IN FEBRUARY 1639, on his way back to Istanbul after recovering Baghdad from the Safavids, Sultan Murad reached Diyarbakır; he was ill, and had to rest there for two months before continuing home to Istanbul. Within a year he was dead – at the age of 29 – and was buried in the crowded dynastic tomb of his father Ahmed I. His uncle, the incompetent two-times sultan Mustafa I, had died shortly before. In a departure from recent practice, Murad had waited until he was home from his various campaigns before despatching his brothers: Bayezid* and Süleyman – half-brothers to Murad and full brothers to Osman II – had met their end at the time of the celebrations marking the Yerevan campaign of 1635; Murad’s full brother Kasım was killed on Murad’s return from Baghdad.
Murad had spared only one brother – probably in response to the pleas of his mother, Kösem Sultan – and İbrahim, known as ‘Crazy’ İbrahim, became sultan. For the first time since Süleyman I succeeded his father Selim I, there were no rival claimants: Murad had no surviving son, and the direct male line was all but extinguished. İbrahim’s mental health may have been in doubt, but the consequences of a complete failure of the Ottoman line can only be imagined. When he was summoned from the inner recesses of the palace, İbrahim was unable to believe that Murad was dead, and assumed that he was about to share the fate of their unfortunate brothers.
Sultan İbrahim kept on Murad’s appointees as sheikhulislam and grand vezir. Zekeriyazade Yahya Efendi remained sheikhulislam until his death in 1644, after a total of eighteen years in office under three sultans. Murad’s final grand vezir, Kemankeş Kara (‘Black Archer’) Mustafa Pasha, had negotiated the peace treaty which brought the Iranian wars to an end and enjoyed a relatively long tenure of office (some five years) before falling victim to factional struggle and execution, also in 1644. As the mother of a sultan who showed little inclination to participate in state affairs, Kösem Sultan again came to the fore, and again she exercised the power she had relinquished after the bloody events of 1632. Competition between the Grand Vezir and the Queen-mother was inevitable, but power struggles at the highest level were kept in check during the early years of İbrahim’s reign.1
Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Pasha continued the reforms begun under Murad IV and his former grand vezir Tabanıyassı Mehmed Pasha; as with Tabanıyassı Mehmed’s four and a half years in office, this further period of stability gave the respite from factional infighting which allowed for their continuing enactment. The exchequer was brought to concede that the resettlement of peasants on their former lands was fraught with insoluble problems, and a new tax survey was ordered which required instead that they be registered where they were presently to be found.2 Kemankeş Kara Mustafa reduced the numbers of janissaries and cavalrymen to 17,000 and 12,000 respectively. He stabilized the currency, required that payments into and withdrawals from the treasury be made in cash, rather than by notes-of-hand,3 and issued a detailed price code.4 He also took measures against one of the most intractable problems of the age, the proliferation of those of no evident value to the state who nevertheless drew salaries from the treasury.
It was inevitable that such a determined grand vezir should arouse opposition, and in 1642–3 another rebellion erupted. The governor of Aleppo, Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin Pasha, son of Ahmed I’s grand vezir Nasuh Pasha, was on very bad terms with Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Pasha.5 Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin sheltered a troublemaker sought by the government, ignored orders sent from Istanbul, and illicitly inserted the sultan’s cypher at the head of his communications – vezirs serving in the provinces were forbidden the privilege of using the cypher;6 he also complained that the Aleppo post had cost him so much money that he could not meet his outstanding debts from the income the position brought – Katib Çelebi reported that it was around this time that senior governmental posts began to be awarded to those who could pay for them. Kemankeş Kara Mustafa appointed Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin to the governorship of Sivas instead, but secretly ordered the incumbent governor to confront him with military force – the hapless governor was killed in the mêlée and Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin marched on Istanbul to air his grievances. His army grew as he crossed Anatolia. At İzmit, only some hundred kilometres from Istanbul, he routed a force sent against him from the capital and pressed on to Üsküdar. Contemporary accounts of his end differ. According to one version, Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin took ship on the Black Sea before being captured by government agents outside Ruse on the Danube and killed.7 Another version has the Grand Vezir feigning forgiveness and promising him the governorship of the province of Rumeli before sending executioners across the Bosporus to exact punishment.8
Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin Pasha had aspired to become grand vezir; another rival for Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Pasha’s office was Civan (‘Young Fellow’) Kapucubaşı (‘Gatekeeper’) Sultanzade Mehmed Pasha, who had crowned a relatively successful military and administrative career by recovering the fortress of Azov from the Cossacks in 1642 while he was governor of the province of Özi on the northern Black Sea coast. Kemankeş Kara Mustafa’s reforms threatened many vested interests, making his position vulnerable, and late in 1643, the Grand Vezir distanced Civan Kapucubaşı Sultanzade Mehmed from court, appointing him to the governorship of Damascus. But Kemankeş Kara Mustafa could not hope to outmanoeuvre the factions conspiring against him indefinitely: Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin’s uprising was only one symptom of the dissatisfaction his reforms engendered, and in February 1644 Sultan İbrahim gave the order for his execution. Civan Kapucubaşı Sultanzade Mehmed was recalled from Damascus and appointed grand vezir in his place.9
Sultan İbrahim left day-to-day matters in the hands of his vezirs, but like his brother Murad was ready to listen to the promptings of favourites. Where Murad had been encouraged by the Kadızadeli preachers to close the coffee-houses and enforce the sumptuary laws, İbrahim’s ill health made him a ready prey to quackery of all sorts. In Cinci (‘Demon-chaser’) Hüseyin Hoca he found the spiritual adviser to suit his needs. Officially, the summit of Cinci Hüseyin’s career was his appointment as chief justice of Anatolia, but the part he played in the politics of the day far exceeded the limits of that office.10 The Sultan’s preferment of Cinci Hüseyin indicated that the Sheikhulislam’s position had become insecure but, providentially, Zekeriyazade Yahya Efendi died before Sultan İbrahim was inspired to remove him.
Like the corsair incident at Vlorë in 1638 which had threatened to escalate but was then defused, that which occurred in the summer of 1644 also had the appearance of one that could be resolved. Yet it sparked a war between Ottomans and Venetians that lasted intermittently until 1669. Contemporary Ottoman sources – including Katib Çelebi – report that that summer, Maltese corsairs attacked a small fleet off the island of Karpathos which lies between Rhodes and Crete. Aboard were Chief Black Eunuch Sünbül Agha, sailing into internal exile in Egypt, as was customary for chief black eunuchs when they were pensioned off, and a number of prominent pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Sünbül Agha was killed in the confrontation, and captured treasure was loaded on to a ship which docked briefly in a Cretan harbour; in recognition of the assistance they had been rendered, the corsairs presented part of the treasure to the Venetian governor-general of Crete. As one of Sünbül Agha’s horses was being off-loaded for presentation to the governor of Candia its hooves touched the ground which, says Katib Çelebi, was taken for a bad omen. After a few days the corsairs sailed west, but before they had gone very far, they scuttled the captured Ottoman boats with the loss of the remaining supplies and animals on board.11
News of this act of piracy provoked outrage in Istanbul, where it was considered that the Venetians of Crete had wilfully flouted the terms of the agreement that no corsair vessels intent on or guilty of attacking the shipping of the other party be given shelter. According to Giovanni Soranzo, the Venetian bailo in Istanbul, all foreign envoys in the capital were summoned to an audience with the Sultan’s influential favourite Cinci Hüseyin Hoca; they were cross-examined as to the involvement of their respective sovereigns in the affair, and each ordered to make separate written statements. At first refusing to do so, they then consented, with the proviso that the truth could only be ascertained by sending someone to Crete for the purpose. Some Ottoman sailors who had survived the incident eventually made their way back to Istanbul, where they revealed that the Maltese had in fact remained on Crete for twenty days, selling their booty and taking on supplies. To the Ottomans this was no minor infringement, which could be overlooked – and it smacked of a deliberate alliance between the Venetians and their co-religionists on Malta.12
The other side’s explanation of the incident was greatly at variance with the Ottoman version. The Venetian governor of Crete reported to the Doge that the Maltese vessels had landed only long enough to put ashore some Greeks in their company before continuing on to Malta; indeed, the officer responsible for the stretch of coast where the Maltese had landed had since been executed for being absent from his post at the time. Two such different versions of events could not be reconciled. It was clearly in Venice’s interest to keep the peace, for it could not afford to defend itself or its possessions against Ottoman attack: on Crete itself, the indigenous Greek population was unlikely to rise in defence of Venetian masters for whom they had no love. There seems to have been scant discussion in the Ottoman imperial council regarding the usefulness of going to war over this incident: the bellicose stance adopted by Cinci Hüseyin Hoca was supported by Silahdar (‘Sword-bearer’) Yusuf Agha, another favourite of Sultan İbrahim, a Dalmatian renegade and also his son-in-law.13 Silahdar Yusuf was promoted to the rank of pasha and appointed grand admiral in command of the combined land and sea operation.14 With Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Pasha dead and his moderating voice silenced, the war party was in the ascendant.
