Every avid travel lover knows the colorful fields of regular geometric shapes that can be seen when flying over Holland. Many people associate the name of this area primarily with tulips - beautiful flowers that can be found here in huge quantities. Where is Holland located, and why is this country considered the birthplace of tulips? What is the history of this area, and what interesting things awaits every guest here?
Holland or the Netherlands?
Many people confuse these two names, but they cannot be equated. The Netherlands is a country that consists of 12 provinces. Two of them together form Holland - the Land of Tulips. These are North and South Holland. However, the name “Holland” is used to refer to the entire territory of the Netherlands.
The official name of the country is the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This area is called the country of tulips due to the fact that a huge part of its territory is covered with multi-colored tulip fields, which look like the flags of different countries replacing each other.
History of the country
The territory of the Netherlands was populated quite early - back in the Neolithic era. Celtic tribes who lived in the 1st millennium BC. e., over time were supplanted by the Germans. In the 5th century, the Frankish kingdom was formed here. In the 10th-11th centuries there were several feudal estates that were part of the Roman Empire. In the 12th century, cities began to emerge in the territory of modern Netherlands, in which trade and crafts rapidly developed. In 1566, a bourgeois revolution began here, aimed at overthrowing the rule of Spain. In the 17th-18th centuries, the Dutch economy became one of the most powerful in all of Europe.
During World War II, the Netherlands declared a policy of neutrality, but was already occupied in 1940. After the end of the war, the country abandoned its traditional policy of neutrality and began to join various political organizations.
From Asia to Holland
Tulips were brought to Holland quite a long time ago - back in the middle of the 16th century. There is a version according to which these flowers were brought here from Vienna by Carlos Clausius, the creator of the apothecary garden at Leiden University. Around the same time, tulips were brought to Austria. They were sent in 1554 by an ambassador named Ogier de Brusec from the gardens of Sultan Suleiman, which were located in Constantinople. The ancestors of the beautiful flowers were a wild species called the Schrenck tulip. It grew in the vast expanses of Turkey, Kazakhstan and the Black Sea coast.
Homeland of tulips
According to another widespread version, the birthplace of the tulip was Iran, and it was from there that this flower spread to other Asian countries. Much later he came to Holland - the Land of Tulips. The word "tulip" comes from the name of the headdress it resembles - "turban".
There is a beautiful legend about this flower. Along one field, where flowers never bloomed, a woman was walking with a baby. When the child saw the flowers, he laughed joyfully, and from his happiness they opened.
So, Carlos Clusius was the man thanks to whom Holland in the future became known as the Land of Tulips. He didn’t even suspect that he would become the culprit of the sheer craze of the entire population of this country for tulips. During the Golden Age, this obsession reached a truly unprecedented scale - in order to acquire new varieties of bulbs, the Dutch were ready to give up entire fortunes, and for a tulip flower bed they easily said goodbye to rich houses and family values.
Tulips today
Today everyone knows which country tulips have been considered as a symbol since ancient times. This is the Netherlands. Holland itself is considered a cultural monument, and tulips make it even more beautiful. However, it cannot be said that after four centuries the Land of Tulips has completely cooled down to these beautiful flowers.
Naturally, in Amsterdam no one will exchange housing for a handful of rare bulbs, but these flowers still remain one of the main sources of income. Every year they bring more than 600 million euros in net income to the Dutch state treasury. The largest flower auction in the country, FloraHolland, has offices throughout the Netherlands. More than 20 million tulips and other plants are sold here every day.
Flower auctions
Tourists will be interested in visiting flower auctions. It's both funny and educational. After all, auctions are held not only to sell as many tulips as possible, but also to entertain the public.
Bidding begins at sunrise. The auction is open all year round, but the best time to visit the Land of Tulips is spring and summer. It is during these seasons that the entire territory of Holland is covered with multi-colored rectangles, on which tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and lilies bloom in turn. Kilometers of neat plantings stretch into the distance, delighting visitors to the country and local residents.
Keukenhof is the largest park
Many people are interested in where the largest and most picturesque park is located in the Land of Tulips. Let's answer: this is Keukenhof, located in Lisse. The word "Keukenhof" literally means "kitchen yard".
