Tulipomania by Mike Dash Read Free Book Online Page A

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 bybecoming 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 thesame 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