Tulipomania (3 page)

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 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 against
Prince 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 an
iron 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. 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 two
months, 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:

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 contained
seven 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 regimentation of the formal gardens that were in fashion at the courts of England, France, and Italy. Ottoman gardens were impressionist spectaculars in comparison, planted not to impress the eye with geometrical precision but to seduce it with visions of lushness and plenty. An Ottoman garden was designed as a place where its owner might seek refuge from the cares of the world and a retreat from the heat of the day. Within its walls the Turks grew soft fruits and created fountains and melodic streams. It was intended as a little piece of heaven here on earth.

Europeans who traveled to Istanbul during the high days of the Ottoman Empire that Mehmed and his successors now built were generally surprised not merely by the city’s size and opulence but by its masters’ manners and good taste. This was a city of culture and coffeehouses that tolerated the religious diversity of its inhabitants in a manner inconceivable in Europe. Yet the Western notion of the Turk had to do only with cruelty and lust—the savagery of the Ottoman armies was a popular theme, as was curiosity about the hidden
pleasures of the sultan’s harem—and certainly the Turks themselves were as capable of cruelty as they were appreciative of beauty.

Sultan Mehmed himself was a man of just such contradictions. One of his earliest acts was to order the construction of a wonderful new palace at the eastern end of the city, poetically named the Abode of Bliss by its creator but better known today as the Topkapi. It was specifically intended to outdo in its magnificence anything built during the Byzantine millennium, combining—in the words of one chronicler—“variety, beauty and magnificence,” and in which “on every side, inside and out, shone and glittered gold and silver, ornaments of precious stones, and pearls in abundance.” Mehmed, a passionate gardener who collected rare plants from every part of his domain and could often be seen laboring in person among his flowers, saw to it that the Abode of Bliss was surrounded by “very vast and very beautiful gardens, in which grew every imaginable kind of plants and fruits; where water, fresh, clear and drinkable, flowed in abundance on every side, and flocks of birds, both of the edible and of the singing variety, chattered and warbled.” Yet when this cultured man discovered one day that one of his prized cucumbers had been stolen, he had the palace gardeners brought before him and disemboweled, one by one, in the hope of ascertaining which of them had eaten it.

Later Ottoman rulers more than matched Mehmed the Conqueror both in cruelty and in their enthusiasm for exquisite palaces and gardens. The greatest of them all—Mehmed’s great-grandson Süleyman the Magnificent, who came to the throne in 1520 and stretched the Turkish empire from the gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea—was a byword for ruthlessness among those Christians unfortunate enough to encounter his armies. To Europeans he was the “Grand Turk,” the title by which subsequent sultans were also known to the West, and he was acclaimed, among his many other titles, “Possessor of Men’s Necks.”
But Süleyman’s subjects revered him as “the Lawgiver,” and he was a pious man who—exceptionally for an Ottoman—had little use for the harem and lived a chaste life with his favorite wife.

By Süleyman’s day, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the tulip had established itself as the quintessential Turkish flower. It was still unknown in Europe, but its popularity among the sultan and his servants was such that—now that the old proscription on the portrayal of living things was being relaxed—it had become one of the favorite motifs of Ottoman artists and artisans, appearing with increasing frequency on flower vases and tiles. Tulips graced the sultan’s robes, and not merely his underclothes as they had done in Bayezid’s time: Süleyman’s imperial cream-colored brocade gown, which still survives, was embroidered with hundreds of blooms. The royal armor, worn on campaigns in Hungary and Persia, was embossed with a single glorious tulip, nine inches long, and the sultan’s helmet, a masterpiece of the armorer’s craft, was adorned with tulips shaped in gold and set with precious stones.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, tulips were becoming much more commonplace within the Ottoman Empire, and other Turks besides the sultan were making copious use of the flower’s image. They were embroidered onto the prayer rugs sewn by brides for their trousseaux and painted onto water bottles or woven into the velvet coverings that ornamented elaborate Turkish saddles. And just as gardeners planted tulip bulbs to help their souls ascend to paradise, so the women of the Turkish empire sewed thousands upon thousands of images of the flower as religious tokens and offered them up with prayers for a husband’s safe return from war.

It was under Süleyman, it seems, that the Turks first began to cultivate the tulip and to breed new varieties to suit their tastes. The wildflowers that had been grown in Istanbul since Mehmed’s day were short and rounded, almost egg-shaped, not unlike many of the varieties still popular today. Perhaps as early as the late sixteenth
century, however, the Ottomans began to look with favor on new cultivars
*
that the capital’s gardeners had begun to produce. These “Istanbul tulips,” as they became known, may have been bred from species that the Turks had discovered on the northern shores of the Black Sea, in the land of their allies the Crimean Tatars. Istanbul tulips—of which there were eventually as many as fifteen hundred varieties—were more delicate and far more elegant than their predecessors. Their petals were enormously long and slender, and needle-pointed at the tip. The most sought-after varieties were shaped like almonds, with daggerlike petals. They were colored vermilion or russet or sulfur.