Class Year

2015

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2013

Department 1

History

Abstract

Scholars have long considered the “Tulip Age” to be a sort of Ottoman renaissance—a golden age initiated by the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz and lasted until the Anti-Tulip Rebellion in 1730. However, recent scholarship has questioned the objectivity of the field’s founding historian, Ahmed Refik, who based his theory off of the twofold concepts of a marked increase in tulip culture and a movement toward westernization in the Ottoman Empire. Because of this shaky foundation, this research reexamines the debate from the beginning: the tulip’s connection to earlier Turkic arts and the actualities of Ottoman “modernization.” This perspective on the “real” Tulip Age is instrumental in suggesting a new hypothesis—that the Tulip Age did not exist in the way historians have accepted for a hundred years.

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