the name of Sahib-Kharj," (master of finance.) The Venetians, who had availed themselves of the anarchy reigning at Constantinople to occupy Tenedos and Lemnos, so as to blockade the Dardanelles, were dislodged by the activity of the vizir, who directed the sieges in person, bestowing honours and rewards on the soldiers most distinguished for their bravery; and though the Turkish fleet was defeated (July 17, 1657) at the entrance of the straits, the Venetians sustained an irreparable loss in their valiant admiral Mocenigo, who was blown up with his ship by a well-aimed shot from one of the batteries on shore. But though the janissaries were thus reduced to order and obedience, the flame of disaffection was still smouldering among the spahis of Asia Minor, and broke out, in the course of the ensuing year, into a formidable and widely-organized rebellion. Not fewer than forty pashas and sandjaks followed the banner of the insurgent leader Abaza-Hassan, pasha of Aleppo, who advanced towards the Bosphorus at the head of 70,000 men, assuming the state of a monarch, and demanding the heads of Kiuprili and his principal adherents as the price of his submission. Morteza-Pasha, governor of Diarbekr, who attempted to oppose him in the field, was routed with the loss of nearly his whole army; and though the emissaries who attempted to seduce the troops in Constantinople from their allegiance were detected and put to death by the vigilance of Kiuprili, the revolt spread throughout Anatolia and Syria, and the sultan was preparing to take the field in person, when treachery succeeded in accomplishing what force had failed to effect. It has been an uniform maxim of the Ottoman domestic policy, which singularly contrasts with their scrupulous observance of the treaties entered into with foreign powers, that no faith is to be kept with fermanlis, or traitors to the Padishah; and in the assured belief, confirmed by hostages and solemn oaths, that the sultan was willing to accede to his demands, Abaza-Hassan suffered himself to be drawn from his headquarters at Aintab, with thirty of his officers, to a conference with Morteza at Aleppo: but, in the midst of the banquet which followed this interview, Abaza and his comrades found themselves in the grasp of the executioners—while their followers, dispersed through the town, were slaughtered without mercy on the signal of a gun fired from the castle; and the army, panic-stricken at the fate of its leaders, quickly melted away. But no sooner was the semblance of tranquillity restored, than the Kaimakam Ismail Pasha, an unscrupulous agent of the merciless decrees of the vizir, was sent into Asia under the new title of Moufetish, or inquisitor; and an unsparing proscription almost utterly exterminated all the remaining partizans of Abaza-Hassan, without distinction of rank; while the suppression of numerous timars or fiefs, and the removal of the occupants of others from their ancient abodes to remote districts, so effectually loosened the bands which had hitherto united the spahis, like the janissaries, into a compact fraternity, that this once powerful body was divided and broken; and they no longer occupy, as a separate faction, their former conspicuous place in the troubled scene of Ottoman history.
The termination of this great revolt freed Kiuprili from the apprehension of military sedition, and left him in the enjoyment of more absolute and undivided authority than had ever been possessed by any of his predecessors in office. The sultan, from whose mind the impression of the bloody scenes witnessed in his youth had never been effaced, rarely visited Constantinople; devoting himself to the pleasures of the chase in the forests and hills of Roumelia, and repairing only at intervals to the ancient palace of his ancestors at Adrianople, whither his harem and household had been transferred from the capital. The uncontrolled administration of the state was left in the hands of the vizir, but his implacable severity towards all who failed in implicit devotion to his will, continued unabated. "He was unacquainted" (says his contemporary, Rycaut) "with mercy, and never pardoned any who were either guilty of a fault, or suspected for it;" and neither rank nor services afforded protection to those who had incurred his jealousy or resentment. Among the numerous victims of his suspicious cruelty, the fate of Delhi-Hussein-Pasha was long remembered in Constantinople. Originally a battadji or lictor in the seraglio, he had attracted the notice of Sultan Mourad-Ghazi by his strength and address in bending a bow sent as a challenge by the Shah of Persia, and which had baffled the efforts of all the pelhwans or champions of the Ottoman court. His first advancement to the post of equerry was only a prelude to the attainment of higher honours, and he became successively governor of Buda and of Egypt, capitan-pasha and serasker in Candia. His exploits in the latter capacity had endeared him to the troops, while his noble figure and frank bearing made him equally the idol of the citizens, but his unbounded popularity led Kiuprili to foresee a future rival in this favourite hero, and the fate of Delhi-Hussein was sealed. In an interview with the vizir, he was graciously received, and invested with a robe of honour; but as he quitted the Porte he was arrested and carried to the Seven Towers, where, two days after, (in spite of the intercession of the Sultana-Walidah, and the refusal of the mufti to ratify the unjust doom,) he was bowstrung in his cell, as the murmurs of the troops prevented the vizir from risking a public execution.