Malta was thought to be the destination of the Ottoman fleet that was now making ready for sea in the imperial dockyard. Still maintaining its innocence, Venice could not believe otherwise, and was taken by surprise when the Ottoman armada arrived off Crete on 26 June 1645.15 During this first summer of campaigning the Ottomans took the fortress of Chania (Canea) after almost two months, allowing its defenders to go free with their lives and possessions intact, in keeping with the Islamic code of war and with Ottoman practice. The conquest was symbolized by the transformation of the cathedral into the main mosque of the city, which was named for the Sultan; of two other churches also converted, one was named for the victorious commander, Silahdar Yusuf Pasha.16
But Silahdar Yusuf Pasha did not long survive this promising fillip to his career. He returned to Istanbul to face criticism from the grand vezir Civan Kapucubaşı Sultanzade Mehmed Pasha with regard to his handling of the siege, and in particular of the fact that he had brought back so little booty. Although Sultan İbrahim, having listened to the arguments of both sides, proceeded to strip Civan Kapucubaşı Sultanzade Mehmed of the grand vezirate, Silahdar Yusuf found that the constancy of the Sultan’s favour was not to be relied upon: when he refused to return to Crete on the grounds that winter was not the season for campaigning, and that the fleet was in any case unprepared, İbrahim ordered his execution for disobedience.17
In 1646 hostilities spread to another theatre of the fragmented Venetian–Ottoman frontier when the Ottomans conquered significant Venetian territory on the Dalmatian coast, only to lose some of it the following season.18 The war on Crete was going well, however. Rethymno fell early in the year and the smaller strongholds throughout the island shortly thereafter. The siege of Iraklion (Candia), the largest city on the island, began in October 1647 (and continued for the next 22 years), and by 1648 the remainder of the island bar a couple of minor forts was in Ottoman hands; it even proved possible to impose a basic form of Ottoman administration, though the island produced little in the way of taxes as yet.19 But Ottoman luck was about to run out. Venetian forces had landed on the island of Bozcaada (Tenedos) in 1646, and although they had been repulsed, that they could harass Ottoman shipping so close to their home base – and at a highly-strategic point along the sea route to Crete – did not bode well for the future. In 1648 a Venetian fleet blockaded the Dardanelles and for a year the Ottomans were unable to sail out into the Aegean and supply their garrisons on Crete; supplies for Istanbul were also affected. The Ottoman navy moved its base – by land – to the fortified west Anatolian harbour of Çeşme, enabling it to overcome to some extent the immobility in operations which the blockade imposed.20 In April 1649 a new and mighty fleet was launched from Istanbul and the blockade was broken.21
The outbreak of hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and Venice had repercussions far away from the theatre of war on Crete. Polish exasperation with the Crimean Tatars had reached a new level in recent years as the effort required to defend the Commonwealth against their raids diverted resources which could better have been employed elsewhere. King Wladyslaw IV had harboured plans for a ‘Turkish war’ since soon after he came to the throne in 1632, and now found a ready ear in the Venetian envoy to his court, Giovanni Tiepolo, who proposed to him that while Ottoman attention was focused on Crete the Cossacks, who were nominally Wladyslaw’s subjects, should attack the Ottoman Black Sea coasts – a tactic that had in the past caused great consternation in Istanbul; Tiepolo also offered financial help. Wladyslaw considered that it was too dangerous to directly provoke the Ottomans and held to his view that the wiser course was to launch an attack on the Tatars which would in any case escalate into war with their Ottoman suzerain. This idea appealed to Tiepolo who in March 1646 obtained the Venetian government’s promise that it would subsidize such an endeavour.22
Wladyslaw failed to find backing from his own government, but the Commonwealth’s neighbours – Muscovy, and the Ottoman vassal states of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania – all intimated that he could count on their support for his scheme which he deemed he could carry out at minimum cost using the Cossack forces at his disposal. But there was a lull in Tatar raids into Commonwealth territory at this time and the Ottoman government, aware of the great difficulty of conducting warfare on two fronts, adopted a conciliatory tone in its dealings with Wladyslaw. Most significantly, however, the constitution of Poland did not permit a war of aggression and his own government refused to budge; the King had no alternative but to bow to its will.23
The war with Venice was fought against a background of Ottoman administrative confusion. Once Murad IV’s most senior statesmen had been removed from the scene, instability in the affairs of both palace and government marked İbrahim’s reign. Although the Sultan’s feeble-mindedness provided an opportunity for his mother to intervene in decision-making, she was powerless to prevent him looking to his own favourites for advice. He occupied himself in the harem, showing little interest in either foreign or domestic politics. Members of the government jockeyed for position as the fortunes of the factions to which they were allied rose and fell. Intrigue was the order of the day, but fraught with peril: murmurings by Salih Pasha, grand vezir from 1645, that Sultan İbrahim should be deposed and replaced by one of his sons brought him swift retribution in 1647.24 Despite the reforms initiated by Murad IV to make it easier for the state to collect the revenues which were its due, the treasury was again empty.
Continuing unrest in the provinces was another sign of disaffection pervading society. Anatolia was in turmoil. The life of the peasants was disrupted as much by local brigandage as by the politically-motivated rebellions of such as Abaza Mehmed Pasha and Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin Pasha. Their response was to abandon their traditional way of life, which many did as economic conditions deteriorated, and seek their fortune as military men in the retinue of one or other pasha, or to resort to pillaging the countryside in the company of their fellows. State rhetoric made a distinction between rebellion and brigandage. Pashas were regarded as Ottomans, first and foremost, and rebellious pashas were considered as aberrant members of this ruling class for which they had been moulded by education; until and unless they proved themselves particularly recalcitrant, they were brought back within the fold, for a time, at least. Brigands, on the other hand, were social inferiors in the eyes of the state, members of the tax-paying peasant class who had illicitly renounced their ordained position in the social order, and were punished according to the criminal code. It was rare for any brigand to enter the ranks of the Ottoman elite. Rebellious pashas and brigands alike raided passing caravans, oppressed the peasantry, opposed agents of the central government charged with tax-collection, and were both loved and hated by local people. They offered the unemployed an outlet for their energies, and recruited many armed young men into their ranks; they were also the subject of contemporary ballads, which alternated between advising them to give up their lawless ways and encouraging them in their clash with authority.25
Typical of the brigand chiefs of these years was Karahaydaroğlu Mehmed who, taking advantage of the absence of the Ottoman troops in Crete, from the mid-1640s followed his father Kara (‘Black’) Haydar into brigandage; he plundered caravans along the main routes through western Anatolia, at the same time demanding the governorship of a sub-province. This was refused him, and an army under the command of İpşir Mustafa Pasha, governor of Karaman province (who had been brought up in the household of Sultan Osman’s would-be avenger Abaza Mehmed Pasha and would later become grand vezir26), was sent to apprehend him in the winter of 1647–8 but failed, as did subsequent attempts. Karahaydaroğlu Mehmed was eventually caught and hanged in late 1648.27 Like others of his kind, he is remembered in a popular song:
Haydar-oğlu, can you be in your right mind?
How could you turn rebel against Osman’s most exalted domain?
However many cruel acts you have committed in this world
one by one you shall be called to account for all.
Why would you not stay put and be peaceable?
Now it is you, your name is on everybody’s tongue;
Take heed for it is at the hands of Kara-Ali [i.e. the executioner]
that you will die a death of a thousand torments.
. . .
