Tulip period

He was interested in what the Europeans were doing and why they seemed to be doing it increasingly well.

The era he presided over from 1718 to 1730 became known as the Laleh Devri the Tulip Era, named for the flower that became the obsessive emblem of Ottoman elite culture during those years.

Tulips, it is worth mentioning.

were originally Anatolian and Central Asian flowers that the Ottomans had been cultivating for centuries.

They had been exported to the Netherlands in the 16th century, where they triggered the famous tulip mania, arguably history's first documented speculative financial bubble before the Dutch market collapsed spectacularly in 1637. now roughly a century later the ottoman elite was importing the european enthusiasm for tulip cultivation back into istanbul as though encountering it fresh throwing lavish garden parties by candlelight with tortoises carrying candles on their backs wandering between the flower beds The tulip had made a complete round trip from Anatolia to Amsterdam to financial disaster and back to Anatolia again, arriving the second time as a symbol of cosmopolitan sophistication.

The flower itself was presumably indifferent to all of this.

The more consequential development of the tulip era was the Ottoman printing press.

The diplomat and intellectual Ibrahim Mutafirika established the first press authorised to print books in Turkish and Arabic in 1727, nearly 280 years after Gutenberg's press had begun transforming European intellectual life.