Tulipomania by Mike Dash Read Free Book Online

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. Thepetals 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 agoldsmith’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