Katib Ali [i.e. the author] says: Go tend to your own business;
they will reduce the whole world to your head on the gallows
one day black ravens will alight on your corpse;
do not suppose you can hang on to such magnificence.28
The rebellion of Abaza Mehmed Pasha in 1623 had erupted to avenge Sultan Osman’s murder, and Nasuhpaşazade Hüseyin Pasha’s grievance was the restriction placed upon his authority as provincial governor. Another Anatolian uprising which similarly threatened to exacerbate the discord in Istanbul by adding to it the quarrels of the provinces was that of Varvar Ali Pasha, governor of Sivas. The historian and bureaucrat Mustafa Naima, whose history was compiled half a century later, reports that in 1647 Istanbul demanded 30,000 aspers from Sivas as a contribution to the festivities planned to accompany the holy month of Ramadan, but after consultation with the notables of the city Varvar Ali decided that he could not impose this burden on local tax-payers. Other demands from Istanbul followed, including one that a wife of İpşir Mustafa Pasha be sent to Istanbul – which Varvar Ali refused on the grounds that the wife of a Muslim should not be handed over to anyone other than her lawful husband – and eventually his increasing exasperation provoked him to speak out against those he held responsible for the disruption of rural life. He blamed the Sultan for not attending to affairs of state, complaining that the sultanate had fallen into the hands of the women around him, and pinpointed the brevity of governor and sub-governor appointments as the besetting evil, for in his view, since senior posts in the provinces could not typically be made to pay for themselves before three years were up, each new incumbent was encouraged to make as much money as possible, at the expense of the local people, before he was dismissed. Varvar Ali announced that, in the interests of the smooth running of the state, he would go to present his case in Istanbul in person.29
Evliya Çelebi, who was in Erzurum at this time, recorded how the governor of the province, his current patron Defterdarzade (‘Son of the Treasurer’) Mehmed Pasha, received news of Salih Pasha’s execution and a warning that, as a protégé of the late grand vezir, his own life was in danger from the new grand vezir Hezarpare (‘Thousand Pieces’) Ahmed Pasha, who had succeeded Salih Pasha five days after his death, and was intent on disposing of the many provincial governors he considered insubordinate. Defterdarzade Mehmed discussed the letter with his officials and asked how they would react if he were to seize the local treasury and shut himself up in Erzurum castle, ‘to become a Celali like Abaza [Mehmed] Pasha’; his attempt to expel the janissary garrison from the fortress failed, however.30 Shortly thereafter, while at Erzincan, Evliya Çelebi reported the arrival of a letter from Varvar Ali Pasha with the news that he had been dismissed from the governorship of Sivas over the incident involving İpşir Mustafa Pasha’s wife, and was marching on Istanbul with a numerous and powerful retinue which included seven other provincial governors and eleven sub-provincial governors. Varvar Ali referred to Hezarpare Ahmed’s reign of terror and proposed that Defterdarzade Mehmed and his men join him on his march on Istanbul – Defterdarzade Mehmed agreed and frantic preparations began. Evliya Çelebi found himself caught up willy-nilly in the confusion, but his foremost concern was for the goods he was carrying with him.31
Varvar Ali Pasha’s plan had been to divide the eastern provinces of the empire among the rebellious pashas, including İpşir Mustafa Pasha, but his proposed coalition did not hold. Defterdarzade Mehmed Pasha sent Evliya Çelebi with a letter to Varvar Ali, who was at the time camped south-east of Amasya, warning him against İpşir Mustafa whom he said was not to be trusted. İpşir Mustafa’s successor as governor of Karaman, Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, had meanwhile been ordered to command the royalist troops sent to rout Varvar Ali’s army, but before they could mobilize, Köprülü Mehmed was captured by Varvar Ali. Soon, İpşir Mustafa and his troops arrived at Varvar Ali’s camp, now north of Ankara, rescued Köprülü Mehmed and had Varvar Ali executed – before Evliya Çelebi had had time to warn him of a plot hatched in Istanbul for Defterdarzade Mehmed Pasha to hunt him down, just as Varvar Ali had been ordered to kill Defterdarzade Mehmed. Evliya Çelebi endured an awkward interview with İpşir Mustafa but stoutly denied that he had any close association with Defterdarzade Mehmed, claiming that he had merely found himself on the road by chance and been caught up in the mêlée.32
Varvar Ali Pasha wrote a verse autobiography detailing his career as a state servant, including his recruitment by the youth-levy – which had all but ceased by the middle of the seventeenth century when janissary numbers were so great as to render it obsolete, and there was no longer any need for Christian converts to people the Ottoman ruling class. Varvar Ali’s couplets are important as one of the few personal accounts of a career in the military-administrative hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire. He had been drafted by Sultan Ahmed’s agents around 1600 – ‘they took me weeping and in distress, I did not know what was in store for me’ – and sent to Istanbul to be educated as a page in the palace service. After four years of preparation he spent ten years in training in the palace, and then became one of Sultan Ahmed’s falconers, in which capacity he had a chance to impress the Sultan:
. . . One day it happened that on going out for the chase the Sultan approached and himself received the falcon from my own hand;
Espying a vulture in the sky, he had no sooner loosed the falcon for the pursuit when, felled, the prey dropped to the plain;
Addressing me at that moment, ‘Pray tell’ he bade, ‘reveal to me your heart’s desire, your wish is my command’;
In reply I entreated, ‘As one of your pages in the senior service, may you grant my wish and permit me to attend you on the march’.
This was the start of a closeness to successive sultans, such as every recruit into the Ottoman ruling class must have striven for. Varvar Ali Pasha served Sultan Osman II on the Khotin campaign, and his reward was to be assigned to the sultan’s cavalry. He won a land-grant in the province of Damascus, but left the cavalry in disgust over the part played by the sultan’s regiments in Osman’s overthrow; he was soon appointed a janissary commander in Egypt, returning to Istanbul a year later as chief of two falconry units in turn. By about 1625 he was serving the young Sultan Murad IV on the hunt, won his favour, became a cavalry commander and took part in the ill-fated Baghdad campaign of 1629–30. He was then appointed governor of Cyprus – his first significant post – where to his regret he remained for only six months before being recalled to Istanbul; he was next sent to govern Adana, Cyprus again, Diyarbakır and Maraş in turn. In 1635 he accompanied the Sultan on his campaign to reconquer Baghdad and was rewarded for his valour with money and a kaftan:
. . . Thrice on the campaign Shah İsmail’s men [i.e. the Safavid troops] I vanquished by God’s will and submitted my trophies to our sultan;
In recognition of my feat of bravery, Shah Murad Khan awarded me aspers in the sum of four purses and a robe of honour.
Distinguishing himself both on the Yerevan campaign and in the subsequent sack of Tabriz, Varvar Ali was appointed governor of Cyprus again and, a year later, of the province of Anadolu in western Anatolia. He was wounded leading the assault in the Baghdad campaign of 1638 and invalided out, and was then appointed governor of the province of Rumeli. On Sultan İbrahim’s succession he fell briefly from favour, but was then sent to govern, in turn, the provinces of Van, Anadolu, Adana, and the sub-province of Bolu, between Istanbul and Ankara. At the very time when he was feeling most disillusioned by the frequent changes of posting he and his peers had to endure – which doubtless lay behind his later proposal that such appointments must last longer than three years – he was sent to govern Bosnia, the homeland he had left some forty years earlier:
. . . After three-and-two-score years [the post of governor-general of Bosnia] was attained – in short, my aspired goal I proclaimed;
On the bestowal of this supreme favour, I became oblivious to the world, the universe entire;
Should the grace of God be granted to His servant, a shepherd may be [transported] to a sultan’s domain.33
Unfortunately Varvar Ali Pasha’s autobiography ends here, three years before his death in 1648. The impetus that made him challenge the power of the establishment so vigorously can therefore only be guessed at. His return as Ottoman governor to the native land he had left as an adolescent was clearly a source of pride, and his brilliant career was a clear demonstration of the opportunity open to a boy such as he, removed from a poor peasant family. No doubt there were tears on both sides as such boys left home and family, but the youth-levy appears not to have aroused much resistance among the Christians subject to it – it almost seems that it may have been regarded as a legal duty owed to a legitimate monarch, rather than a tyrannical imposition. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, its more occasional character may have made it seem akin to the impressment of men for military service – such as was practised in many contemporary western states.
The end of Sultan İbrahim’s reign was a bloody affair: the chronicler Hasan Vecihi, employed in Istanbul at the time, declared that the details would fill a bound volume.34 By 1648 all factions were united in viewing the Sultan’s removal as a necessity. Even İbrahim’s mother, Kösem Sultan, had come to realize that his actions were detrimental to the future of the state, both domestically and in its foreign relations. Kösem was as weary of İbrahim’s extravagant and volatile ways as the rest of his circle, and also fearful for her own position, as she revealed in writing to Grand Vezir Hezarpare Ahmed Pasha, ‘In the end he will leave neither you nor me alive. We will lose control of the government. The whole society is in ruins. Have him removed from the throne immediately’.35
Hezarpare Ahmed Pasha was widely unpopular, resented as much in Istanbul as by the provincial governors on whom the state depended for its smooth functioning. His enjoyment of the luxuries his position brought within his reach was too overt, and he did little to exercise a moderating influence on the Sultan’s excesses. Katib Çelebi, who was close to events, wrote that the Grand Vezir’s presentation of sable robes to commanders returning from the Cretan campaigns provided an impetus for the uprising which led to İbrahim’s deposition.36 A gesture of such ostentation – albeit sanctioned by custom – was the ultimate affront to a people suffering the hardships brought by domestic and foreign strife: the Venetian blockade of the Dardanelles begun earlier that year meant that goods were scarce in the city.
Discontent was first expressed at the janissaries’ mosque – which had played a key part in the deposition of Sultan Osman and the restoration of his uncle Mustafa in 1623 – underlining yet again the janissaries’ central role in the making and unmaking of sultans. From here, on 7 August 1648, they sent word to the palace that the young princes of the next generation must be protected from harm. Hezarpare Ahmed Pasha fled but was soon caught and executed by order of the Sultan. As in 1623, the janissaries allied themselves with the religious establishment in the person of the Sheikhulislam and senior clerics, inviting them to their mosque. The next day they assembled in the Hippodrome.37
Casting aside the formalities of their customary deference, the janissaries and the sultan’s cavalry regiments, who were invited to support them, held the Sultan himself responsible for the ills of the state. Yet though they had the monopoly of armed might in Istanbul, they did not feel able to rely on brute force alone in so momentous an act as the deposition of a sultan. They could not conceive of operating outside the framework of tacit consensus which underpinned the state, and felt they needed a juridical opinion from the Sheikhulislam to sanction their actions with canonical legitimacy. The alternative was anarchy without restraint. Their original raison d’être as the sultan’s crack troops now a distant memory, the janissaries and cavalrymen had come to regard themselves as guardians of the state – a role which did not of necessity conflict with their position as the sultan’s servants, but increasingly did so in practice. In an era when the authority of the sultan was weakened by the vociferousness of the factions in his orbit, they saw it as their task to perpetuate the established form of government and to ensure their place in it. Individual sultans were expendable, but the continuity inherent in the centrality of the Ottoman dynasty was an article of faith.