But though thus inexorable to all whose popularity or pretensions might interfere with his own supremacy, and haughty even beyond all former precedent in his intercourse with the representatives of the Christian powers,8 Kiuprili deserved, by the merits of his domestic administration, the high place which has been assigned to him by the unanimous voice of the Ottoman historians. The exact regularity which he enforced both in the payment and disbursement of the revenue, relieved the people from the irregular imposts to which they had been subject, in order to make up the deficiencies arising from the interception, by the pashas, of the tributes of distant provinces, and the peculation which had long reigned unchecked at the seat of government—while the sums thus rendered disposable were laid out chiefly in improving the internal communications, and strengthening the defences, of the empire. The Dardanelles, hitherto guarded only by Mohammed II.'s two castles of Europe and Asia, was made almost impregnable by the construction of the formidable line of sea defences still existing; the necessity for which had been demonstrated by the recent attack of the Venetians; and fortified posts were established along the line of the Dnieper and Dniester, to keep in cheek the predatory Cossacks between these rivers, who were at this time engaged in a furious civil contest with the king of Poland, the ally of the Porte. The Hungarian fortresses were also repaired, and vast warlike preparations made along the Danube, as the peace which for fifty years had subsisted with the empire appeared on the verge of inevitable rupture. The succession to the principality of Transylvania, the suzerainté of which had long been a point of dispute between the Porte and Austria, was now contested between Kemény and Michael Abaffi—the latter being the nominee of the sultan, while Kemény was supported by the emperor, to whom the late Prince Racoczy had transferred his allegiance a short time before his death in battle against the Turks, in 1660. The Imperialists and Turks had more than once encountered each other as auxiliaries of the rival candidates, and Kiuprili was on the point of repairing in person to the scene of action, when he died at Adrianople of dropsy, (Oct. 31, 1661,) in the eighty-sixth year of his age, and was buried in a splendid mausoleum, which he had erected for himself, near the Tauk-bazar (poultry market) at Constantinople—the vault of which, during his life, he had daily filled with corn, which was then distributed to the poor to purchase their prayers! "Thus," says a Turkish annalist, "died Kiuprili-Mohammed, who was most zealous and active in the cause of the faith! Enjoying absolute power, and being anxious to purify the Ottoman empire, he slew in Anatolia 400,0009 rebels, including seventeen vizirs or pashas of three tails, forty-one of two tails, seventy sandjak-beys, three mallahs, and a Moghrabiu sheikh. May God be merciful to him!"
The genius of the Ottoman institutions is so directly opposed to any thing like the perpetuation of offices in a family, which might tend to endanger the despotism of the throne by the creation of an hereditary aristocracy, that even in the inferior ranks, an instance had hitherto scarcely been known of a son succeeding his father. The immediate appointment, therefore, of Fazil-Ahmed, the eldest son of the deceased minister, to the vizirat, was so complete a departure from all established usages, as at once demonstrated to the expectant courtiers that the influence of the crafty old vizir had survived him, and that "the star of the house of Kiuprili" (in the words of a Turkish writer) "had only set in the west to rise again with fresh splendour in the east." Ahmed-Kiuprili was now thirty-two years of age, and joined to an intellect not less naturally vigorous than that of his father, those advantages of education in which the latter had been deficient. At an early age he had
De la Haye, the French ambassador, was imprisoned in 1658, and his son bastinadoed in the presence of Kiuprili, for being unable or unwilling to give a key to some letters in cipher from the Venetians; and some years later, the envoy of the Czar, Alexis Mikhailowitz, was driven, with blows and violence, from the presence of the sultan, who was irritated by the incompetency of the interpreter to translate the Czar's letter! This latter outrage, however, was not till after the death of the elder Kiuprili.
This monstrous exaggeration is reduced by Rycaut to the more credible, but still enormous number of 36,000 victims during the five years of his ministry.
