Mehmed The Gardener:
"In 1400 AD Constantinople was a shadow city, its decline reflecting the faded fortune of the final Byzantine rulers. In fact, the city was more than half empty. The seven mile long walls enclosed a city of barely 50,000. But in size and situation and reputation, it was still the greatest city in the world. At least it was true until 1204… bronze cannons made by a Hungarian Christian who had originally offered his tech to Emperor Constantine the 11th, but he didn't have the money to pay for the guns… when we were there for a while, on vacation, they referred to it, a lot of the locals referred to it as Constantinople... When Mehmed discovered one day that one of his prized cucumbers had been stolen, he had the palace gardeners brought before him and disemboweled them one by one, in hopes of ascertaining which one of them had eaten it. Later Ottoman rulers would more than match Mehmed the Conquerer both in cruelty and in their enthusiasm for exquisite palaces and gardens."
Carolus Clusius Part 1:
"Charles de L'Escluse… was surprised to find a package of tulips. Perhaps they’d been intended as a gift. They were stuffed in amongst the fabric, and probably put there by a grateful Ottoman who was making a good profit on this shipment. At any rate, the merchant had not been expecting them and didn't want them. He actually had no idea what they were. He thought they were a strange sort of Turkish onion. Most of the bulbs were roasted, and served for supper. Seasoned with oil and vinegar. The rest he planted in his vegetable patch, next to the cabbages"
Early Dutch Tulip Types:
"Botanical tulips were noted for their robust and simple color schemes. So how did the celebrated cultivars of the Dutch Golden Age become so elaborately colored? The solution to this problem was simple, but disturbing. They were diseased. The great irony of tulip mania is that the most popular varieties, the ones that changed hands, for hundreds and thousands of guilders, were actually infected with a virus, which is unique to tulips. It was this virus that caused both the spectacular intensity and the variations in the colors of their petals and that explained why tulips alone amongst flowers of the garden displayed distinct, intense and brilliant colors that the collectors came to crave"
French Tulipmania 1600:
"Although the French craze was short lived, their enthusiasm for the tulip had important consequences for Parisian society. Even in the 1600s, French court life was renowned and copied throughout Europe for its elegance and style, and fashions of the French court were taken up and followed everywhere. Indeed, they often continue to flourish in the backwaters of Europe long after the French had moved on to something else. And it was not uncommon for visitors to go to West Ireland, or to the forests of Lithuania, and find local noblewomen dressed in Parisian styles that had faded away 10 to 20 years ago. The first people to follow the fashion of the French court were of course the French themselves. Shortly after the tulip became popular in Paris, a mini mania for the tulip hit northern France... If later reports are to be believed, the passion for the tulip at this time was such that in 1608 a miller exchanged his entire mill for a single specimen"
Dutch Style in the Golden Age:
"During the Dutch Golden Age, the once sober, God fearing Dutch, who were so Calvinist that their society frowned upon any kind of ostentation in any form, and the ministers were actually fined for venturing the merest semblance of a joke in church slowly began to acquire a taste for display"
Tulips and the Ottoman Empire 1595:
"The Ottoman Empire had always admired the tulips but starting around 1595 the decline of both the popularity of the tulip and the decline of the Ottoman Empire’s power began. Mehmet III became Sultan in 1595. This womanizer was less interested in tulips and more interested in seducing women.
After Mehmet III you have Mustafa I who ended his reign locked in a dungeon with only two naked female slaves for company. Osman II was killed by having his testicles crushed by his own soldiers. Most of this era’s sultans were either short lived inadequates or butchers. At best they only displayed sporadic interest in the Gardens of the Abode of Bliss which is course the Topkapi palace.
Some degree of stability returned to the Ottoman Empire under sultan Mehmet IV, 1647 to 1687. But his father Ibrahim the Mad, a man who once had all 280 women of his harem drowned just so he could have the pleasure of selecting their replacements, was still not exactly a good father figure for the Sultan. But one thing that Mehmet the, that Ibrahim was noted for, however, was his love of tulips. So there's a little bit of good somewhere in there...
In 1687 Mehmet IV was deposed by his ministers and replaced by a pliant half brother. Now how does this all come about? And there's a good reason for why the Turks through the 17th century or the 1600s were cursed with a long line of mad and bad Sultans who threatened to ruin the empire. Things had changed in Istanbul since the days of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Much of the vigor of the Turkish royal line had dissipated when it proved necessary to abandon the old ways of securing the Imperial succession. Ever since the time of Bayezid, the victor of Kosovo and then following by Bayezid’s bloody example, the new Sultan would inaugurate his reign by having every one of his brothers executed so they couldn't plot to take over from him.
Under Mehmet the Conqueror this lethal tradition had actually been codified as law so that on the ascension of Mehmet III, 1595, no fewer than 19 of the new Sultan’s siblings - some of those still infants breastfeeding - were dragged from the harem and strangled with silk handkerchiefs, having first been circumcised to ensure that they would receive a welcome in paradise.
Brutal as the system was it did produce a series of bold, decisive Sultan's famous for their ruthlessness. In 1607 however, the reigning Sultan Ahmed I could no longer stomach the prospect of one of his beloved children murdering all the others. He arranged for the old policy of legal fratricide to be replaced by one of locking up the unwanted brothers in a small area of the harem known as the kafes or the cage.
The cage was a suite of rooms in the West area of the fourth courtyard of the palace. That offered tantalizing views of fig orchards, the Ottoman paradise gardens and the Bosporus. There with eunuchs for company and sterile concubines for sexual consolation, unwanted princes lived lives that unpleasantly combined the immutable boredom of their daily routine with the nagging terror that execution might after all still be their lot. When one Ottoman ruler died, his eldest son would be taken from the cage where he had spent his entire life and acclaimed as the new Sultan while the other men of the Imperial line would return to the few pursuits they were permitted, embroidery and manufacturing ivory rings among them and their lives of quiet despair."
Tulip Kings End:
"His only chance of saving his neck was abdication. A nephew Mahmoud was plucked from the cage and placed on the throne. His ascension turning point for both the Empire and the tulip… he was a keen voyeur who like nothing better than hide behind a grill in the harem and spy on the women of the palace. On one occasion, the Sultan even had the stitches of the flimsy clothes that the ladies wore while bathing secretly removed and the garments reassembled with glue, knowing that it would melt in the heat of the steam room and expose each woman naked to his gaze... Ahmed the Tulip King was returned to his cage to gaze once more over the Ottoman fig groves and to wile away his nights and dreams of dagger petaled flowers, bathing in the full moon’s light and throwing needlepoint and shadows about the secret gardens of the abode of bliss. So that's the end of the second round of tulipmania. And the poor Ottomans lost all of those tulips. It's incredible. Not, none of them survived"