The Sheikhulislam deferred to Kösem Sultan in the matter of İbrahim’s deposition, aware like other statesmen that she must be consulted before the final decision could be taken. They sent a message to inform her that they were all agreed he must go, and ready to swear the oath of allegiance to the eldest prince, his son Mehmed. Kösem Sultan agreed to meet them in the palace where she went through the motions of resisting them:
For so long you have permitted whatever my son wished [and] proved your loyalty; [and] not once has any of you admonished him or not wished him well. Now you wish to reverse the situation and criticize such an innocent one. This is an evil act.
The matter was discussed for two hours, at the end of which she seemed in despair:
All are united in the opinion that the Sultan must be deposed; it is impossible to do otherwise. You tell me that if I don’t hand over the Prince, they will enter the palace and take him by force.38
It was a measure of the authority which had accrued to the figure of the sultan’s mother, and to the present queen-mother in particular, that it was considered necessary to win her over before the Sheikhulislam could deliver his opinion. Although she could write to the Grand Vezir privately of her true feelings, in the company of the statesmen convention required that she appear to resist them. Fearing that attempts might be made to restore İbrahim, another juridical opinion was sought regarding his subsequent execution.39 Soon the ‘Crazy’ Sultan was dead, to be buried in the tomb of his deposed great-uncle, Sultan Mustafa, in the precincts of Ayasofya.40
If any hoped that the departure of the incompetent Sultan İbrahim and the succession of seven-year-old Mehmed IV would temper the factional struggles in Istanbul and the turmoil in the provinces, they were swiftly disillusioned. A new sultan, and especially one so young, merely brought new alliances into play. In keeping with the custom which had by now become an accepted norm, Mehmed’s mother should have acted as regent on his behalf until he came of age, as Kösem Sultan had for Murad IV until he threw off her authority during the later part of his reign. This time, however, the confused events of recent years and the fact that Mehmed’s mother, Turhan Sultan, was only in her early twenties, did not make for a smooth transition to a regency; the statesmen considered her too inexperienced to have any share in the exercise of power. The position of queen-mother was therefore redefined – as had happened with the right of succession in 1617, when the brother of the deceased Ahmed I rather than his son had been put on the throne: the senior female of the harem, Kösem Sultan, remained in the palace, and Turhan Sultan was set aside to wait her turn.41
Hezarpare Ahmed Pasha’s successor as grand vezir, Sofu Mehmed Pasha, was the compromise candidate of those who had engineered Sultan İbrahim’s deposition and in his nine months in the post, never more than a puppet of competing factions. He was removed and executed to make way for the janissary commander-in-chief Kara Murad Pasha, whose elevation to the grand vezirate signalled that the influence of the janissaries on affairs of state would continue during Sultan Mehmed IV’s minority;42 and, indeed, a janissary commander-in-chief became grand vezir on several occasions during these years.
İbrahim’s deposition no more put an end to unrest on the streets of Istanbul than it did to factional struggle. The protestors now were youths educated in the expectation of a position at court, or a career in the sultan’s cavalry regiments. Lack of money to pay the salaries of the many who were eligible for the cavalry had led to neglect of these regiments in recent years – most conspicuously on the occasion of the latest change of sultan, a time when promotions into their ranks were customarily made. Supported by serving cavalrymen, the frustrated candidates pronounced that Sultan İbrahim had been wrongly executed, but the janissaries and clerics who had agreed on his deposition remained united: backed by a juridical opinion that it was an unlawful rebellion, over some days the janissaries bloodily put down the protest in the Hippodrome, where the cavalrymen and would-be cavalrymen had gathered.43 Thus did the recent solidarity between infantry and cavalry become another casualty of the unrest as each corps pursued its own interests.
Suppression of the cavalry uprising in Istanbul which attended Sultan İbrahim’s deposition provoked a violent response in the provinces. From his base at Niğde in central Anatolia Gürcü (‘Georgian’) Abdülnebi Agha, a former member of the sultan’s cavalry, set off for Istanbul to protest on behalf of those recently massacred. Contemporary chroniclers, shaken by the crisis unfolding before them, dwelt at length on the alarming sequence of events. Abdurrahman Abdi, later Pasha, and Mehmed IV’s favourite, had graduated to service in Topkapı Palace from the palace school of Galatasarayı at the very time of the massacre in the Hippodrome. Of Gürcü Abdülnebi he noted in his digest of these events that he harboured a personal grievance against the government, having been deprived of a lucrative state job. Gürcü Abdülnebi demanded the head of the Sheikhulislam whose opinion had sanctioned the killing of his fellows, and requested an opportunity to state his case before the Sultan.44 According to the chronicler Mustafa Naima, Gürcü Abdülnebi was particularly distressed because the bodies of the protesters had been unceremoniously dumped in the sea without the necessary obsequies being performed: they had been killed, said their avenger, as though they were Christian prisoners-of-war.45
Gürcü Abdülnebi Agha gathered together a large force which included a brigand of the name of Katırcıoğlu (‘Son of the Muleteer’) Mehmed and his band, and crossed Anatolia, reaching İznik in the summer of 1649. The government’s response was to send forth an army commanded by the governor of Erzurum, Tavukçu (‘Chicken-keeper’) Mustafa Pasha, who was then in Istanbul. However, when it reached İzmit, two stages north of İznik, it became apparent that the governor’s forces were inadequate to resist the rebels, and they returned to the capital. Instead, it was decided to station a large army at Üsküdar, just across the Bosporus from Istanbul, and in the Çamlıca hills above. When the government forces were in position the sacred standard of the Prophet Muhammad was taken from the palace at the request of the grand vezir Kara Murad Pasha to his camp at Çamlıca.*46 The Sultan, however – or probably, as regent, his grandmother Kösem Sultan – refused to give permission for the standard to be used to rally the troops against Gürcü Abdülnebi, according to Abdurrahman Abdi, because they hoped to settle the crisis without the bloodshed which the use of this potent symbol might produce. Nevertheless, the Grand Vezir’s tough yet conciliatory stance was apparently justified when further communications from Gürcü Abdülnebi moderated his demand to the dismissal of the Sheikhulislam and, when this was also refused, to senior provincial posts for himself and his associates, including Katırcıoğlu Mehmed. With the rebel army now encamped at Bulgurlu, only a short distance from the Grand Vezir’s forces, he deemed it expedient to concede this reduced demand.47 The terror engendered in Istanbul by the menacing events unfolding across the Bosporus is palpable in Mustafa Naima’s account of this rebellion, although it was compiled some fifty years later, with its details of the hasty enrolment of new janissaries to fight the rebels, of orders for the city’s bread ovens to work at full capacity, and of the arming of shepherds and low-lifes to police a city now empty of troops.48
Grand Vezir Kara Murad Pasha’s limited compromise with the rebels did not work. Bands of skirmishers from either side encountered one another, and after a vicious fight the rebels emerged victorious. The Grand Vezir thereupon sent his troops against Gürcü Abdülnebi’s forces, and they fled into Anatolia. Gürcü Abdülnebi was apprehended at Kırşehir, east of Ankara, and his severed head was subsequently displayed outside Topkapı Palace as a warning to others who might think to challenge the Sultan.49 Katırcıoğlu Mehmed won a pardon, entered the Ottoman military-administrative establishment, and served stints as a provincial governor before being killed in action on Crete50 – this was a rare case of a brigand chief becoming a high-ranking state servant.
