Tulipomania

by Mike Dash

  Given this revision, it is clear that even if the ambassador’s account is accurate in its other details, attributing to Busbecq the tulip’s introduction to Europe would be all but impossible; the flower was definitely growing in at least one German garden by April 1559. For this to have been Busbecq’s work, he would have had to have sent tulip bulbs back within a few months of his arrival for immediate planting that same autumn—which is possible but not especially likely. It is true that Busbecq did post valuable flower bulbs and seeds from Istanbul to Europe, but as it is not known for certain that he did so any earlier than 1573, it would be dangerous to attribute the existence of one particular tulip to his efforts.

  A similar confusion unfortunately swirls about the part Busbecq may have played in giving the flower its familiar name. The Turks, of course, called the tulip lale, and Busbecq is generally believed to have described it as a tulipan because of the petals’ resemblance to a folded turban—dulbend to the Turks, and tulband to the people of the Netherlands. A comparison of this sort could well explain how the word tulip entered the English language, but it cannot have been as a consequence of Busbecq’s travels. The term has been traced back as far as 1578, when it appeared in a translation of a botanical work that had originally been published in Latin, so it was certainly in circulation before the ambassador published his famous letters. It took time, in any case, for the word tulip to be generally accepted; in the late sixteenth century European botanists most often referred to the flower as lilionarcissus, emphasizing its kinship with more familiar bulbous plants.

  It was in the year 1559, then, that the first tulip definitely known to have flowered in Europe appeared. It grew in the garden of a certain Johann Heinrich Herwart, a councilor of Augsburg, in Bavaria. The town was part of the Holy Roman Empire—that remarkable agglomeration of German cities and states that endured from the Dark Ages until its dissolution at the hands of Napoleon, and of which it is important to remember only, in Voltaire’s famous phrase, that “it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”—and Herwart’s garden appears to have been one of its principal adornments. It was certainly well enough known to attract visitors from some distance away.

  One of these who came and saw the new flower Herwart had grown was a natural scientist called Conrad Gesner, who lived in Zürich. Like many scholars of that time, Gesner was a polymath who studied zoology as well as botany, and he was also a doctor of medicine; one of his most remarkable cases concerned a mysterious epidemic during which snakes and newts were seen crawling from the stomachs of the recently dead. By the late 1550s he was already compiling the important works of natural history for which he is best remembered, including a comprehensive botany called the Catalogus plantarum. He was, in short, well able to understand the significance of the brilliant import he found in Herwart’s flower beds.

  “In the month of April 1559,” Gesner recalled, “I saw this plant displayed, sprung from a seed that had come from Byzantia* or as others say from Cappadocia.† It was flowering with a single beautifully red flower, large, like a red lily, formed of eight petals of which four were outside and the rest within. It had a very sweet, soft and subtle scent which soon disappeared.” The sketch that Gesner made of his short-stemmed scarlet flower still survives, covered with scribbled marginal notes and queries that pay mute tribute to his interrogative mind. It shows a comfortably rounded flower with tight-wrapped petals curling delicately outward at the tips. (There are only six petals, the normal number, in this watercolor, rather than the eight Gesner mentioned in his written description, leaving open the interesting question of whether this pioneer tulip was actually a “sport,” or mutation.) Gesner called it Tulipa turcarum, acknowledging that its provenance was the Ottoman realm.

  By the time the Swiss scientist completed his sketch in the spring of 1559, however, the tulip had certainly established itself elsewhere in Europe. Gesner himself had already seen a sketch of another specimen, yellow this time, that may have grown in northern Italy; it had been sent to him by his correspondent Johann Kentmann, an artist who had lived in Padua, Venice, and Bologna between 1549 and 1551. From these bases and maybe others, the flower spread quickly from country to country. Its novelty, delicacy, and beauty made it welcome everywhere, and its wide distribution was assisted by the easy portability of its bulbs.

