Honored by the Glory of Islam by Marc David Baer

Author:Marc David Baer [Baer, Marc David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

The Second Polish Campaign and the Death of Fazıl Ahmed Pasha

The following year Mehmed IV had to wage a second campaign to ensure the Treaty of Buczacz that guaranteed Polish tribute. Silahdar, echoing Abdi Pasha, depicts the first campaign as but a warm-up, for the zeal of the sultan had not been dissipated. He was aching for battle and bloodshed, and to make the Polish king “taste the sword of fire” in order to uphold his honor and that of the religion and dynasty he represented.19 He was like a champion falcon or a tough horseman; one campaign was not enough to satisfy the hunger of his zeal. He journeyed as far as Isakçı on the Moldovan frontier with Vani Mehmed Efendi and did not return to Edirne for almost a year and a half. Due to the heavy snow, the campaign was suspended for winter, which gave the sultan ample time for hunting, such as one trip lasting thirty-three days. The journey was taken up again on the day of the vernal equinox. During that time, the opponent of the Kadızadeli movement, Sheikhulislam Minkarizade Yahya Efendi, lying sick in bed in Edirne, was replaced by the more compliant Çatalcalı Ali Efendi.20

Mehmed IV passed into Cossack territory and again presided over the bloody capture of numerous defensive works after offering the defenders terms of surrender. Abdi Pasha notes that the troops fighting for the sultan often killed or imprisoned the enemy after ignoring white flags asking for quarter. He watched as hundreds of others who waved the white flag were put in chains and sent to the galleys. Of prisoners remaining in defense works, the sultan took scores for himself to serve in a variety of palace roles. As we have seen before in the case of Shabbatai Tzevi, this sultan liked to surround himself with converts. After the long journey from Isakçi, the sultan, in the words of Abdi Pasha, arrived in Edirne “with the splendor of the master of the auspicious conjunction conquests.”21

After several more years of off-and-on battles with the Commonwealth of Poland, which saw the Ottoman army advance as far as Lvov, by 1676 the Ottomans had conquered Podolia in Ukraine. In that year it turned out that not everyone around the sultan seems to have been on the same page of the book of correct morals. The learned, virtuous ghazi Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, who had otherwise exalted morals and had left in his wake mosques in Uyvar, Crete, and Kamaniça, a man who defeated Habsburgs, Poles, and Venetians, could not overcome the bottle. Some unnamed close associates had helped convert him into an alcoholic.22 Because of his declining health, in autumn 1676, rather than travel overland from Istanbul to Edirne with the sultan, he went by skiff to the quay of Ereğli, and from there to Çorlu.23 After a stroke his condition worsened, and a little over two weeks later “he departed from this lower world and migrated to the world to come.” Despite his

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