BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Limit Borderlands For Ffion CONTENTS MAP OF THE U NITED PROVINCES OF THE NETHERLANDS A NOTE ON PRICES A Mania for Tulips The Valleys of Tien Shan Within the Abode of Bliss Stranger from the East Clusius Leiden An Adornment to the Cleavage The Tulip in the Mirror Florists 10 Boom 11 At the Sign of The Golden Grape 12 The Orphans of Wouter Winkel 13 Bust 14 Goddess of Whores 15 At the Court of the Tulip King 16 Late Flowering NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A NOTE ON PRICES It is impossible to make accurate comparisons between prices in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and those today Figures can certainly be calculated, based on the comparative prices of gold or essential foodstu s, but they not take into account vital di erences such as what constitutes a minimal standard of living (in many respects, people who today would be called poor live more comfortably than the richest Dutch in the seventeenth century) and certainly not what luxuries such as tulip bulbs were worth in the Golden Age The best comparisons probably come from looking at di erent salaries and earnings The table that follows sets out some typical examples from the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century.* The basic unit of currency in the republic was the guilder One guilder was made up of 20 stuivers 20 stuivers = guilder ½ stuiver Cost of a tankard of beer 6½ stuivers Cost of a 12-pound loaf, 1620 stuivers 18 stuivers 13 guilders Daily wage of an experienced Haarlem bleacher, 1601 (= about 110 guilders a year) Daily wage of an Amsterdam cloth-shearer, 1633 (= about 250 guilders a year) Exchange price of one Dutch ton of herring, 1636 60 guilders Exchange price of 40 gallons of French brandy, 1636 250 guilders Annual earnings of a carpenter, 1630s 750 guilders Clusius’s salary at the University of Leiden, 1592 1,500 guilders Typical earnings of a middle-ranking merchant, 1630s 1,600 guilders Rembrandt’s fee for his greatest masterpiece, The Night Watch, 1642 3,000 guilders Typical earnings of a well-off merchant, 1630s 5,200 guilders Highest reliably attested price paid for a tulip bulb, 1637 *Sources: Deursen, Plain Lives; Hunger, Charles d’Ecluse; Posthumus, Inquiry; Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland They were possessed with such a Rage or, to give it its proper Name, such an Itching for their Flowers, as to give often three thousand Crowns for a Tulip that pleased their Fancies; a Disease that ruined several rich Families MONSIEUR DE BLAINVILLE, TRAVELS THROUGH HOLLAND (LONDON, 1743), vol 1, p 28 ... he died of apoplexy, but the playwright Christopher Marlowe, in Tamburlaine the Great, has him dash out his own brains against the bars of the cage in despair at his plight At any rate he was... Rembrandt’s Holland, p 72, citing J van Loenen, De Haarlemse Brouwindustrie voor 1600 (Amsterdam, 19 50), p 53 Number of breweries Groenveld et al., Deugd Boven Geweld, p 176; Raaij, Kroniek, entry... Netherlands, pp 46–47 Dutch East India Company Ibid., p 54 The Black Tulip Dumas, Black Tulip; Blunt, Tulipomania, p 17 Trade in pound goods Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, pp 51–52 Chapter