This flower garden is considered the largest in the world - its area is 32 hectares. Here you can see “rivers” of tulips and “banks” of hyacinths. Keukenhof is also considered a model in the field of landscape design. Every autumn, about thirty gardeners begin to create pictures of the coming spring. They plant more than 7 million bulbs in this park. The vast majority of growers provide their flowers here for free - after all, for each of them, planting their own flowerbed in Keukenhof Park is considered a great honor. At the same time, flower magnates compete with each other for the right to receive a diploma for the most beautiful flower and for the most picturesque flower bed. Everyone who has ever visited Keukenhof remembers for the rest of their lives how picturesque and unusual the Country of Tulips is.
Every year tourists can see new landscapes in this park. You can come to it every year, and every time you will be amazed at the skill of the gardeners and organizers. Breeders tirelessly develop more and more new varieties of flowers. Long before the season opens, the organizers develop the concept of the next exhibition.
In 2012, the main country at the exhibition was Poland. Guests of Keukenhof could see a portrait of Chopin made of flowers. And in 2010, the “Russian season” was opened. Here one could see various floral decorations - a hut on chicken legs, a large theater, mittens, nesting dolls. St. Basil's Cathedral was built from flowers, and the main guest was D. Medvedev's wife Svetlana. In the same year, two new varieties of flowers were developed - cream-colored tulips were named Miss Medvedeva, and pale pink ones were called Putin. In Keukenhof souvenir shops you can buy your favorite varieties of tulips.
Floriade
But Keukenhof only opens for 9 weeks. Although it is the largest park, there is a project in the Land of Tulips that surpasses Keukenhof in scale. This is a world-famous horticultural exhibition that takes place in Holland only once a decade - the Floriade.
Various cities in the Netherlands are constantly fighting for the right to host this famous exhibition. The city of Almere is a candidate to host the next Floriade, which will take place in 2022. The area where the exhibition is taking place is about 66 hectares. Usually there are not only picturesque flower beds, but also various pavilions, cinemas, recreation areas and attractions.
Financial pyramids, from which many Russians suffered at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, turn out to be far from a new phenomenon. One of the first such pyramids arose back in the 16th century and led to the ruin of an entire country - Holland.
In 1593, Carolus Clusius, director of the herbal garden of Emperor Maximilian II, planted several tulip bulbs in the soil of the botanical garden of Leiden University. The next year, flowers appeared that determined the entire future fate of Holland.
Like most other ornamental plants, the tulip came to Europe from the Middle East. But the tulip had one interesting feature. Beautiful flowers of one color or another grew from its bulbs, and after a few years it suddenly changed: stripes appeared on the petals, each time in different shades. It is now known that this is the result of a viral disease of tulips. But then it looked like a miracle. If a diamond dealer had to buy a new diamond for a lot of money and cut it in a new way, then the owner of a single tulip bulb could become the owner of a new, unique variety, which was already worth several orders of magnitude more on the tulip market.
In 1612, the Florilegium catalog with drawings of 100 varieties of tulips was published in Amsterdam. For example, the bulb of the tulip shown in the picture cost, depending on the size, from 3,000 to 4,200 florins.
Many European royal courts became interested in the new symbol of prosperity. Tulips have jumped in price. In 1623, a bulb of the rare variety Semper Augustus, which was in great demand, cost a thousand florins, and at the height of the tulip boom in 1634-1636 they paid up to 4,600 florins. For comparison: a pig cost 30 florins, and a cow cost 100 florins.
The second reason for the tulip boom was the cholera epidemic of 1633-1635. Due to the high mortality rate in the Netherlands, there was a shortage of workers, so wages increased. Ordinary Dutch people had extra money, and, looking at the tulip madness of the rich, they began to invest in their own tulip business.
Clusius literally infected the Dutch with his passion for tulips. Insanity began in the country, complete madness, later called “Tulipomania” by historians. For more than 20 years, the Dutch have managed to grow dozens of varieties of tulips.