Another striking detail from Mustafa Naima’s retrospective account of these events concerns the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of Tavukçu Mustafa Pasha from İzmit before the despatch of a larger force under the command of the Grand Vezir. According to Naima, Tavukçu Mustafa and his men encountered Katırcıoğlu Mehmed and his forces at İzmit, but as Tavukçu Mustafa’s janissaries took aim, Katırcıoğlu Mehmed called out to them to hold their fire, for he had no quarrel with them. At this, the janissaries emerged from their trenches, sat down with their supposed enemies, and drank coffee with them. Some of the janissaries even went behind the lines to Gürcü Abdülnebi’s camp, where they met with a similarly amicable reception. Tavukçu Mustafa’s men decided there was no reason for this fight, and also persuaded reinforcements arriving on the scene by boat to lay down their arms. In this version of events, faced with this insubordination among his troops, and seeing that the townspeople of İzmit supported the rebels, Tavukçu Mustafa had no alternative than to retire to Istanbul.51
Gürcü Abdülnebi’s revolt revealed the depth of the divisions among the self-appointed guardians of the Ottoman state and within its ruling circles. The sultan’s cavalry were at first at odds with the janissaries, ready to support rebels allegedly seeking revenge, like them, for the massacre in the Hippodrome. Yet the janissary rank-and-file were easily able to have amicable intercourse with the rebels. Some officials criticized the Queen-mother, as the Sultan’s regent, for her refusal to sanction the use of the sacred standard against Gürcü Abdülnebi’s forces; but she was supported by her ally the Chief Black Eunuch who, like her, insisted that it must be used only against non-Muslims. As it transpired, permission for it to be taken from the palace had been given by the Registrar of the Descendants of the Prophet who ignored the tradition that only the sultan had the authority to take such a decision. Another high-ranking cleric, on the other hand, was wary of the consequences of issuing a juridical opinion that it was licit to attack rebels whose grievances contained more than a grain of truth: the recent massacre in the Hippodrome demonstrated that it might produce further violence.52 So it was that Gürcü Abdülnebi’s readiness to arm himself and his supporters and to take his complaint to Istanbul was understood by the statesmen as a grievous threat to their hold on power, one all the more alarming given that the sultan’s regiments seemed ready to mutiny. Yet the rebels could conceive of no other redress than the award of an office of state.
Although Gürcü Abdülnebi had brought the disquiet of Anatolia to the very heart of the Ottoman state, the resolution of his rebellion did not result in any improvement in the life of the Anatolian people. In 1650 those in possession of state land-grants were ordered to pay over half their income as an extraordinary tax,53 a move which can only have exacerbated the already turbulent situation in the provinces. The careers of the ‘rebellious pashas’ brought to prominence by this turmoil tended to conform to a pattern: they alternated periods in the service of the state with periods of resistance, and when sent against others of their number, they were reluctant agents of the central power. They hoped to make the statesmen in Istanbul aware of provincial concerns, and to impose their own vision of government upon the chaos they witnessed there. When the various factions in Istanbul were sufficiently united to curtail the pashas’ activities, they were able to do so; often this unity was lacking, however, and the terrifying prospect of thousands of armed men heading for the capital left little alternative but submission – to a greater or lesser degree – to the pashas’ demands for inclusion, or reinclusion, in the ruling establishment. Gürcü Abdülnebi’s was one of many violent expressions of deep-seated provincial resentment of the janissaries’ increasing control of central power to be acted out in the immediate environs of the capital. (In England, seven years earlier, the march of a hostile army on the capital had resulted in a similar stand-off at Turnham Green, about as far from the heart of London as Bulgurlu is from the centre of Istanbul – but on that occasion the ‘rebel’ was King Charles I, trying to reclaim his throne, and those holding power were the members of the Long Parliament.)
One notable circumstance common to several of the rebellious pashas who rose to particular prominence between Sultan Osman’s murder in 1623 and the lull in provincial disturbances which followed the appointment as grand vezir in 1656 of Varvar Ali Pasha’s one-time captive Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, was their Caucasian origin. Abaza Mehmed Pasha came from Abkhazia on the Caucasian Black Sea coast as did İpşir Mustafa Pasha; Gürcü Abdülnebi was a Georgian. Derviş Mehmed Pasha, who was grand vezir in 1653–4, was also from the Caucasus.54 Evliya Çelebi’s kinsman and patron Melek Ahmed Pasha was another Abkhazian but, noting that Abkhazians were considered stingy, Evliya held that Istanbul-born Melek Ahmed should not really be counted as one.55 Men such as these were not products of the youth-levy, for they were Muslim-born and came from a region which had not traditionally supplied recruits for the ruling establishment. The possibility of state service had been opened up to the youths of the Caucasus from late in the sixteenth century: describing the quarter of Galata around the cannon foundry, Evliya Çelebi noted that those living there came mainly from the Black Sea and from Georgia and Abkhazia; he wrote that the Abkhazians sent their children back to their country when they were merely a year or two old, to be brought up there and then returned to Istanbul at the age of fifteen when they would be presented to the sultan’s favourites or sold to state dignitaries. Melek Ahmed, Evliya wrote, had entered state service from such a background.56
Other rebels came from the western reaches of the empire and had been recruited through the youth-levy in the customary way: for instance, Varvar Ali Pasha was from Bosnia* and Evliya Çelebi’s one-time patron Defterdarzade Mehmed Pasha was from Herzegovina. It is evident from contemporary accounts that there was tension between men of Bosnian or Albanian origin and those from Abkhazia, Georgia or the further Caucasus; men brought into the Ottoman system from the Balkans considered those hailing from the Caucasus to be interlopers57 – and İpşir Mustafa Pasha’s Abkhazian origin, for instance, was cited by Defterdarzade Mehmed when he warned the hapless Varvar Ali not to trust him.
In August 1650 Melek Ahmed Pasha was appointed grand vezir, but his term came to an abrupt end a year later as a result of his incompetence in handling a violent uprising of Istanbul tradesmen. The treasury was empty in these years, and when time came in the summer of 1651 for salaries to be paid to the janissaries, the state treasurer colluded with their officers to collect debased coin struck in the Belgrade mint and clipped coins wherever they might be found, and the shopkeepers of Istanbul were forced to exchange these for the gold coins in their possession at a loss of 30 per cent on the official rate. The gold coins were then exchanged for silver at the moneychangers, at a loss to the latter. By this means enough cash was found to both pay the salaries and allow the janissary officers a substantial profit.58 As it happened there was more debased coin available for these financial manipulations than usual, for the insecurity of the sea-routes – presumably because of continuing Cossack harassment – meant that it was not possible to send off the pay due to the garrison at Azov.59
Guild leaders took their complaints to Melek Ahmed Pasha citing fourteen other levies they had had to endure that year in addition to this latest vexation. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Melek Ahmed insulted them, calling them ‘infidel cats’, and ordered them out.60 Reaction against the proliferation of debased coin came to a head in uproar in the Istanbul bazaar on 21 August. The tradesmen shut up their shops and their leaders gathered at the residence of the sheikhulislam, Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz Efendi – a former chief justice of both Rumeli and Anatolia who had played a part in the deposition of Sultan İbrahim and was therefore on bad terms with Kösem Sultan61 – who wrote a history of his time in which he recorded his involvement in the tradesmen’s uprising. The leaders of the tradesmen appealed to the Sheikhulislam to intercede on their behalf with the Sultan, but he pleaded that he could not and advised them to go once more to the Grand Vezir; their tone became menacing and he was forced to agree to write to Melek Ahmed about the matter. Omitted from Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz’s account of events – but recorded by Mustafa Naima – is the fact that when the tradesmen’s leaders insisted that he go before them to the palace, he went to another room on the pretext of performing his ablutions and tried to escape from his house without them noticing.62 His horse saddled up, Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz was taken under close supervision to Ayasofya where there was gathered a crowd he estimated at 20,000.63
The Sultan consented to give Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz an audience but before the boy could arrive, Kösem Sultan, seeing the Sheikhulislam waiting, asked why he had been permitted to come inside. Fearfully, Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz stated his business and, after a long discussion, convinced the Queen-mother that the grand vezir’s seal must be brought to her, signifying his dismissal.64 Sultan Mehmed summoned the terrified Grand Vezir and ordered him to write a memorandum designed to bring an end to the unrest, but the crowd would accept only the Sultan’s own hand. He therefore ordered that all recent impositions be lifted, indeed that nothing additional to the taxes included in the law code of Sultan Süleyman I be levied. The crowd prepared to disperse, and it seemed that the trouble was over. But there then arose a demand for the execution of sixteen people whom the tradesmen accused of embezzling state funds – mainly janissary officers, including the commander-in chief, Kara Çavuş (‘Black Messenger’) Mustafa Agha. The crowd also called for the dismissal of Melek Ahmed Pasha. In a naive effort to put an end to the unrest, Kösem Sultan proposed that Kara Çavuş Mustafa should replace Melek Ahmed Pasha, but when Kara Çavuş Mustafa refused to go to the palace, demanding that the seal of office be brought to him, an elderly vezir, Siyavuş Pasha, was appointed instead.65 Predictably, Evliya Çelebi blamed others for Melek Ahmed’s fall, and Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz for inciting the crowd and palace against his patron.66
Night came. The new grand vezir and the Sheikhulislam tried to calm the tension. They went to the mosque of the janissaries to meet the regiments’ officers, where the commander-in-chief Kara Çavuş Mustafa Agha reminded Siyavuş Pasha that he was impotent without the janissaries’ support. Next morning the streets were full again, and janissaries stood menacingly on every corner with drawn swords to stop the people reaching the palace. Many of the protestors were wounded, others murdered. Fear eventually dispersed the crowd, but the tradesmen refused to reopen their shops.67
The janissary officers determined to silence all opposition inside the palace to their domination. Their target, to which Kösem Sultan agreed for reasons of her own, was the faction around Turhan Sultan, and an element of their plan was the replacement of Sultan Mehmed with his younger brother Süleyman, whose mother was a less threatening rival than Turhan. One of Kösem’s servants leaked news of a plot to poison the young sultan to Turhan’s faction whereupon Turhan and her supporters decided to have Kösem assassinated. She was murdered on the night of 2 September 1651 by palace functionaries hired for the purpose.68 With Kösem dead, Turhan’s partisans now came to the fore, the most senior among them her chief black eunuch, Süleyman Agha. The new grand vezir Siyavuş Pasha was a natural ally of this faction having himself been the victim of the janissaries’ brutishness on his appointment to the post only a few days earlier.
