Talking Tulip Mania with J G Harlond, Holland in the 17th Century

4th February 2022

Talking Tulip Mania in Holland in the 17th Century, the heart of J G Harlond’s novel: The  Chosen Man (Book 1 of the Ludo da Portovenere trilogy).

#Tulipmania

Think about the Dutch province of Holland and two images come to mind: bicycles and tulips. In Amsterdam, tulips feature on everything from umbrellas to socks. So how did a small plant growing wild in Afghanistan and on the isle of Crete plant itself so firmly in moist soil of the rainy Netherlands, then become a connoisseur item worth more than its weight in gold?

Wild Tulips Aghanistan

The story begins in sixteenth century Turkey, where the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman kept a team of assassins as gardeners in the Topkapi to deal with any would-be thief. Tulips were very precious in those days. Despite all odds, the Austrian Ambassador to Constantinople smuggled bulbs out of the city and on returning to Vienna gave them to one Carolus Clusius, Prefect of the Imperial Herb Garden. Clusius then moves to Leiden for religious reasons, and plants them in the university garden, where they thrive. Soon, local horticulturists begin cultivating them and by 1593 Dutch tulips are a collector’s item.

Around 1624, Clusius is offered 3,000 guilders for a bulb bred from his original collection. This was more than a successful merchant could earn in a year and the start of what we know as ‘tulip fever’ or ‘tulipmania’. Bear in mind that a skilled artisan’s family lived on 300 guilders per annum.

By the early 1630s, wealthy upper-class and professional men are purchasing decoratively striped and spotted tulips as a status symbol. ‘Connoisseurs’ breed the plants to exchange and sell amongst themselves. This is the Dutch Golden Age when Calvinist thrift has resulted in surplus income and a degree of conspicuous spending is tolerated. Rising professional men, lawyers and architects, begin acquiring paintings for their dreary homes, and brightly-coloured tulips for their hitherto functional gardens.

What they are buying are exclusive luxury items, because these tulips have individual identities. They display unique patterns and combinations of colours, and they have names.

If the purchaser is lucky even a single-coloured tulip bulb will produce offsets with fancy stripes, each of which can be given a superior-sounding name such as Semper Augustus or Admiral of Admirals, or named for his home town. Hence, Root en gheel van Leiden, Admiral van Eyck, or Generalissimo.

For a period of about two and half years, bulbs were traded at outrageous prices. Pamphlets instance men exchanging an entire farm or newly-built townhouse for just one bulb. A man owning a dozen bulbs was offered over 3,000 guilders for just one of them.

By 1636, the craze was out of control; workmen were selling their tools to join a get-rich-quick futures market in which promissory notes changed hands up to ten times a day for goods unseen.

Lamenting this lunacy, a man named Munting recorded items and their value for a single Viceroy bulb. (A baker’s family lived on 250 guilders a year.)

What provoked otherwise sober-minded, frugal Protestants to join this collective madness over a flower named for a Turkish infidel’s turban? The answer lies in a combination of factors, but the presence of the plague underlies it all. Death was on the doorstep. Take Amsterdam in 1635, a thriving city with a huge population for the epoch. The Dutch have wrested their independence from Habsburg Spain and are currently engaged in the Thirty Years War to keep it. The general ethos among ordinary folk going about their daily lives is what we call the ‘work ethic’. Frippery and ostentation are frowned upon, money must not lie idle so it is ploughed back into small businesses and sound investments. Except every evening they hear a clanging bell and the cry ‘Bring out your dead’. Time is precious, and very uncertain. This is probably the final motivating factor: ‘We could be dead tomorrow so why not take the risk?’ Sign a promissory note and sell on immediately – to provide for the family in the future. Cheap single-coloured ‘rag goods’ have been known to ‘break’ and become fancy pinks or violets . . . We could be rich.

At its height in the early spring of 1637, working men were attending auctions in the backrooms of taverns. Catalogues with exquisite watercolours of the tulips on offer were circulated along with jugs of ale – and the bidding begins on bulbs still in the ground. It was exciting, contagious, until eventually a merchant pays 6,650 guilders for a dozen white-petaled rag goods and the bubble bursts. An economic bubble inflated by a Habsburg-Vatican conspiracy (based on my research for The Chosen Man) using (in my version) a rogue Genoese merchant and one-time pirate named Ludo da Portovenere as an agent-provocateur.

It was collective madness indeed, but having lived in the province of Holland I can appreciate, to some extent, why tulips became and remained so popular. They bring colour and joy at the end of long, dark winters, and the 1600s were deep in a mini-ice-age. Dutch frugality and diligence had led to wealth, but many feared they might not have the time to enjoy it and took to the thrill of gambling. The dreadful irony is that the flames and stripes, the delightful colouring of the most coveted bulbs was due to an infirmity, an infection. It was always going to end in debt and tears one way or another.

J G Harlond

The Chosen Man is published by Penmore Press. Discover more about the author via her website

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