In 1625, a rare tulip bulb could already cost 2,000 gold florins. Their trading was organized on the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem and Leiden. The volume of the tulip exchange reached an astronomical amount of 40 million florins.
By 1635, the price had risen to 5,500 gold per bulb, and by early 1637, tulip prices had increased 25-fold. One onion was given as a bride's dowry, three were worth as much as a good house, and just one Tulip brasserie onion was given for a thriving brewery. Bulb sellers earned huge amounts of money. All conversations and transactions revolved around a single item - bulbs.
For example, a red tulip bulb with white veins cost 10,000 florins, and Rembrandt was paid 1,800 for his painting “The Night Watch,” which made him very happy.
The documented record was a deal of 100,000 florins for 40 tulip bulbs. To attract poor people, sellers began to take small advances in cash, and the buyer’s property was used as collateral for the rest of the amount. For example, the cost of a Viceroy tulip bulb was "2 loads (2.25 cubic meters) of wheat, 4 loads of rye, 4 fat cows, 8 fat pigs, 12 fat sheep, 2 skins of wine, 4 barrels of beer, 2 barrels of butter, 1000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a wardrobe with clothes and a silver cup" - a total of 2,500 florins. The artist Jan van Goyen paid the Hague burgomaster an advance of 1,900 florins for ten bulbs, offered a painting by Solomon van Ruisdael as collateral for the rest of the amount, and also undertook to paint his own.
Tulip fever gave rise to legends. One of them is about how a port tramp, seeing a ship entering the harbor, rushed to the office of its owner. The merchant, delighted by the news of the return of the long-awaited ship, selected the fattest herring from the barrel and rewarded the ragamuffin with it. And he, seeing an onion on the counter that looked like a peeled onion, decided that herring was good, but herring with onions was even better, put the onion in his pocket and departed in an unknown direction. A few minutes later, the merchant grabbed a tulip bulb Semper Augustus (“Eternal August”), for which he paid 3,000 florins. When the tramp was found, he was already finishing his herring and onions. The poor guy went to prison for theft of private property on an especially large scale.
Another apocryphal story is about how Haarlem tulip traders heard about a Hague shoemaker who managed to breed a black tulip. A delegation from Haarlem visited the shoemaker and bought all the black tulip bulbs from him for 1,500 florins. After which, right in front of the amateur tulip grower, the people of Haarlem rushed to furiously trample the bulbs and only calmed down after turning them into mush. They were afraid that an unprecedented black tulip would undermine their well-established business. But the shoemaker could not bear the barbarity, he fell ill and died.
Many Dutch people quit their jobs and constantly played on the tulip market. Homes and businesses were mortgaged to buy bulbs and resell them at a higher price. Sales and resales were made many times, while the bulbs were not even removed from the ground. Fortunes doubled in moments, the poor became rich, the rich became super-rich. The first financial pyramid began to be built, which even Mavrodi would envy. The tulip mafia has appeared, stealing the bulbs.
And on Tuesday, February 3, 1637, it ended in Holland. Moreover, unexpectedly and for hitherto unknown reasons. The auction began with the sale of inexpensive White Crown bulbs at a price of 1,250 florins per lot. Just yesterday there were many people who wanted to buy this lot for a much higher price, but today there were no buyers at all.
The sellers realized that all the bulbs needed to be sold immediately, but there was no one to do it. The terrible news spread throughout the city, and after some time throughout the country. Prices not only dropped - the tulip exchange immediately ceased to exist. Prices for bulbs fell an average of a hundred times. Tens of thousands of people went broke and became destitute in a matter of hours. A wave of suicides swept across the country.
Many farms were sold under the hammer. Many poor people became even poorer. And Holland suffered for a long time from the consequences of speculative fever. Businessmen from London and Paris, where she managed to transfer, also suffered. Tulips from “securities” again turned into just flowers, an object of delight for the eyes of passers-by and guests.
When economists encounter the phenomena of financial panic or financial collapse, they immediately think of such a phenomenon as tulip mania. Strictly speaking, the concept of “tulip mania” is a metaphor used in the field of economics. If you look in Palgrave's Dictionary of Economic Terms, you won't find any mention of the speculative mania of the seventeenth century in Holland. Instead, economist Guillermo Calvo, in his addition to the dictionary, defines tulip mania as follows: "Tulip mania is a phenomenon in which price behavior cannot be fully explained by underlying economic indicators."