The janissary officers were able to resist the swell of popular sentiment for only a short time longer: all sections of society were set against them as indicated by events since Mehmed IV’s accession. It was the janissaries who had enabled the elderly queen-mother, Kösem Sultan, to retain her grip on power, but commentators were divided as to whether she had actively sought an alliance with them, or whether she had felt constrained to humour them as the only means of preserving the integrity of the state; to some, their power seemed a lesser evil than the looming prospect of having to concede every whim of the populace.69
When Kösem Sultan was murdered she was nearly seventy and had been at the centre of power since becoming Ahmed I’s favourite concubine some fifty years earlier. During her periods of regency in the reigns of her sons Murad IV and İbrahim and her grandson Mehmed IV she had achieved unprecedented influence over political decision-making in her role as protector of the dynasty and the state. As observers were divided concerning her motives for espousing the janissaries’ cause, so they differed in their verdict on her other activities. Some reckoned that she had, most reprehensibly, amassed a great fortune through illegitimate means and that her involvement in affairs of state was to be execrated. To Mustafa Naima, however, she was a great benefactress who put the income from the lands and revenues assigned to her to good use, undertaking charitable works and construction projects as visible signs of the concern of the dynasty for its subjects.70 Her mosque in Üsküdar is not large, and far less splendid than that of her predecessor as queen-mother, Nurbanu Sultan – who built a mosque, a theological school, a dervish lodge, a hospice, a school, a caravansaray, a bath-house, and other structures in the same quarter – but her substantial caravansaray near the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul – the Valide Han – still stands, albeit in a much dilapidated condition.
Early on the morning following Kösem Sultan’s murder, the Sultan summoned his statesmen and the palace functionaries to an audience. First to speak were two high-ranking clerics, Hanefi Efendi and Hocazade Mesud Efendi, who adduced the argument that since the Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam any opposed to him were to be accounted rebels, and that it was proper to kill them. They recommended that the sacred standard be brought out, and that criers be sent around the city to summon all true believers; any who did not come to the palace should be punished. The Sultan seemed convinced by their reasoning and the sacred standard was taken from safe-keeping – despite the fact that those causing the disorder were Muslim. Sheikhulislam Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz Efendi was conspicuous by his absence from the palace: against advice and after much indecision, he ignored the Sultan’s summons, preferring to put his trust in the janissary officers whom he greatly feared and whom he reckoned would emerge victorious from the confusion. With a number of other senior clerics he took refuge at the janissary commander-in-chief’s residence, but when clerics and janissary commanders decided to move to the nearby mosque of the janissaries, they found their way impeded by rank-and-file janissaries who were many, armed, and surrounded them on all sides as they went, challenging the clerics that they had refused to attend the Sultan’s audience. By this time criers had roused the people of the city against those who, in usurping the government, had overstepped the bounds of acceptable conduct. Fired up, the crowd blamed the janissaries for Kösem’s murder and swore to avenge it.71
In his absence, Sheikhulislam Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz Efendi was dismissed. Much discussion ensued over a suitable successor; the candidate supported by Turhan Sultan’s faction, his deputy Ebusaid Efendi, was appointed, and his first act was to give a juridical opinion for the execution of those who refused to rally to the sacred standard. The janissary officers, under siege in their mosque, and with no means of escaping from their predicament, were effectively isolated. Soon the streets were full of men converging on the palace, each armed to defend himself against the janissaries. Bewildered, at first the crowd bided its time, waiting to see what would happen, and before long the rank-and-file janissaries began to join the surge towards the sacred standard, trying to blend in. Ebusaid Efendi sent a letter to their officers in the corps’ mosque, ordering them to appear before him. This was ignored, and the commander-in-chief, Kara Çavuş Mustafa Agha, thinking that his rank-and-file would rescue them, told his colleagues to stand fast and be ready to defend themselves if forces loyal to the new government were sent against them – however, all but the most senior officers soon slipped away. A defiant Kara Çavuş Mustafa Agha sent an ultimatum to the palace demanding the heads of a further ten officials, in addition to four aghas of Turhan’s faction he had earlier called for – as an alternative, he proposed exiling the latter to Egypt.72
The loyalty of the people of Istanbul proved by their readiness to rally to the sacred standard, the crowd – and the janissaries in its midst – dispersed. The negotiations that eventually ended this shocking incident must have encouraged the janissary commanders to believe they would survive, albeit in exile, but still in possession of the wealth they had amassed while in office: Kara Çavuş Mustafa Agha was appointed governor of Temeşvar, while his second-in-command, another Mustafa, was to be governor of Bosnia, and the former janissary commander-in-chief Bektaş Agha was awarded the office of sub-governor of Bursa. In the event, however, all were killed shortly afterwards at the Sultan’s behest, and the seizure of their huge fortunes went some way to alleviating the state’s dire financial crisis.73 Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz Efendi, compromised by his closeness to these janissary officers, was exiled to the island of Chios:74 his actions had manifestly undermined the fiction that members of the religious hierarchy remained aloof from politics. Three weeks of turmoil were thus brought to an end, and it was seen that the statesmen around the Sultan and his young mother had acquitted themselves well in the handling of an explosive situation.
With the ending of janissary domination of Istanbul politics began the supremacy of another clique, that of the palace aghas who had confirmed Turhan Sultan in her position as queen-mother. While officially she was the Sultan’s representative during his immaturity, the primary agent of her will was Chief Black Eunuch Süleyman Agha, who had been party to the decisions taken for the restoration of order and the destruction of the janissary commanders. Grand Vezir Siyavuş Pasha had no real power, and within a few weeks was replaced by the aged and equally ineffectual Gürcü Mehmed Pasha, brother of the rebel Gürcü Abdülnebi.75 Gürcü Mehmed was succeeded after a few months by Tarhoncu (‘Tarragon-eater’ or ‘Tarragon-seller’) Ahmed Pasha, who had been governor of Egypt between 1649 and 1651, had subsequently been imprisoned in the fortress of Yedikule on the Istanbul land walls, and had his wealth confiscated, before being ignominiously appointed governor of a Balkan sub-province.76 His rehabilitation was engineered by Hocazade Mesud Efendi, now chief justice of Anatolia, who was deeply involved in state affairs and a powerful presence in the palace; but it was not achieved without a great deal of deliberation on the part of the Sultan and the high officers of state. Mehmed’s own preference was for his tutor Deli Hüseyin Pasha, currently commanding the army in Crete, but Hocazade Mesud dominated the proceedings and, with an eloquent summary of the three critical problems facing the state – the condition of the fleet, the war in Crete, and finding the money to pay for this war – persuaded the Sultan that Tarhoncu Ahmed, whom he reminded everyone had kept the Egyptian treasury in the black, was the only man for the job.77
In a radical departure from past practice Tarhoncu Ahmed Pasha was required as a condition of his appointment to undertake, in the presence of the Sultan, his vezirs and the Sheikhulislam, to resolve the three problems identified by Hocazade Mesud Efendi. Threatened with the loss of his head if he failed in his mission, Tarhoncu Ahmed set two conditions of his own. The first was that no one, whatever their status, should be exempt from his efforts to ensure that the state received the moneys due it, and that he should have full independence in this matter; the second, that he should have the power vested in him to rescind the improper appointments and preferments of his predecessor.78
