Volume 53 / Part 1 — CHAPTERS OF TURKISH HISTORY. RISE OF THE KIUPRILI FAMILY—SIEGE OF CANDIA.

NO. IX.

Sultan Mohammed IV., afterwards surnamed Avadji, or the Hunter, who was destined to fill the throne of the Ottoman Empire during one of the most eventful periods of its history, possessed qualifications which, if his education had not been interrupted by his early accession to supreme power, might have entitled him to a high place among the monarchs of his line. Unlike most of the imperial family, he was of a spare sinewy form, and lofty stature; and his features are said by Evliya to have been remarkably handsome, though his forehead was disfigured by a deep scar which he had received in his infancy, by being thrown by his father, in an access of brutal passion, into a cistern in the gardens of the seraglio; and a contemporary Venetian chronicler says that his dark complexion and vivid restless eye gave him rather the aspect of a Zigano, or gipsy, than an Osmanli. In the first years of his reign, his grandmother, the Walidah Kiosem, acted as regent; but the rule of a woman and a child was little able to curb the turbulent soldiery of the capital; and the old feuds between the spahis and janissaries, which had been dormant since the death of Abaza, broke out afresh with redoubled violence. The war in Crete, which had been commenced under Ibrahim, languished for want of troops and supplies; while the rival military factions fought, sword in hand, in front of the imperial palace, and filled Constantinople with pillage and massacre. The janissaries, who were supported by Kiosem, for some time maintained the ascendency; but this ambitious princess was at length cut off by an intrigue, in the interior of the harem, fomented by the mother of Mohammed, who suspected her of a design to prolong her own sway by the removal of the sultan, in favour of a still younger son of Ibrahim. Seized in the midst of the night of September 3, 1651, by the eunuchs whom her rival had gained, Kiosem was strangled (according to a report preserved by Evliya) with the braids of her own long hair; and the sultan was exhibited at daybreak by the grand-vizir Siawush-Pasha to the people, who thronged round the palace on the rumour of this domestic tragedy, to assure them of the personal safety of their youthful sovereign.

Mohamned Kiuprili was at this period nearly eighty years of age, and so wholly illiterate that he could neither read nor write; yet such was the general estimation of his wisdom and abilities, that the young sultan, on entrusting to him the ensigns of office, voluntarily pledged himself to leave entirely at his discretion the regulation of the foreign and domestic relations of the empire, as well as the disposal of all offices of state—thus virtually delegating to him the functions of sovereignty. The measures of Kiuprili soon showed that these extraordinary powers would not be suffered to remain dormant. The impatience of the troops at the strict discipline which he enforced, erelong announced the approach of a fresh tumult; and the ringleaders, in the confidence of long-continued impunity, openly boasted that "the plane-tree would soon bear another crop"—when on the night of Jan. 5, 1657, the grand-vizir, accompanied by the aga of the janissaries, and fortified by a fetwa from the mufti, legalizing whatever he might do, made the round of the barracks with his guards, and seized several hundreds of all ranks in the various corps, whose bodies, found floating the next day in the Bosphorus, revealed their fate to their dismayed accomplices. The Greek patriarch, on suspicion of having endeavoured to engage the Vaivode of Wallachia in a plot for a general rising of the Christians, was summoned to the Porte, and forthwith bowstrung in the presence of Kiuprili; and in the course of a few weeks, not fewer than 4000 of those who had been implicated in the previous disorders perished under the hands of the executioner: "for as in medicine," remarks a Turkish historian, "it is necessary to employ remedies which are analogous to the disease, so by bloodshed alone could the state be purified from these lawless shedders of blood!"

These terrible severities broke the spirit of insubordination in the capital; and the irregularity of their pay, which had been one of the chief grievances of the janissaries, was remedied by the good order which Kiuprili had from the first introduced in the finances. "He proportioned the expenditure of the empire," says Evliya, "to its revenues, which he also greatly enlarged, so that he gained 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.

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 been placed under the historian, Abdul-Aziz Effendi, as a student of divinity and law, in the medressah or college attached to the mosque of Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, and had attained, in due course, the rank of muderris or fellow therein; but the elevation of his father to the vizirat transferred him from the cloister to the camp, and he held the governments successively of Erzroom and Damascus—in the latter of which he distinguished himself by his moderation and firmness in reducing to order the refractory chiefs of the Druses, of the two great rival houses of Shahab and Maan-Oghlu. Recalled, at length, to Constantinople to assume the office of kaimakam, he had scarcely entered on his new duties when he was summoned to Adrianople, to attend the deathbed of his father, and to succeed him in the uncontrolled administration of the empire.