The purpose of this work is to identify the features of the emergence of the first financial crisis in Europe and its consequences.
Many researchers agree that events occur in a certain cycle and that they can be repeated from time to time. In this regard, we can say that studying the historical facts of financial crises gives us the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of past generations.
According to Karl Marx, Holland at the beginning of the 17th century could be considered an ideal capitalist country. Almost immediately, foreign and colonial trade became the basis of its economic base. Dutch industry also received a strong boost at this time. The key to success is considered to be the political system of the Netherlands, which guaranteed the big bourgeoisie, which took control of all finance and trade in the country, unlimited dominance.
The “Tulip” epic rightfully bears the title of the world’s very first speculative race, which ultimately ended in collapse for the entire country, which was the leader at that time in economic terms. The excitement and crazy demand for tulips began in the Netherlands in the early 1620s and did not stop until 1937. The peak prices were recorded in a three-year period: from 1634 to 1637.
One of the foreigners intrigued by tulips was Ogier Ghislain de Busbeck, the Austrian ambassador to Turkey (1555-1562). He brought several bulbs from Constantinople to Vienna, where they were planted in the gardens of Ferdinand I, the Habsburg emperor. There the tulips bloomed under the expert supervision of Charles de Lecluse, a French botanist better known by his Latin name, Charles Clusius.
The tulip was a status symbol. He testified to belonging to the upper strata of society. Beautiful flowers of one color or another grew from the bulbs, and after a few years it suddenly changed: stripes appeared on the petals, each time in different shades. Only in 1928 was it established that a change in flower color is a disease of a viral nature (mosaic), which ultimately leads to the degeneration of the variety. But at the end of the 17th century it seemed like a miracle; the petals received an unusual and brighter color. These flowers were a symbol of luxury and their presence in the Dutch garden testified to the high status of the owners in society.
The reason for the frantic demand for tulip bulbs can be considered the publication in 1612 in the Dutch catalog “Florilegium” of almost 100 varieties of this flower. Over time, some European royal courts also became interested in this new symbol of prosperity. As a result, its price began to rise sharply. Realizing that you can make good money from tulips, almost all segments of the population began to engage in this business. The fever was explained by the expectation that soon more and more people would become interested in this flower, and prices for it would rise more than once.
Foreign capital begins to rapidly import into Holland, the cost of real estate rises, and the demand for luxury goods increases. People who had not previously thought about trading began to take an active interest in it and even mortgaged their homes, lands, and jewelry to buy as many tulip bulbs as possible in the hope of earning as much money as possible later.
Before this “flower” rush began, tulips were traded from May, when they were dug up, to October, when they had to be planted in the ground. The following spring, the flowers already delighted their owners. During the boom, the winter trade in seedlings became widespread. Most traders, despite all the risk, tried to buy tulips in winter: in this case, in the spring they could be sold for two or even three times more expensive! By the end of 1636, the lion's share of the year's harvest had become "paper", sold under "futures" contracts. As a result, speculators began to appear on the markets, trying to buy as many “paper” tulips as possible at the beginning of summer, hoping to resell them the following spring at an even higher price.
Prices for tulip bulbs were rising. But on February 2, 1637, the market overheated - prices reached such heights that demand fell sharply. The indebted and impoverished Dutch were left with a lot of tulip bulbs - but there was no one to sell them to. Of course, those who were lucky enough to be the first to sell the bulbs became rich in no time. Those who were not so lucky lost everything. That year, the price of bulbs fell 100 times. This price collapse hit the entire Dutch tulip industry. The tulip crisis became the cause of the subsequent financial crisis in Holland; it turned out that the entire economy of the country was focused on tulips. Affected citizens began to blame the government for provoking the tulip crisis, which adopted a number of amendments to the laws on tulip trade, limiting stock speculation. It is clear that the Dutch government only “closed the hole” that allowed tulip prices to skyrocket. Not everyone understood that the sooner the bubble of tulip mania burst, the easier the consequences would be.
