The tulip, Tulipa, is a bulb of the lily family native to the mountains of Central Asia and the Near East, brought into cultivation by the Turks and carried to Europe from the Ottoman court in the sixteenth century; the name comes, through a misunderstanding, from the Turkish and Persian word for turban, which the flower was thought to resemble. In Ottoman Turkey the tulip was the supreme cultivated flower, so beloved that an early-eighteenth-century period of peace and refinement is remembered as the Tulip Era. In Turkish the letters spelling lale, tulip, are the same as those spelling Allah, and the flower carried a discreet sacred resonance for that reason.
The popular account of Dutch tulip mania as a national financial catastrophe has been substantially revised by modern economic historians: Anne Goldgar's archival research, published in 2007, found little evidence the crash bankrupted large numbers of ordinary people or damaged the wider Dutch economy, concluding the episode's reputation as history's paradigmatic speculative bubble was considerably inflated by later moralising writers rather than by the contemporary record itself. The garden tulip's wild ancestors are native specifically to the Tian Shan and Pamir-Alai ranges of Central Asia, in what is now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and several of these wild Tulipa species are now considered threatened in their native mountains by overcollection, even as their cultivated descendants number in the billions worldwide.