Earlier reform efforts had typically been rooted in the attempted reimposition of norms imagined to have prevailed in past times. Now it seemed the realization was dawning that solutions designed to cope with the present were required, rather than attempts to make the present conform to the past.79 Tarhoncu Ahmed’s appointment seemed to suggest that the recent turmoil had shaken Ottoman statesmen to the core and forced them to adopt a constructive attitude, with the overriding aim of saving the state from sinking further into bankruptcy, but this rare instance of agreement was not enough to ensure that workable solutions would or could be found. Tarhoncu Ahmed’s undertaking to achieve a satisfactory outcome to the Cretan war, for example, conflicted with the need to put the financial affairs of the state to rights, and he soon found himself in dispute with Grand Admiral Derviş Mehmed Pasha over the money needed to keep the fleet in readiness.80 These were also years of plague and poor harvests.81 Perhaps inevitably, Tarhoncu Ahmed failed to balance the budget: he remained in office for less than a year, and the terms of his contract were honoured – he paid with his life. His austere measures had not been popular and, as Evliya Çelebi observed on the appointment of Derviş Mehmed Pasha as his successor, ‘the people breathed a sigh of relief . . . they celebrated each day as though it was New Year’s Eve . . . everyone rejoiced.’82 A contemporary from Baghdad, however, where Derviş Mehmed, as governor from soon after its reconquest in 1638, had adopted innovative economic measures which were often unpopular, wrote of him as a brutal tyrant.83 Former grand vezir Melek Ahmed Pasha was swiftly rehabilitated from the disgrace that followed his ignominious handling of the Istanbul uprising of 1651; by 1653 he was second vezir and, Evliya Çelebi recorded with no trace of irony, in a position to enjoy life in his twelve mansions on the shores of the Bosporus.84
İpşir Mustafa Pasha, rescuer of the future grand vezir Köprülü Mehmed Pasha from probable death at the hands of Varvar Ali Pasha in 1648, also briefly became grand vezir. He had spent his early years in the retinue of Abaza Mehmed Pasha, accompanying him when he marched on Istanbul in 1623 and during his subsequent career in the Balkans. He won the patronage of Grand Vezir Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Pasha, architect of the 1639 peace with Iran, fought with Sultan Murad on the Yerevan campaign, and held the governorship of a number of provinces. His strong-arm tactics made him unpopular, but built him a reputation as the only man capable of putting down the rebellions of these years. He had declined to fight on behalf of the state against the rebel pashas who were his allies – against Derviş Mehmed Pasha, then governor of Anadolu province in 1646, for example, and against Varvar Ali Pasha in 1648 (though in the end he took the state’s part on the latter occasion).85
In 1651, as governor of Sivas, İpşir Mustafa Pasha occupied Ankara and attempted to establish his own administration in the area, setting himself up as a champion of the sultan’s cavalry regiments against the janissaries. One of the demands he addressed to the government was that the Druze of Lebanon, whose grip on the tax-farms of the area he had earlier failed to loosen, be suppressed; he was soon appointed governor of Aleppo and charged with the task of quelling Druze insubordination. His success in this, coupled with an awareness of the dramatic events in Istanbul, encouraged him to put forward his own programme for the redress of the ills besetting the government – as had the unfortunate Varvar Ali Pasha before him; he sent notice of it to the governors of the Anatolian provinces, but received scant response. Complaints of his harsh style of government in Aleppo reached Istanbul, as did reports that he planned to march on the capital and take retribution on the incumbent statesmen. Alarmed, they sought to deflect his wrath by appointing him grand vezir. At first he refused, but in December 1654 he marched from Aleppo to Istanbul to claim the office, seizing tax-farms for his own men, and exacting summary justice as he went. In an attempt to bind him to the dynasty’s cause he was betrothed to Ayşe Sultan, a middle-aged, widowed daughter of Ahmed I.* İpşir Mustafa lasted only a few months as grand vezir, during which time he succeeded in alienating even his cavalry supporters, to the extent that they united with the janissaries in a rebellion which led to his execution.86 He was only one of a succession of provincial governors who had used the opportunity afforded by distance from Istanbul to attempt to throw off central control. While serving in the provinces such men were able to build a local power-base from which it seemed possible to dictate their own terms to the government of the day. Rarely did they rise as high in the administration as İpşir Mustafa – and his hubris was followed by swift nemesis.
The war for Crete continued. While the ruling circles were engaged in so intensive an internal struggle for power there was little chance of a consistent policy. Commanders pursued their goals – as they saw them – as best they could, always uncertain whether troops or funds would reach them, and nervous that incidents of mutiny – like that in August 1649 when the janissaries demanded to be sent home after two years’ service in the trenches of Iraklion87 – might be repeated. It was not only fighting ships they needed but a high level of logistical support in men and matériel, without which they were quite unable to function. In July of 1651 – the summer which saw the tradesmen’s uprising and the murder of Kösem Sultan – the first significant naval engagement of the war took place. A strong Ottoman fleet sailed south from Istanbul and met the Venetians off Santorini, an initial skirmish which was followed by a battle off Naxos in the Cyclades in which the Ottoman fleet was scattered and close on a thousand captives were taken by the Venetians.88
There was little activity in the Cretan war during the months of Tarhoncu Ahmed Pasha’s grand vezirate, but as a former grand admiral his successor Derviş Mehmed Pasha gave it greater priority. During his term of office there occurred, in May 1654, what subsequently proved to be the first of four naval battles in the Dardanelles; it ended in Ottoman victory, but the Venetians were able to console themselves with the knowledge that the Ottomans had suffered the substantial loss of six thousand men. The new grand admiral, Kara Murad Pasha, restructured the fleet at Chios, then raided Tinos, and met the Venetians at Milos before sailing to Foça, north of İzmir, and then returning to the Dardanelles, from where he went south to Crete and was back again in Istanbul by the autumn. The Venetians may have avoided a second set-piece engagement with an Ottoman fleet in 1654, but a joint Venetian–Maltese fleet encountered the foe at the Dardanelles in June 1655; this time the Ottomans withdrew after a six-hour battle. In July, a five-week Venetian siege of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese came to nothing.89
Success or failure in a naval battle of the seventeenth century could lie in a shift of the wind. In the Dardanelles in June 1656 not only was the current in the Venetians’ favour, but such a shift of the wind gave added advantage, bunching the Ottoman fleet against the shore of the Straits, unable to escape the Venetian guns. The feelings of Grand Admiral Kenan Pasha were clear from his report of the circumstances of this defeat. He had been all too aware before the battle that he was undermanned: the troops of the sultan’s regiments refused to serve at sea, and he had to resort to men of inferior quality. When brought to battle by the Venetians he suffered further losses through desertion, as men leapt overboard and swam to the nearby shore. He could only watch impotently as the wind blew his ships one against the other.90 Previous attempts made by Venice to blockade the Straits and thus prevent naval supplies and manpower from Istanbul reaching Crete to reinforce the Ottoman assault on Iraklion had been thwarted, but in this disastrous encounter the Ottomans lost the strategically vital islands of Bozcaada and Lemnos. Holding them, the Venetians could control the Straits and the Ottoman outlet to the open seas of the Aegean and beyond. If the Ottomans escaped lightly in 1655, wrote Mustafa Naima, in 1656 they suffered their worst naval defeat since Lepanto.91
The war with Venice was not the only international crisis to occupy the Ottomans in the middle of the seventeenth century. After years of peaceful coexistence, their relationship with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was shaken in 1648 by events on the north-western frontier of the empire when the Ukrainian Cossacks, ably commanded by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against their Polish masters. When King Wladyslaw was formulating his scheme to provoke the Ottomans to fight on a second front in the Black Sea while they were yet battling Venice for possession of Crete, he had secretly negotiated with Cossack leaders – of whom Khmelnytsky was one – to gauge the strength of their willingness to participate; although his hopes were dashed, the discussions upset the status quo and raised expectations of an improvement in the oppressed situation of the Cossacks within the Commonwealth. The immediate cause of Khmelnytsky’s revolt, however, was the seizure of his lands by a Polish nobleman; unlike many of his fellows, Khmelnytsky refused to accept such behaviour and events were set in motion which led to outright war between the Cossacks and the Commonwealth.