The main dealers desperately tried to save the situation by organizing sham auctions. Buyers began to cancel contracts for the flowers of the summer season of 1637, and on February 24, the main tulip growers gathered in Amsterdam for an emergency meeting. The developed scenario for overcoming the crisis was as follows: contracts concluded before November 1636 were proposed to be considered valid, and subsequent transactions could be terminated unilaterally by buyers by paying 10% compensation. But the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which considered manufacturers the main culprits for the massive ruin of Dutch citizens, vetoed this decision and proposed its own version. Sellers, desperate to get money from their customers, received the right to sell the goods to a third party at any price, and then claim the shortfall from the person with whom the original agreement was concluded. But no one wanted to buy anymore... The government understood that it could not blame any specific category of its citizens for this hysteria. Everyone was to blame. Special commissions were sent around the country to examine disputes over “tulip” transactions. As a result, most sellers agreed to receive 5 florins out of every 100 that they were entitled to under the contracts.
Three years of stagnation in the “non-tulip” areas of the Dutch economy: shipbuilding, agriculture, fishing - cost the country dearly. The scale of the shock that the Netherlands suffered in the 17th century is commensurate with the default of August 1998. Subsequent wars brought the country to a desperate state, accelerating the decline of Holland's trading power.
The tulip craze survived the effects of tulip mania, and the tulip bulb growing industry began to flourish again. Indeed, by the 18th century, Dutch tulips had become so famous that the Turkish Sultan Ahmed III imported thousands of tulips from Holland. So, after a long journey, the Dutch descendant of Turkish tulips returned to his “roots”.
Tulip mania has not yet been sufficiently studied and has not been the subject of thorough scientific analysis. The phenomenon of tulip mania first became widely known in 1841 after the publication of the book “The Most Common Delusions and Follies of the Crowd,” written by the English journalist Charles Mackay, and the novel “The Black Tulip” by Alexandre Dumas (1850).
In its development, the economy goes through stages of ups and downs, determined by the general laws of its development. Therefore, the development of the economic system is considered as a cyclical process. The tulip crisis, in turn, is an important stage in this cyclical process. The work reveals the peculiarities of the emergence of the first financial crisis in Europe, and we can conclude that everything in life comes back, and everything that seems new, in fact, has already happened.
You need to know what history and experience around the world say, and use this knowledge for the benefit of the prosperity of the country's financial life.
Literature:
1. McKay Ch. The most common misconceptions and madness of the crowd / M.: Alpina Business Books, 1998. – 318с
2. Bernstein P. L. Against the Gods: Taming Risk / Transl. from English - M.: JSC "Olymp-Business", 2000. - 400 p.
3. Douglas French “The whole truth about tulip mania” [article], 2007 Access mode: http://mises.org/
Perkov G.A.
Kramarenko A.A
Donetsk National University
The “Tulip Crisis” that erupted in Holland in the 17th century is one of the first sufficiently described and documented economic crises in human history. In the winter of 1637, “tulip fever” was rampant in Holland. The demand for tulip bulbs and their value was enormous. This was the first example of a planned crisis in history and the experiment was clearly a success...
Tulips - a miracle of botanical gardens
In 1554, the envoy of the Austrian emperor in Constantinople, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbeck, noticed beautiful flowers in the garden of the Turkish Sultan, which amazed him with their grace. In the same year, the envoy purchased a batch of bulbs with his own money and brought them to Vienna, where they were planted in the garden of Ferdinand I.
The garden is run by the botanist Charles de Lecluse, known as Charles Clusius. He managed to create the necessary climate in the Habsburg garden, the flowers bloomed and they were able to be propagated.
News of this success reached the leadership of the university in the Dutch city of Leiden, where Clusius was appointed head of the university Botanical Garden. There, Clusius crosses different varieties of flowers to create varieties that are suitable for the colder Dutch climate.
Already in 1594, the first frost-resistant flower bloomed. Thus began what would later be called “tulip fever.”
Flower symbol
Beautiful and rare, the tulip is quickly becoming a new symbol of wealth, prosperity and belonging to a chosen society. Possessing it is coveted and prestigious.