  The time was now right for the tulip. With the discovery of silver mines in the Americas and trade routes to the Indies, there was more money about in Europe than ever before, and the rich were looking for interesting new ways to spend it. The Renaissance had reawakened interest in science, and printing had made both new discoveries and hoarded stores of older knowledge widely available. One consequence of these developments was that botany and gardening were greatly in fashion among the elite. Many of the most influential and affluent citizens of Europe planted their own gardens and wanted to stock them with rare and coveted plants. Even in Augsburg, Councilor Herwart’s collection was easily overshadowed by the gardens of the Fuggers, the fabulously rich Bavarian family of bankers who were to the fifteenth century what the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were to the twentieth. The Fuggers were growing tulips in Augsburg by the beginning of the 1570s.

  There were tulips in Vienna by 1572. They were in Frankfurt by 1593, and they reached the south of France by 1598 (possibly much earlier). Bulbs were sent into England as early as 1582, where they were soon grown in great quantity. Before the end of the sixteenth century, endless ranks of new hybrids, each more colorful than the last, had already begun to make their appearance: James Garret, one of the best-known botanists in England, spent two decades producing new varieties—so many that even his friend John Gerrard (the curator of the physic garden of the London College of Physicians, who mentions them in a herbal published in 1597) confessed that “to describe them particularlie were to roule Sisiphus’s stone, or number the sandes.”

  Garret was a Flemish immigrant who worked as a pharmacist and kept a garden at London Wall. His tulips—Gerrard mentions that he grew yellow, white, red, and lilac varieties—were valued not so much for their beauty as for their supposed medicinal properties. An English botanist, John Parkinson, whose celebrated treatise on flowers appeared some three decades later, mentions they could be mashed into red wine and drunk as a cure for “a cricke in the necke.” They were the stock from which many more varieties were grown; by the reign of Charles I (1625–49) and with the help of imports from the East, more than fifty different tulips were cultivated in the royal gardens.

  Gerrard might not have felt able to make the effort to catalog all these flowers, but someone had to. The profusion of new varieties included tulips that differed one from another not merely in their color but in their height, the shape of their leaves, and whether they bloomed early or late. What the flower needed now, more than anything, was someone who could create order from the impending chaos. Without a sound system of classification, the whole genus could get mired in a botanical muddle from which it might never emerge. Without a system of evaluation, moreover—one that indicated which flowers were rare and covetable, and which common and worthless—a trade in tulips could never have developed.

  Fortunately such a man existed. He was indisputably the greatest botanist of the sixteenth century, indeed one of the greatest of all time. He was to become, in important respects, the father of the tulip. His name was Carolus Clusius.

  *A Turkish coin.

  *Byzantium, that is, the Ottoman Empire.

  †province in central Anatolia, still today the home of flourishing colonies of wild tulips.

  CHAPTER 5

  Clusius

  One day in the autumn of 1562, a ship sailed into the harbor at Antwerp carrying a cargo of cloth from Istanbul. Somewhere among the bales of Eastern fabrics, consigned to one of the great merchants of the town, were tulip bulbs, perhaps the first ever seen in this part of northern Europe.

  The Flemish merchant who had ordered the cloth was surprised to find that his consignme
nt included a package of tulips. Perhaps they had been intended as a gift, stuffed in among the fabrics by a grateful Ottoman who was making a decent profit on the shipment. At any rate the merchant had not been expecting them and did not want them. He did not even know what they were. Thinking the bulbs must be some strange Turkish sort of onion, he had most of them roasted and ate them for his supper, seasoned with oil and vinegar. The rest he planted in his vegetable patch, next to the cabbages.

  Thus it was that in the spring of 1563, a few strange flowers poked their heads above the dung and detritus of an Antwerp kitchen garden—somewhat to the disgust of the garden’s owner, who had been looking forward to another meal or two of Turkish onions. The petals were red and yellow in color, and stood out in their delicacy and elegance from the drab leaves of the root vegetables that surrounded them. These fortunate survivors of the cloth dealer’s dinner may well have been the first tulips to flower in the Netherlands, and even the Flemish merchant guessed that the latest products of his cabbage patch were something out of the ordinary. He had never seen plants like them before, and, his interest piqued, a day or two later he took a visitor out into his garden and asked him what they were.

