modern science.
In May 1573, while Clusius was still living in Mechelen and busy distributing tulip bulbs and other plants throughout Europe, he was asked by the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian II, to go to Vienna and establish an imperial
hortus
—or botanic garden—there. This was a tempting offer. Clusius’s father, whom he had been supporting, had just died at the age of eighty-one, freeing his son from the burden of caring for him. The proposed salary of five hundred Rhine guilders a year would let Clusius—who had been embarrassingly dependent on the charity of friends for years—live comfortably at last. And Maximilian wanted a garden to outshine those his princes and nobles had been cultivating. Clusius, whose poverty and scanty claim to the ranks of nobility had left him with something of an inferiority complex, was flattered by the attention and grateful that the emperor offered formal acknowledgment of his status as a noble. In addition, he already knew a little about his prospective patron, who was one of the few emperors ever to show sympathy toward the Protestant faith; his friend and regular correspondent Johannes Cratovon Krafftheim was Maximilian’s personal physician. The reports he received were positive and the task certainly seemed an interesting one. So he accepted the proposal.
Today Vienna is a central European city noted for its culture. In Clusius’s day, though, it was very much a frontier town. Although it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the home of the imperial court, it was also only fifty miles from the Ottoman border and was known, not merely to the empire, as “the front line of Christendom.” Under Süleyman the Turks had laid siege to Vienna with a quarter of a million men in 1529, and they would return again in 1683. So for all the elegance of the imperial residence, the palace of Schönbrunn, the beauty of the broad sweep of the Danube, and the bustle of the narrow, crowded streets in the center of the town, the state of the gates and the walls mattered more than the addition of a few flower beds. Gardens were something of a luxury.
From the moment Clusius arrived, he discovered that while there were advantages to working for an emperor, his job was attended by many frustrations. Maximilian was busy, and Clusius had to wait two months for an audience and more than a year for any sign of activity at the site chosen for the garden. Worse, the imperial chamberlain in charge of both the finances for the
hortus
and arranging Clusius’s own pay turned out to be a strict Catholic who made life as difficult as he could for the Protestant botanist. On the other hand, Clusius did begin to receive regular parcels containing the bulbs and seeds of many plants from the imperial ambassador at Istanbul, and he struck up a botanical friendship with Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, who was now back at court. The two men exchanged presents of plants, and when Busbecq left for France in 1573, he presented his friend with a large quantity of seed. Clusius did not get the opportunity to plant it for another two or three years, by which time Busbecq’s gift had shriveled so badly that he feared the seed was dead; but it did germinate eventually and turned into a spectacular profusion of tulips—a suitable mark indeed of the friendship between two champions of the flower.
For all that, the garden project continued to languish, and by the summer of 1576 Clusius’s pay was eleven months in arrears. Then Maximilian died suddenly, and matters took a turn for the worse. The new emperor, Rudolf II, was a Catholic zealot who dismissed every Protestant serving at his court. Worse, he had little interest in flowers, and the fledgling
hortus
was torn up so the land could be turned into a riding school. Clusius was horrified. Although his services were always in demand, he never in his life worked for another monarch.
He stayed on in Vienna for a while, disillusioned and plagued by repeated thefts of
In May 1573, while Clusius was still living in Mechelen and busy distributing tulip bulbs and other plants throughout Europe, he was asked by the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian II, to go to Vienna and establish an imperial
hortus
—or botanic garden—there. This was a tempting offer. Clusius’s father, whom he had been supporting, had just died at the age of eighty-one, freeing his son from the burden of caring for him. The proposed salary of five hundred Rhine guilders a year would let Clusius—who had been embarrassingly dependent on the charity of friends for years—live comfortably at last. And Maximilian wanted a garden to outshine those his princes and nobles had been cultivating. Clusius, whose poverty and scanty claim to the ranks of nobility had left him with something of an inferiority complex, was flattered by the attention and grateful that the emperor offered formal acknowledgment of his status as a noble. In addition, he already knew a little about his prospective patron, who was one of the few emperors ever to show sympathy toward the Protestant faith; his friend and regular correspondent Johannes Cratovon Krafftheim was Maximilian’s personal physician. The reports he received were positive and the task certainly seemed an interesting one. So he accepted the proposal.
Today Vienna is a central European city noted for its culture. In Clusius’s day, though, it was very much a frontier town. Although it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the home of the imperial court, it was also only fifty miles from the Ottoman border and was known, not merely to the empire, as “the front line of Christendom.” Under Süleyman the Turks had laid siege to Vienna with a quarter of a million men in 1529, and they would return again in 1683. So for all the elegance of the imperial residence, the palace of Schönbrunn, the beauty of the broad sweep of the Danube, and the bustle of the narrow, crowded streets in the center of the town, the state of the gates and the walls mattered more than the addition of a few flower beds. Gardens were something of a luxury.
From the moment Clusius arrived, he discovered that while there were advantages to working for an emperor, his job was attended by many frustrations. Maximilian was busy, and Clusius had to wait two months for an audience and more than a year for any sign of activity at the site chosen for the garden. Worse, the imperial chamberlain in charge of both the finances for the
hortus
and arranging Clusius’s own pay turned out to be a strict Catholic who made life as difficult as he could for the Protestant botanist. On the other hand, Clusius did begin to receive regular parcels containing the bulbs and seeds of many plants from the imperial ambassador at Istanbul, and he struck up a botanical friendship with Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, who was now back at court. The two men exchanged presents of plants, and when Busbecq left for France in 1573, he presented his friend with a large quantity of seed. Clusius did not get the opportunity to plant it for another two or three years, by which time Busbecq’s gift had shriveled so badly that he feared the seed was dead; but it did germinate eventually and turned into a spectacular profusion of tulips—a suitable mark indeed of the friendship between two champions of the flower.
For all that, the garden project continued to languish, and by the summer of 1576 Clusius’s pay was eleven months in arrears. Then Maximilian died suddenly, and matters took a turn for the worse. The new emperor, Rudolf II, was a Catholic zealot who dismissed every Protestant serving at his court. Worse, he had little interest in flowers, and the fledgling
hortus
was torn up so the land could be turned into a riding school. Clusius was horrified. Although his services were always in demand, he never in his life worked for another monarch.
He stayed on in Vienna for a while, disillusioned and plagued by repeated thefts of
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