Tulips from the early 17th century.
Its bulbs become a precious and highly desired gift. They are incredibly expensive. Sometimes, in order to buy them, you have to part with... a stone house.
"Florilegium" and the reason for the demand
In 1612, the Florilegium catalog published 100 varieties of the new flower. Where do so many varieties come from? It's all about... a virus (but this will become known only in the twentieth century).
In the meantime, the bulbs are growing, and, blooming, they give an endless number of variations - either stripes of different shades, then white spots, then some other speckles, or curly edges of the petals.
Royal European courts are beginning to take an interest in the new flower. Prices are rising, fueled by rumors that soon more and more people will become interested in the flower, and prices for it will rise more than once.
Ideal capitalist country
After a protracted war with Spain for independence, on the territory of the seven northern Dutch provinces, after a truce, a bourgeois republic was founded, which in a fairly short time began to occupy a leading position in shipbuilding and colonial trade - the leading economic areas of the 19th century.
Amsterdam is becoming a thriving industrial center. The main reason for this growth lay in the political system of the Netherlands, which guaranteed the bourgeoisie almost unlimited dominance in all areas of the economy.
Viceroy and Semper augustus - half a kingdom for a flower
So how much did the bulbs cost? In 1623, a Viceroy bulb costs 1,000 guilders. Is it a lot or a little? The average annual income of a Dutchman at that time was 150 guilders, and in order to buy just one onion he had to save for 7 or even 8 years.
A ton of butter cost one hundred guilders, and three hundred pigs cost 300. But the record was broken by the “Semper augustus” variety. There is a record of a transaction that says that for one bulb of this variety they give 6 thousand guilders! By the way, the most profitable bride was considered to be the one whose dowry included the “Semper augustus” onion.
Variegated tulips from the 1630s (leaftulip catalogfrom the collectionDutch Historical and Economic Collection). Right - “Semper Augustus”
Some deals are still amazing. In 1635 there were 40 tulip bulbs. sold for a fantastic sum at that time - 100,000 guilders. It was also not uncommon for one onion to be sold for several acres of fertile land, for a stone house, or for several hundredweight of wheat.
In addition, when selling, only part could be paid in guilders; the rest could be given in cows, wheat, butter, cheese or good wine.
Tulip fever gave birth to legends
One of them is about how a port tramp, seeing a ship entering the harbor, rushed to the office of its owner. The merchant, delighted by the news of the return of the long-awaited ship, selected the fattest herring from the barrel and rewarded the ragamuffin with it.
And he, seeing an onion on the counter that looked like a peeled onion, decided that herring was good, but herring with onions was even better, put the onion in his pocket and departed in an unknown direction.
A few minutes later, the merchant grabbed a tulip bulb Semper Augustus (“Eternal August”), for which he paid 3,000 florins. When the tramp was found, he was already finishing his herring and onions. The poor guy went to prison for theft of private property on an especially large scale.
"Allegory of Tulip Mania." PaintingBruegel the Youngerbased on a popular print, around 1640.
Another apocryphal story is about how Haarlem tulip traders heard about a Hague shoemaker who managed to breed a black tulip.
A delegation from Haarlem visited the shoemaker and bought all the black tulip bulbs from him for 1,500 florins. After which, right in front of the amateur tulip grower, the people of Haarlem rushed to furiously trample the bulbs and only calmed down after turning them into mush.
They were afraid that an unprecedented black tulip would undermine their well-established business. But the shoemaker could not bear the barbarity, he fell ill and died.
Winter tulips, stock exchanges and “air trading”
Tulips are a seasonal product. Before the “flower rush” began, they were traded from May to October. However, during the boom period, the winter seedling trade became popular.
Most traders tried to buy winter plants, because in the spring they could be sold for two, three, or even four times more expensive.
Trader and tulip lover. Caricature painting from the mid-17th century.
Demand grew, more and more Dutch people plunged into the new business. Trade in gold began to bring in less income than trade in flower bulbs.
