in public places, and private “paradise gardens,” enclosed within the walls of their own homes and filled with flowers.
    This profusion of greenery distinguished Istanbul, in the eyes of visitors, from any European city. And the Turks planted their gardens in ways that startled Western horticulturists. They hated the corseted