The office of grand vizier carried enormous power—on occasion, grand viziers could arrange the fall of sultans—but it also entailed enormous risks and offered little prospect of a peaceful death. Defeat in war was blamed on the grand vizier and was followed inevitably by dismissal, exile and, not infrequenty, strangulation. Only a master of intrigue could attain the office. Between 1683 and 1702, twelve grand viziers came and went from the Divan and the Sublime Porte.
Nevertheless, earlier in the seventeenth century, it had been the grand viziers who saved the empire while the sultans sat in their harems indulging their tastes and fantasies.* Outside, Ottoman power had declined so greatly that Venetian ships cruised off the Dardanelles while Cossack "seagull" corsairs from the Dnieper raided the western entrance of the Bosphorus. The empire, bubbling with corruption and dissolving into anarchy, was rescued by the skill of what amounted to a dynasty of grand viziers: father, son and brother-in-law.
In 1656, with the empire near collapse, the harem hierarchy reluctantly named as grand vizier a stern, seventy-one-year-old Albanian, Memmed Korpulu, who solved problems ruthlessly: Between 50,000 and 60,000 executions purged the Ottoman administration of graft and corruption. By the time he died, five years later, the decline in the empire's fortunes had been halted. Under his son Ahmed Korpulu and later his brother-in-law, Kara Mustapha, a brief revival of Ottoman power occurred. The fleets and armies of the Christian powers, Austria, Venice and Poland, were driven back. In 1683, responding to a Hungarian appeal for aid against the Emperor Leopold, Kara Mustapha decided to capture Vienna. An army of over 200,000 men under a banner with horsehair plumes, commanded by Kara Mustapha himself, marched up the Danube, conquered all of Hungary and, for the second time in Ottoman history, stood before the walls of Vienna. Through the summer of 1683, Europe watched anxiously. Regiments of soldiers from the German states enlisted under the Hapsburg Emperor's banner to fight the Turks. Even Louis XIV, normally the enemy of the Hapsburgs and secret ally of the Turks, could not afford not to help save the great Christian city. On September 12, 1683, an allied relieving army fell on the Turkish siege lines from the rear and drove the Turks in flight down the Danube. By order of the Sultan, Kara Mustapha was strangled.
*One sultan, Ibrahim the Mad, encased his beard in a network of diamonds and passed his days tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosphorus. He wanted to see and feel nothing but fur, and levied a special tax for the import of sables from Russia so that he might cover the walls of his apartments with these precious furs. Deciding that the bigger a woman was, the more enjoyable she would be, he had his agents search the empire for the fattest woman they could find. They brought him an enormous Armenian woman, who so fascinated the Sultan that he heaped riches and honors upon her and finally made her Governor General of Damascus.
The years that followed the repulse from Vienna were disastrous for the Turks. Buda and then Belgrade fell, and the Austrian armies even neared Adrianople. The great Venetian admiral Francesco Morosini captured the Peloponnesus, advanced across the isthmus of Corinth and laid siege to Athens. Unfortunately, during his bombardment one of his shells hit the Parthenon, which the Turks were using as a powder magazine. On September 26, 1687, the building, then still largely intact, blew up and was reduced to its present state.
In 1703, Sultan Mustapha II was deposed by the Janissaries in favor of of his thirty-year-old brother Ahmed III, who came to the throne from the seclusion of "The Cage" and ruled for twenty-seven years. An esthete, unstable, morose, greatly influenced by his mother, he liked women, poetry and painting flowers. He had a passion for architecture and built beautiful mosques to please his people and beautiful gardens to please himself. Along the Golden Horn, he erected a series of luxurious pleasure pavilions, some in Chinese design, some in French, where he would sit in the shade of a tree and, in the company of his favorite concubines, listen to poetry. Ahmed loved theatrial entertainment; in winter, elaborate Chinese shadow plays were performed, followed by a distribution of jewels, sweets and robes of honor. In summer, elaborate mock sea battles and firework displays were staged. Tulipmania possessed his court. In the spring evenings, in gardens hung with lanterns or drenched with moonlight, the Sultan and his court, accompanied by musicians, would stroll, stepping carefully over hundreds of turtles that crawled among the tulips and through the grass with lighted candles on their backs.
In this secluded, scented environment, Ahmed III lived out the same years which saw the active, turbulent reign of Peter of Russia. Although Ahmed's reign outlasted Peter's, its end had a distinctly Ottoman flavor. In 1730, with the empire once again in turmoil, Ahmed thought to appease his enemies by ordering the current grand vizier, who happened also to be his brother-in-law, strangled and his body given to the mob. This only temporarily postponed Ahmed's own fate. Soon after, he was deposed and succeeded by his nephew, who had him poisoned.
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LIBERATOR OF THE BALKAN CHRISTIANS
In the second half of the seventeenth century, a new and quite unexpected danger appeared in the north to threaten the Ottoman Empire. Muscovite Russia waxed in power and portended menace for the throne of the Shadow of God. Traditionally, the Turks had regarded the Muscovites with disdain; it was not they, but their vassals the Crimean Tatars who dealt with the Muscovites. Indeed, such was the order of ascendancy that the Crimean Tatars, the sultan's tributaries, themselves received tribute from the tsar. For the Crimean khans, Muscovy was a harvest ground for slaves and cattle taken in the great annual Tatar raids into the Ukraine and southern Russia.
That the Ottoman Empire had been able to display this indifference toward the Russian tsardom was due to Moscow's involvement with its other enemies. The two most numerous Christian people of Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Poles, had been fighting each other for generations. But in 1667 a change disagreeable to the sultan occurred: Russians and Poles resolved their differences at least temporarily to unite against the Turks. And it was in 1686 that King Jan Sobieski of Poland, anxious to fight the Ottoman Empire, surrendered temporarily (the transfer became permanent) the city of Kiev to the Regent Sophia in return for Russian adherence to a Polish-Austrian-Venetian alliance against Turkey.
Prodded by her allies, Russia finally initiated military action in this war. The offensives launched against the Crimean Tatars in 1677 and 1689, both commanded by Sophia's favorite, Vasily Golitsyn, ended in failure. In Constantinople, the insignificance of Russian military power seemed further confirmed, while in Moscow, Golitsyn's failures precipitated a shift in power. The revelation of Sophia's weakness led to the Regent's downfall and the assumption of power by the Naryshkin party in Peter's name. Thereafter, while the youthful Tsar was drilling soldiers, building boats and visiting Archangel, relations between Russia and Turkey