Flower exchanges open in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Harlem. Not only live bulbs were traded there, but also ungrown “future” bulbs. In this way, deals were made for the future - people agreed to buy an agreed number of bulbs at an agreed time in the future.
Such transactions were called “wind trading” (from the English wind handel). So people began to sell their time, which is a sin for Christian culture.
Collapse
By 1634, half of all transactions on the market were “paper”, that is, for the future. Prices rose, the demand bubble inflated more and more, but in February 1637 the market “overheated” occurred. There were a huge number of bulbs, but there was no one else to sell them to. The price of bulbs instantly fell a hundred times, and then a thousand.
The market collapse hit the entire Dutch industry, since both it and the entire economy of that time were focused on tulips. A full-blown financial crisis began.
"Flora's Chariot" An allegorical painting by Hendrik Pot, circa 1640, a popular popular print mocking simpleton speculators. The carriage with the goddess of flowers and her idle companions rolls downhill into the depths of the sea. Behind her wander artisans who have abandoned the tools of their labor in pursuit of easy money.
The catalyst for the process was the futures mechanism - the same “wind trading” - which provoked first a sharp and increasing growth, and then an equally rapid decline.
Nationwide hysteria, an inflated demand bubble and the unreasonable value of investments led to the collapse. However, it was the memory of the “tulip hysteria” that helped the Dutch refrain from risky ventures in subsequent years and make up for lost time over the next 200 years...
Clusius literally infected the Dutch with his passion for tulips. Insanity began in the country, complete madness, later called “Tulipomania” by historians. For more than 20 years, the Dutch have managed to grow dozens of varieties of tulips.
In 1625, a rare tulip bulb could already cost 2,000 gold florins. Their trading was organized on the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem and Leiden. The volume of the tulip exchange reached an astronomical amount of 40 million florins.
By 1635, the price had risen to 5,500 gold per bulb, and by early 1637, tulip prices had increased 25-fold. One onion was given as a bride's dowry, three were worth as much as a good house, and just one Tulip brasserie onion was given for a thriving brewery. Bulb sellers earned huge amounts of money. All conversations and transactions revolved around a single item - bulbs.
For example, a red tulip bulb with white veins cost 10,000 florins, and Rembrandt was paid 1,800 for his painting “The Night Watch,” which made him very happy.
The documented record was a deal of 100,000 florins for 40 tulip bulbs. To attract poor people, sellers began to take small advances in cash, and the buyer’s property was used as collateral for the rest of the amount. For example, the cost of a Viceroy tulip bulb was "2 loads (2.25 cubic meters) of wheat, 4 loads of rye, 4 fat cows, 8 fat pigs, 12 fat sheep, 2 skins of wine, 4 barrels of beer, 2 barrels of butter, 1000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a wardrobe with clothes and a silver cup" - a total of 2,500 florins. The artist Jan van Goyen paid the Hague burgomaster an advance of 1,900 florins for ten bulbs, offered a painting by Solomon van Ruisdael as collateral for the rest of the amount, and also undertook to paint his own.
Tulip fever gave rise to legends. One of them is about how a port tramp, seeing a ship entering the harbor, rushed to the office of its owner. The merchant, delighted by the news of the return of the long-awaited ship, selected the fattest herring from the barrel and rewarded the ragamuffin with it. And he, seeing an onion on the counter that looked like a peeled onion, decided that herring was good, but herring with onions was even better, put the onion in his pocket and departed in an unknown direction. A few minutes later, the merchant grabbed a tulip bulb Semper Augustus (“Eternal August”), for which he paid 3,000 florins. When the tramp was found, he was already finishing his herring and onions. The poor guy went to prison for theft of private property on an especially large scale.
Another apocryphal story is about how Haarlem tulip traders heard about a Hague shoemaker who managed to breed a black tulip. A delegation from Haarlem visited the shoemaker and bought all the black tulip bulbs from him for 1,500 florins. After which, right in front of the amateur tulip grower, the people of Haarlem rushed to furiously trample the bulbs and only calmed down after turning them into mush. They were afraid that an unprecedented black tulip would undermine their well-established business. But the shoemaker could not bear the barbarity, he fell ill and died.
