Price of a mill

We desire the things we cannot have. Somewhere along the way, those desires clutch to sinful actions and become inseparable in their unholy matrimony, an outside observer will never be able to find the end of one and the beginning of the other.

A young man arrives at Leiden on the 19th October, 1593. His name is Carolus Clusius. He carries a secret - a private collection of precious tulip bulbs. Already a famous botanist, he would teach medicine at the University of Leiden and establish one of the earliest botanical gardens. He would also create a vast interest in tulips which would result in one of the biggest flower obsessions known to date - Tulipomania.

Clusius loved his flowers and did not wish for them to be underappreciated, thus when he was asked to sell them, he asked for unrealistically high sums of money. The botanist wasn’t greedy however, he often gave rare specimen of his collection to his friends for free, if he knew the gift would be cherished, but he was not a man that would waste his treasures.

He suffered greatly for his stubborness, despite its justified nature. From his letters to friends, it can be estimated that over 100 flower specimen were stolen from his garden.

At the same time, other botanists began cultivating tulips, seeing the growing demand for them. They faced a problem however; it took extremely long for the flowers to actually grow. Moreover, no one knew how to predict what kind of tulip would grow from a given bulb, thus making trading the bulbs quite ambiguous. The most prized flowers possessed petals with multiple colours, which ironically was a result of a tulip-only virus, now referred to as Tulip Breaking Virus.

Enter, Greed. A number of smart people saw an opportunity in those vivid petals. Knowing nothing about botany, merchants, painters, craftsmen would buy bulbs for outrageous prices in hopes of reselling them for an even more ridiculous price. One of the most extreme cases saw a mill traded for a single bulb, though other cases of people selling or trading most of their stuff for a simple flower were common.

To commemorate this obsession, Alexander Dumas wrote a novel called the Black Tulip. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/965/965-h/965-h.htm I’m sure you are able to guess from the name what it is about. The intriguing part is, black tulips do not exist in nature and the only variety that comes close to the colour is called Queen of the Night which is dark purple.

Karma rolls by on a flower-adorned chariot, laughing.

Eventually, the prices rose to such extremes that traders refused to buy any tulips. This happened in February 1637, creating a ripple throughout the United Republics of Netherlands that resulted in a crash of the tulip market. Historians approach this event with a number of perspectives. Some say that the effects were devastating, crippling the Dutch economy, while others state that it wasn’t that bad. Which ever it is, doesn’t matter to us because even if the ripple wasn’t strong enough to ruin a county, it was surly enough to imprint itself on the pages of history.

Even today, the Netherlands control the majority of tulip trade around the world, but we shouldn’t forget that apart from the worn-out stereotypes of the Amsterdam’s red light district, klompen or seas of tulips the country has so much more to offer. The country that gave the world Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh. The first country in the world to grand its citizens the right of same-sex marriage. The country that keeps fighting for human rights and sets and example to the rest of the world. +1 to the Netherlands.