Notwithstanding the ill success of his arms, the vizir was received by the sultan, on his return with the army in the ensuing spring to Adrianople, with such extraordinary distinction, that those who had hoped to profit by his expected fall, could explain such continued favour only by the supposition that sorcery had been practised on the mind of the monarch by the mother of the all-powerful minister. Solicitous to retrieve his military reputation in the eyes of the soldiery, Kiuprili now determined to assume in person the conduct of the long-continued war in Crete, and to bring the struggle to a close by the capture of Candia, the siege of which had already reached near twice the duration of that of Troy. To supply the deficiencies of the Turkish marine, which had been almost ruined by the repeated naval victories of the Venetians, an overture was made to the English ambassador, Lord Winchilsea, for permission to hire the services of a number of British vessels; but this strange request being evaded, the expedition was postponed for a year, while every nerve was strained in the building and equipment of galleys; and at length, in the autumn of 1666, the fleet set sail from Monembasia in the Morea, under the command of the Capitan-pasha Mustafa, surnamed Kaplan, or the Tiger, the brother-in-law of Kiuprili, and anchored off Canea in the beginning of November. But before we proceed to narrate the closing scenes of the Cretan war, we must retrace our steps, to give some account of its origin and progress.

From Scio the united fleet sailed to Navarino—a course purposely adopted to spread the belief that Malta was the point of attack; but no sooner were they again at sea, than the capitan-pasha, summoning the principal officers on board his galley, read the khatt sheeref of the sultan, announcing that he had taken up arms for the conquest of Candia. War had, in the mean time, been formally declared against the Republic at Constantinople, and the Venetian envoy, Soranzo, imprisoned in the Seven Towers: but he had previously contrived to communicate to the Signory his suspicions of the impending storm; and supplies and reinforcements had been hastily dispatched from Venice to Andrea Cornaro, the inquisitore, or governor of Crete, in the event of its bursting in that quarter. Little serious apprehension seems, however, to have been entertained; and great was the consternation of the Candiote population, when, on the morning of June 24, the vast armament of the Ottomans was seen rounding Cape Spada, and disembarking the troops near Canea, on the same spot where, according to tradition, the standards of Islam had first been displayed, 820 years before, by the Saracens of Spain.

The leaguer of Candia was pushed during several months by the Turks, animated by the courage and example of their general, with the same fanatic zeal which they had displayed before Canea and Retimo; but the besieged, whose tenure of Crete depended on this last stronghold, held out with equal pertinacity: and their efforts were aided by the presence of a large body of Maltese auxiliaries, as well as by the succours which the naval superiority of the Venetians enabled them continually to introduce by sea. In one sortie, a detachment of the garrison penetrated even to the tent of the serdar, who owed his safety to his personal prowess; while the outworks of the town were ruined by the constant explosion of mines, and the Ottoman standards were planted on the bastion of Martinengo, and on several of the redoubts which covered the interior defences. But in spite of their repeated assaults, the besiegers failed to make any impression on the body of the place; and the serdar was compelled to withdraw his diminished army into winter-quarters. The anarchy at Constantinople which followed the deposition of Ibrahim, combined with the blockade of the Dardanelles by the Venetians, prevented any reinforcements from reaching the seat of war—yet the siege was renewed in the ensuing summer, and carried on with such vigour, that the garrison, weakened by the loss of half its numbers, including the valiant governor, Colloredo, was reduced to the last extremity; when the arrival of the Maltese squadron, under Balbiani, baulked the Turks of their expected prize; and the janissaries, breaking out into furious mutiny, compelled Delhi-Hussein once more to abandon the hopeless enterprise. All the remainder of the island, however, had now peaceably submitted to the Ottoman rule, and had been organized into sandjaks and districts; so that the garrison of Candia were rather the occupants of a solitary post in a hostile country, than defenders of the soil against the invasion; and the Turkish commanders, ill supplied from Constantinople, during the troubled minority of Mohammed, with siege equipage and munitions of war, contented themselves with blockading the town by the erection of redoubts, and guarding the open country with their cavalry. While the war thus languished in Crete, the events of the maritime contest continued to justify the proverbial saying of the Turks, that "Allah had given the land to the true believers; but the sea to the infidels!" Not only was the blockade of the Dardanelles so strictly kept up, that it was only in winter, when the Venetian fleet was unable to remain on its station, that the Turks could convey reinforcements to their brethren who were waging the holy war in Crete, but repeated and disastrous defeats were sustained by the Ottoman navy, whenever it attempted to dispute the sovereignty of the sea with the Lion of St Mark. In July 1651, a formidable armament with supplies and troops for Crete was almost entirely destroyed off Naxos by Mocenigo: and on July 6, 1656, the same commander inflicted on the Turkish fleet, off the mouth of the Straits, the most decisive overthrow which it had sustained since the fatal day of Lepanto. Seventy sail of ships and galleys were sunk or taken; the Capitan-pasha escaped into the Bosphorus with only fourteen vessels; and the inhabitants of Constantinople, in the first access of consternation, expected the apparition of the Christian ensigns in the Golden Horn; but the victors contented themselves with the occupation of Tenedos and Lemnos, which they held till dislodged in the following year by Kiuprili.