  The visitor was Joris Rye, a businessman from the nearby town of Mechelen, whom the cloth merchant knew took a keen interest in horticulture. Almost certainly Rye did not recognize the flowers either; tulips were still all but unknown in northern Europe at this time, and Gesner’s description of them had yet to be published. Nevertheless, the cloth merchant’s visitor was one of the few men in Antwerp who would have understood the importance of preserving the unusual new red and yellow flowers he was shown that day. He was an enthusiastic botanist who filled his own garden back in Mechelen with rare breeds of plants and maintained an extensive correspondence with many of the most prominent horticulturists of the day. So when, with his friend’s permission, Rye transplanted the surviving tulip bulbs from the cabbage patch to Mechelen, he did more than just plant them and cultivate them; he wrote to tell his scientific friends what he had found and asked for their assistance and advice.

  One of Joris Rye’s most enthusiastic correspondents was Carolus Clusius, an exceptionally able botanist in his late thirties who had already spent many years traveling through Europe searching for rare and valuable plants. If Rye was going to tell anyone about his new discovery, it would probably be him. So it may well have been in 1563 that Clusius first heard about the tulip.

  Clusius was not his real name. He was born Charles de L’Escluse in the French city of Arras in February 1526. His mother was a goldsmith’s daughter and his father an extremely minor member of the nobility, whose lordship at Waténes was so poor that he had been forced to take an administrative job at a monastery at St. Vaast to help support his family. This proved to be a piece of good fortune, so far as young Charles was concerned, because at a time when many young aristocrats spent more time learning how to hunt and fight than they did in the classroom, it meant he attended the monastery school and received a thorough education.

  De L’Escluse proved to be an able student. From St. Vaast he went on to the highly regarded Latin School at Ghent and then to Louvain, which at that time possessed the only university in the Netherlands. He learned Flemish, Greek, and Latin and—in accordance with his father’s wishes—studied law, receiving his degree in 1548. But at Louvain de L’Escluse did more than learn of legal precedents. It was almost certainly there that he first encountered the Protestant heresy that Martin Luther and his followers had been spreading across northern Europe. Despite, or perhaps because of, his monastic upbringing, de L’Escluse found Luther’s arguments persuasive, and he abandoned Catholicism. This meant he no longer felt safe at Louvain, and thus it proved to be the second great turning point in his life.

  It is easy, now, to underestimate the significance of de L’Escluse’s conversion, and it is important to remember that religion, in the mid-sixteenth century, remained firmly at the center of both public and private life. It played a role in the lives of almost everyone—even people, like Charles de L’Escluse, who were not especially religious. To turn one’s back on Rome meant risking not only the wrath of the Church, which taught that heretics could expect only damnation, but also of Europe’s Catholic monarchs, who, with the Inquisition’s help, often did what they could to ensure that Protestants entered into eternal life sooner than they expected. Louvain was one of the dominions of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, whose possessions stretched from Germany to Spain—a man so pious that he ended his reign by becoming a Catholic monk. That meant de L’Escluse was in very real danger. During one period of persecution, his own uncle was burned at the stake for embracing the same heresy that he now professed. De L’Escluse decided he would be better off in the Protestant lands.

  Not daring to tell his staunchly Catholic father where he was going, he journeyed to the town of Marburg, where the local German princeling, Philip the Magnanimous, the landgrave of Hesse, had recently founded a university specifically to educate the burgeoning Lutheran elite. De L’Escluse enrolled there with the intention of reading law. But while at Marburg he found himself increasingly attracted to the study of botany, and he began to take long walks around the local countryside, searching for rare and unusual plants.

  At this time botany was not regarded as a distinct subject, worthy of study in its own right. It existed only as a branch of medicine and then merely as an aid to identifying medicinal plants and herbs. In order to pursue his interest in botany, de L’Escluse had to abandon law and become a student of medicine. This he did in the summer of 1549. It was also at about this time that he Latinized his name to Carolus Clusius.

