When you think of tulips, you think of Holland and likely the great tulip bubble of 1637. But the history of the tulip didn’t start there. It started in the Himalayas and then Turkey, where the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent first cultivated and obsessed over these flowers in the early sixteenth century. Like so many other things, the Ottomans eventually brought tulips to Europe. By the 1550s, they popped up in Vienna. Next Leiden University in the Netherlands. Fast forward a few more decades, and Holland found itself engulfed in tulip mania, the first recorded speculative bubble in history. Above, you can watch the history of the tulip unfold in a short animation. It was created by Stephane Kaas for the Tulip Museum in Amsterdam.
via Mental Floss