The serdar, Delhi-Hussein, who had for eleven years gallantly upheld the renown of the Ottoman arms in Crete, withstanding with equal firmness the efforts of the enemy, and the mutinous spirit of his own soldiers, had been recalled early in 1656 to assume the vizirat; a fleeting glimpse of honour, which, though cancelled even before he reached Constantinople in favour of the Kaimakam Mustapha, subsequently (as already related) cost him his life from the jealousy of Mohammed Kiuprili. His successors possessed neither his energy nor his military skill; and the Venetians, taking courage from the change of commanders, sallied from Candia, and even ventured, though without success, to attempt the recovery of Canea. Negotiations for peace, meanwhile, had been kept on foot almost from the first; but as the Ottoman pride absolutely refused to listen to any propositions which did not include the total and unconditional surrender of Candia, no pacification could be effected; and the war continued to linger till Ahmed-Kiuprili, secured on the side of Hungary by the peace with Austria, collected all the forces of the empire, to crush this last fragment of Venetian dominion in the Levant.

These repeated reinforcements, joined to the knowledge that the Pope was exerting himself to unite all the princes of Christendom in a league for the relief of their hardly-beset brethren, still encouraged the heroic defenders of Candia, though the Turks had by this time carried their mines at several points within the bastions and exterior defences, and compelled the garrison to shelter themselves behind an inner rampart, constructed during the winter in anticipation of this extremity:—"So that, in effect," says Rycaut, "this most impregnable fort of the world was forced and taken by the spade and shovel, and by a crew of unarmed labourers, who understood nothing more than the plough and harrow." The promised succours, however, were now at hand. On the 22d of June, a French fleet appeared off the port, having on board 7000 of the flower of the French troops and nobility, who were commanded by the Dukes de Noailles and Beaufort, and comprised in their ranks several princes of the sovereign houses of Lorrain and Bouillon, the Marshals Colbert and De la Motte-Fenelon, the Count of St Pol, and many other names of the noblest and bravest in France, who had crowded to embark as volunteers in this new and glorious crusade. These gallant auxiliaries landed amidst the acclamations of the Venetians; and, on the night of the 27th, a general sortie was made, in order to raise the siege by driving the Turks from their trenches. The janissaries were driven from their works by the impetuous onset of the assailants; but, in the tumult of the fight, a large powder-magazine, between the Sabionera and Fort St Demetrius, which had been occupied by the French, was accidentally blown up. The Duke de Beaufort, and many others, perished in the explosion, or were buried under the ruins; and the survivors, panic-stricken at the catastrophe, were driven within the walls with terrible slaughter by the Turks, who rallied and returned to the charge. The usual hideous trophies of Ottoman triumph—the heads of the slain, were laid at the feet of the vizir; but the body of the Duc de Beaufort, though anxiously sought for at the prayer of his comrades, who offered, through a flag of truce, to redeem it at its weight in gold, could never be discovered.

Thus ended this famous siege, the longest, and one of the most memorable, recorded in history. During its continuance, the Venetians and their allies lost 30,000 men, and the Turks more than 100,000; fifty-six assaults were made on the town above ground, and the same number through the mines; and nearly an equal number of sorties was made by the garrison. 460 mines were sprung by the Turks, and no less than 1172 by the Venetians; and the quantity of missiles hurled into the town exceeded all calculation. The fortifications were, however, speedily repaired by the care of Kiuprili, who remained in the island nine months after the surrender, employed in the final organization of this new province, which was divided into the three pashaliks of Canea, Retimo, and Candia—the last being the residence of the beglerbeg, or supreme pasha. The arrangements being at length completed, he quitted Candia for Constantinople, whither the capitan-pasha had preceded him with the fleet; and, on the 3d of July 1670, he replaced in the hands of the Sultan, in his hunting-camp near Rodosto, the sandjak-sheeref, which had been committed to his charge for the war against the infidels. "In this manner," says Rycaut, writing not in a spirit of prophecy, three years only before the battle of Vienna, "expired the action of the year, fortunate in its success to the Turks; for though they gained but thirty acres of land, with expense inestimable of blood and treasure, yet the glory and fame which attended it, being the consummation of twenty-five years' war, and the theatre where the whole world were spectators, was of greater value to the Turks than any other consideration, and may with time prove a place of advantage to the further increase of their western empire, unless God Almighty, by his mercy and providence, give a stop to the progress of this grand oppressor."