  It was de L’Escluse’s decision to become Clusius that really suggests that his espousal of Lutheranism had more to do with an acquired distaste for the Catholic religion than with any great faith in the new ideas. Latin names were in fashion among the humanists—those who rejected old-fashioned and claustrophobic religious authority in favor of the rediscovery of the secular ideals of the Classical age. Clusius’s passion for botany, and his willingness to move from Catholic lands to Protestant and back again in pursuit of his beloved plants, mark him out as a humanist first and foremost.

  For the rest of his life, Clusius traveled almost incessantly. He studied in Montpellier, Antwerp, and Paris and spent months tramping through Provence and Spain and Portugal in search of new plants. He went to England, where he met Sir Francis Drake. At the same time he began to earn a reputation as a scientist, publishing books on medicine and pharmacy and entering into what became a prodigious and lifelong correspondence with fellow botanists throughout Europe. It has been estimated that Clusius wrote as many as four thousand letters during his lifetime, an astonishing quantity in an age when the posts were not only slow and unreliable but also expensive enough to consume a large portion of the botanist’s meager income. So when an unknown flower bloomed in an Antwerp kitchen garden, he was a natural choice to receive a letter from Joris Rye.

  When Rye’s first crop of tulips flowered in 1564, Clusius was in Spain on one of his protracted botanical field trips. But twelve months later he was back in the Netherlands, and it may have been in this year that he saw the flower himself for the first time. This is not certain, since he did not mention tulips in any of his writings before 1570, but it can hardly have happened any later than 1568, when the botanist actually moved to Rye’s hometown, Mechelen, to live with his friend Jean de Brancion. Clusius was quick to recognize the importance of Rye’s discovery, acknowledging that the brilliant new flowers “bring pleasure to our eyes by their charming variety.” But he remained a man of science first and foremost, and when he heard from Rye that the tulips’ original owner had eaten them with relish, he resolved to investigate their potential as a foodstuff. He had a Frankfurt apothecary named Müler preserve some bulbs in sugar and then ate them as sweetmeats. They proved, in his considered opinion, to be far tastier than orchids.

  Even in a war-torn and f
requently starving Europe, tulips never really caught on as a delicacy (though they were consumed in quantity by the Dutch during the “hunger winter” they endured at the end of the Second World War). The central role that Clusius played in the history of the flower had nothing to do with the experiments he conducted with Müler and everything to do with his habit of dispatching specimens of the plants he encountered to correspondents all over Europe. As slow as the European mails of the time were, they were unlikely to harm tulip bulbs, and thanks in large part to Clusius and his circle the flower established itself in gardens from Jena to Vienna, Hungary to Hesse.

  By now the botanist was at the height of his powers. A contemporary portrait shows a long-faced gentleman of obvious intelligence with a steady, piercing gaze. He appears handsome and distinguished and wears his hair brushed back from his forehead, his mustache thick and his beard short and neatly clipped above a full ruff, in the fashion of the day. For a solitary man who never married and had minimal contact with his family for years on end, Clusius had a remarkable number of friends. In person he was both earnest and—being often troubled by ill health—inclined to melancholy, yet there was obviously something very compelling about him, for he maintained lifelong friendships with dozens of men and women from very different backgrounds. His skill with languages must have been a help—he spoke at least nine, including French, Flemish, Italian, English, Spanish, German, and Latin—but it was undoubtedly his passion for plants and his extraordinary knowledge of botany that made so many people in so many different countries look forward to his next letter and anticipate the wonders his packages might contain. His correspondent Marie de Brimeu, whose proper title was princess de Chimay, and who lived at The Hague, seems to have harbored something approaching maternal feelings for the old bachelor and sent him numerous presents and parcels of food. It was Marie who bestowed on Clusius perhaps the compliment he treasured most; he was, she wrote, “the father of every beautiful garden in this land.”