Tulips

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TULIPS

TULIPS. The tulip made its first impact on European history in 1389 in Kosovo, when the son of the Ottoman sultan rode into battle against the Serbs wearing a shirt embroidered with tulips. The tulip is a plant native to Turkey and much revered in that country, where it is known as lale. The Western name probably derives from a mispronunciation of the Turkish word tulband, 'turban', which was reported back by early travelers as tulipam. It is possible that the similarity of the shape of the turban and the flower caused the linguistic confusion. In 1559 a Swiss physician and botanist, Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), published the first account and the first picture of tulips in western Europe.

In the sixteenth century tulips were cultivated in Europe by a mere handful of botanists. Most notable among them was Charles de L'Écluse, or Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), a native of Arras in the Habsburg Netherlands. Clusius helped establish the Imperial Botanical Garden at Vienna at the behest of Emperor Maximilian II and then created another botanical garden in Frankfurt before his appointment as Horti Praefectus at the recently established University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1592. Clusius had the largest collection of tulip bulbs in Europe and ensured that the university's botanical garden included numerous varieties of tulips.

By then the tulip had already become a fashionable item in aristocratic gardens; in the Dutch Republic it was to become a truly popular flower. In 1612 Emanuel Sweerts (1552–1612) of Amsterdam published his Florilegium, the first sales catalogue that included tulips. Dutch agriculture was already highly commercialized and quick to pick up this new product. As it was, the soil directly behind the dunes in the vicinity of Haarlem proved exceptionally suitable for the growing of bulbs. The interest in tulips reached fever pitch during the 1630s, when a single bulb could change hands for the price of a sizable house on one of Amsterdam's fashionable canals. Especially in demand were the so-called broken varieties, which displayed flamed patterns of many colors, instead of the more common solid coloring. Twentieth-century laboratory tests would reveal that breaking occurred as the result of a viral infection of the bulb. In the seventeenth century it was only understood that the broken varieties were rare, and therefore valuable. Of the Semper Augustus, perhaps the rarest of them all, only twelve bulbs were known to exist, and at a certain point they were all owned by Adriaen Pauw (1581–1653), who was the pensionary, the most important civil servant, first of Amsterdam and later of Holland.

In 1637 the tulip bubble burst, and it took the Dutch authorities years to sort out the financial mess, which left numerous people bankrupt. Although observers at home and abroad insisted it had taught the speculators a lesson, the tulip mania turned out to be a publicity scoop. It would establish in the public mind, for centuries to come, the closest possible connection between Holland and bulbs. Thanks to its flowers, Dutch agriculture is still one of the largest exporters in the world.

See also Botany ; Commerce and Markets ; Dutch Republic ; Gessner, Konrad .