Setting aside past differences Khmelnytsky and the Tatar khan İslam Giray III negotiated an alliance to bring together the formidable combination of the Cossack infantry and the Tatar cavalry; a precedent for this had been set in 1624 when the Cossacks supported Mehmed and Şahin Giray in their resistance to Ottoman attempts to reinstate Canbeg Giray as Crimean khan. One condition of Khmelnytsky’s alliance with İslam Giray was that the Cossacks should burn the 3,000 boats of their Black Sea fleet, cause of so much devastation to Ottoman shores, in case they were used to harass the coasts of the khanate. The forces of the Commonwealth had no hope of resisting the Cossack–Tatar combination; their army lost several battles and Warsaw was left vulnerable to attack. However, the Cossack–Crimean alliance was not a natural one, by reason of their very different geopolitical interests, and the Khan made sure that the Cossacks were not strengthened enough to achieve total success in their uprising. Khmelnytsky looked for other allies, the Ottoman sultan among them, and long negotiations ensued. Muscovy and the Commonwealth had signed a treaty in 1634 and Muscovy therefore could not respond to Khmelnytsky’s request for help; in 1654, however, with his erstwhile Tatar ally now on good terms with the Polish king, Khmelnytsky swore allegiance to the Tsar, precipitating a war between Muscovy and the Commonwealth over Ukraine. Khmelnytsky’s revolt and its bloody consequences were an important element in preparing the ground for the great power struggle in the steppe between the Commonwealth, Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, which came to a climax over a century later with the partition of Poland, the end of the Crimean khanate and the Ottoman retreat from the northern Black Sea.92
In 1656 another revolt of the utmost severity convulsed Istanbul for several months, recorded in a number of contemporary accounts. According to the Ottoman Armenian Eremya Çelebi Kömürcüyan, a youth at the time, the uprising began at midday on Friday, 1 March 1656: he was sitting in a shop when a great noise erupted, and the shopkeepers began to close their shutters. The important Friday midday prayer was cancelled as officers and men of the sultan’s regiments gathered at their parade ground, complaining because their salaries were being paid in debased coin – an event not in itself unusual, but the coin was so corrupt on this occasion that 1000 aspers of it was valued at less than one hundred aspers in the market-place. The troops marched to the Hippodrome, vociferously demanding that those who had deceived Sultan Mehmed by implementing the debasement be killed. Two days later the Sultan granted the leaders of the mutiny an audience; they swore allegiance to him, levelling blame at ‘some black and white aghas and women’ whom they held responsible for perverting his rule. The aghas of the harem retorted that it was he they were after which frightened the boy-Sultan so much that he trembled and began to cry. Wiping his tears he asked the mutineers what they wanted and was presented with a list of thirty-one names, including that of his mother and the Chief Black Eunuch. Still weeping, Mehmed asked that his mother be spared – this was acceptable to the ringleaders, but soon the bodies of the Chief Black Eunuch and the Chief White Eunuch were thrown over the wall of the palace into the mob below, and their mutilated corpses were strung feet up in a plane tree in the Hippodrome.93
The next day the troops again marched on the palace. The Sultan was unable to resist their demands: more palace officials were sacrificed and their corpses tossed over the wall to be strung up in the plane trees, while the troops forced the appointment of their own candidates to the ranking offices of state; among these was Siyavuş Pasha who became grand vezir for the second time, and Hocazade Mesud Efendi who became sheikhulislam. Some of their intended victims escaped, and a hunt for them began in the city – criers went about promising any who found them a position in the sultan’s cavalry or infantry and a land-grant. Five days after the beginning of the uprising the criers ordered the shops to reopen. Eremya Çelebi recalled seeing the Sultan’s nurse Meleki Hatun, who had been responsible for betraying Kösem Sultan’s plot to Turhan Sultan, being taken away before she was murdered and strung up in a tree. Three days later the relatives of those hung from the plane trees were ordered to come and retrieve the corpses. The reign of terror continued during the following weeks.94
In late April the governor of Damascus, Boynueğri (‘Crook-neck’, also known as Boynuyaralı, ‘Wounded-necked’) Mehmed Pasha, who was in his late eighties, was summoned from his post to succeed Siyavuş Pasha who had died after a month as grand vezir. Boynueğri Mehmed had been sent to Syria to put an end to the activities of Seydi Ahmed Pasha, an ally of Melek Ahmed Pasha and a fellow Abkhazian, who had subsequently been removed from the governorship of Aleppo – where he and his men had pillaged and wrought great destruction – to Sivas. Sultan Mehmed’s advisers showed some skill in handling the current crisis, which was made even more dangerous than past uprisings by the unanimity of purpose of janissaries and cavalrymen. On 9 May the Sultan ordered his troops to prepare for campaign; the janissaries and cavalrymen hoped that this would be against Seydi Ahmed Pasha. The anticipated rewards of campaigning were clearly attractive: Eremya Çelebi reported that anyone who was not eligible to be enlisted, but who falsely passed himself off as a janissary or cavalryman, had his garb ripped off. He does not explain why this should have happened, but by describing the enthusiastic common folk as ‘Turks’, a term of disparagement at the time, implies that the tax-exempt military were zealous in refusing to share their privileges with the tax-paying populace. Some ‘Turks’ dressed themselves as Armenians, recognizable by their yellow boots, their coloured fur hats and quilted turbans, their colourful jackets and silk cummerbunds; these ‘Turks’, by contrast, perhaps sought to avoid military service at any price, since non-Muslims did not serve as fighting men.95
On several occasions Eremya Çelebi saw the Sultan going about the city in disguise (as sultans not infrequently did), once passing through the bazaar only a stone’s throw away from his shop. On another occasion the Sultan ordered the beheading of a man caught smoking tobacco. It was almost two months after the anarchy began before Mehmed IV was again able to appear openly in ceremonial procession to celebrate Friday prayers in a mosque outside the palace; in veneration, the tradesmen and city people threw sand in his path so that his horse’s hooves would not touch the ground.96
The dangerous situation in Istanbul was brought under control and a measure of tranquillity was finally restored by employing the classic strategy of divide and rule – the janissaries and the cavalrymen were made to doubt one another’s loyalty to their common cause. At the time of Mehmed’s first public appearance for the Friday prayer, word went around among the janissaries that Seydi Ahmed Pasha – recently arrived in the capital – had been granted an audience at the palace in the company of the officers of the sultan’s cavalry. One week later the janissary commander-in-chief was executed and Seydi Ahmed was granted an amnesty – Eremya Çelebi describes the arrival of his followers in Istanbul, loaded down with the goods and weapons, including even cannon, plundered in the course of their progress through Anatolia. They did not stay long, but set off for Silistra on the Danube, a recently (and as it turned out, only temporarily) independent province where Seydi Ahmed was to be governor.97 Deprived of the cavalrymen’s support, and with their commander-in-chief removed, the janissaries gradually subsided into quiescence.
Sheikhulislam Hocazade Mesud Efendi was a victim of the violence. Twenty-two years after Ahizade Hüseyin Efendi had become the first sheikhulislam to be executed, judged guilty of meddling in politics by Murad IV in 1634, Hocazade Mesud became the second. The decision to appoint him had been forced upon the Sultan in the heat of the chaos, despite his reputation for venality and propensity, as with Ahizade Hüseyin, for meddling in politics. To Eremya Çelebi he was the scourge of the Armenian community of Bursa – as kadı in that city, earlier in his career, he had had an Armenian church pulled down, prompting the grand vezir of the time to send inspectors to the city to investigate the incident.98 By Eremya Çelebi’s account, Hocazade Mesud was punished for his activities in Bursa with five hundred lashes to his feet, and a ban on future office – which did not, however, hold him back.99
For several weeks during that tumultuous summer of 1656 – between the death of the aged Siyavuş Pasha in late April and the arrival from Damascus of Boynueğri Mehmed Pasha early in July – there had been no grand vezir. The disastrous sea-battle in the Dardanelles took place on 26 June, Bozcaada fell to the Venetians on 8 July and Lemnos on 20 August.100 The subsequent blockade of the Dardanelles affected not only the war in Crete: there was a scarcity of food and other goods in Istanbul, and prices rose. Many people addressed petitions to the Sultan, hoping to provoke him to action.101
At a meeting on 4 September between Sultan Mehmed and his highest-ranking statesmen and military officers a detailed plan concerning preparations and strategy for the forthcoming land and sea campaign against Venice was discussed. Although significant sums had lately accrued to the treasury from the estates of those murdered in the recent uprisings and from melting down the debased coin which had sparked the furore,102 the state coffers were far from full. Furthermore, Boynueğri Mehmed Pasha noted, some of the revenues traditionally earmarked to defray campaign expenses were no longer in the possession of the state but had devolved into the hands of private individuals. He threatened that if this problem was not remedied, the burden of continuing the war against Venice must fall this season on individual statesmen and military officers who would bear the cost from their own pockets. Needless to say, this did not meet with approval, but when these revenues were reassigned, Boynueğri Mehmed distributed them amongst his own supporters.103
The Sultan was not pleased with his new grand vezir, complaining that he had achieved nothing since coming to office – and had caused much irritation besides. A week later another meeting was called. To everyone’s surprise, Mehmed IV announced that he intended to lead his army on campaign in person. Boynueğri Mehmed Pasha maintained that this would add further expense to an undertaking which was in any case most inadvisable, but his protestations fell on deaf ears.104 A few days later, he paid for his frank opinion with dismissal, and was replaced on 15 September by Köprülü Mehmed Pasha who had been without office, living in his adopted home-town of Köprü, near Amasya, since throwing in his lot with İpşir Mustafa Pasha – unwisely, as it turned out. He had returned to Istanbul with Boynueğri Mehmed in July, and settled back into the politics of central government after an absence of several years. The odd workings of fate displayed by the dismissal of Boynueğri Mehmed and the elevation in his place of Köprülü Mehmed as grand vezir fittingly inaugurated the rise of a dynasty which was to monopolize the office into the next century.
* As Osman’s full brother Bayezid could be considered the rightful heir in Murad’s place. His fate inspired the French playwright Racine to dramatize his story in a play first performed in 1672. Racine knew of Murad’s murder of Bayezid from the despatches of Count de Cézy, French ambassador to the Sultan’s court at the time of the fratricide.
* Apparently brought from Damascus to Istanbul in 1593–4 to provide inspiration in the war against the Habsburgs, the standard had accompanied Sultan Mehmed III to the battlefield of Mezőkeresztes in Hungary, but after the 1596 campaigning season it was not returned to Damascus (Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power 151).
* The printed edition of Mustafa Naima’s chronicle used here refers to him as Vardar Ali Pasha, implying possibly that he came from, or at least had some connection with, the area of the river Vardar in Macedonia.
* Two of her previous six husbands had also been grand vezirs: Nasuh Pasha, grand vezir between 1611 and 1614, and Hafiz Ahmed Pasha, who served in 1625–6 and again in 1631.