rare plants from the private garden he still maintained there. At a time when much-coveted plants might exist in only one or two gardens in the whole of Europe, the organized theft of specimens was, if not exactly commonplace, then certainly far from unknown. Like antique thieves today, the men who carried out these crimes were often knowledgeable connoisseurs in their own right and knew exactly what they were looking for. (Those who didn’t simply bribed the ill-paid servants who acted as gardeners for the necessary information.) The plant thieves generally worked for nobles and merchants who wanted an enviable garden of their own for minimal effort. Miscreants such as these seldom made any effort to conceal the evidence of their activities, but there were no police to investigate such crimes, and the authorities were not remotely interested in prosecuting the well-connected for such trivial offenses. On at least one occasion Clusius was forced to grind his teeth while a Viennese noblewoman proudly conducted him around flower beds she had stocked with plants stolen from his garden.
Carolus Clusius was a very old man now, over sixty and half crippled by a bad fall in his bath. He suffered from undiagnosed stomach complaints and had lost all his teeth; and now that his imperial salaryhad been stopped, he was badly off again and needed some way to supplement the meager income from his lordship and the occasional food parcels he received from his friends. He yearned, too, for some sort of academic recognition of his life’s work. And in the end it came.
C HAPTER 6
Leiden
I t was in January 1592 that a large sealed package arrived at the lodging house where Clusius was living. It was a letter from Marie de Brimeu containing the news that he had been offered a post in the medical faculty of the University of Leiden.
Leiden was a large industrial town in the United Provinces of the Netherlands—not a place that Clusius would normally have chosen to live. But de Brimeu’s letter arrived at a particularly opportune moment. After leaving Vienna, the old botanist had retreated to Frankfurt to be close to his friend and patron, the landgrave of Hesse. But the landgrave had just died, his heir had canceled the small yearly pension on which Clusius relied, and deprived of his principal source of income, he badly needed to find work. The post at Leiden offered not just recognition of his life’s work but a salary of 750 guilders a year plus his travel expenses; in addition, several of his correspondents already worked at the university, and the man who had actually proposed him for a professorship, Johan van Hoghelande, was a friend with whom he had exchanged flower bulbs for years. After some consideration,and not without reluctance, Clusius decided to accept van Hoghelande’s offer.
Thus it was that the man who had done more than anyone to popularize the tulip made his way to the Dutch Republic, where the flower would become truly famous. Clusius reached Leiden on October 19, 1593, bringing with him many of his precious plants. Among his baggage was his extensive—and by now quite valuable—collection of tulip bulbs.
The botanist’s new home was a substantial town of perhaps twenty thousand people that stood more or less in the center of the United Provinces. The city was built around the ruins of a medieval castle and was noted as a busy center of the textile trade. Yet when Clusius arrived there, civic confidence was in a fragile state. Leiden might have been a large town by Dutch standards, and the university was its pride and joy, but the town was only just emerging from a century of stagnation to embark on a period of rapid expansion that would culminate in its becoming one of the two biggest cloth towns in Christendom. Really there seemed to be no reason why anyone who lived outside Holland should have known or cared much about it. Yet as Clusius himself would have been well aware, in the closing years of the
Carolus Clusius was a very old man now, over sixty and half crippled by a bad fall in his bath. He suffered from undiagnosed stomach complaints and had lost all his teeth; and now that his imperial salaryhad been stopped, he was badly off again and needed some way to supplement the meager income from his lordship and the occasional food parcels he received from his friends. He yearned, too, for some sort of academic recognition of his life’s work. And in the end it came.
C HAPTER 6
Leiden
I t was in January 1592 that a large sealed package arrived at the lodging house where Clusius was living. It was a letter from Marie de Brimeu containing the news that he had been offered a post in the medical faculty of the University of Leiden.
Leiden was a large industrial town in the United Provinces of the Netherlands—not a place that Clusius would normally have chosen to live. But de Brimeu’s letter arrived at a particularly opportune moment. After leaving Vienna, the old botanist had retreated to Frankfurt to be close to his friend and patron, the landgrave of Hesse. But the landgrave had just died, his heir had canceled the small yearly pension on which Clusius relied, and deprived of his principal source of income, he badly needed to find work. The post at Leiden offered not just recognition of his life’s work but a salary of 750 guilders a year plus his travel expenses; in addition, several of his correspondents already worked at the university, and the man who had actually proposed him for a professorship, Johan van Hoghelande, was a friend with whom he had exchanged flower bulbs for years. After some consideration,and not without reluctance, Clusius decided to accept van Hoghelande’s offer.
Thus it was that the man who had done more than anyone to popularize the tulip made his way to the Dutch Republic, where the flower would become truly famous. Clusius reached Leiden on October 19, 1593, bringing with him many of his precious plants. Among his baggage was his extensive—and by now quite valuable—collection of tulip bulbs.
The botanist’s new home was a substantial town of perhaps twenty thousand people that stood more or less in the center of the United Provinces. The city was built around the ruins of a medieval castle and was noted as a busy center of the textile trade. Yet when Clusius arrived there, civic confidence was in a fragile state. Leiden might have been a large town by Dutch standards, and the university was its pride and joy, but the town was only just emerging from a century of stagnation to embark on a period of rapid expansion that would culminate in its becoming one of the two biggest cloth towns in Christendom. Really there seemed to be no reason why anyone who lived outside Holland should have known or cared much about it. Yet as Clusius himself would have been well aware, in the closing years of the
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