The Ottoman Empire, 1600–1660

Mehmed III had been sultan since 1595, and the war with the Habsburgs for Hungary, begun in 1593, ate men and silver. The coin was debased to pay for it. In Istanbul the palace cavalry, paid in bad money, turned on the people who stood between them and the sultan.

Mehmed's mother Safiye, the valide sultan, filled the court with her own people and ran a household of agents who handled her money, her gifts and her letters to foreign courts. Whoever wanted an office went through her circle, which made its members the soldiers' targets.

Esperanza Malchi, a Jewish businesswoman, was Safiye's kira: she bought for the harem, handled its money and carried the valide's letters, even to Elizabeth I of England. When the cavalry rose over debased pay in spring 1600, they demanded her, and on 1 April she and her eldest son were killed.

Gazanfer Ağa, a Venetian-born eunuch who kept the gate to the sultan's private quarters, had made himself Safiye's ally. In January 1603 the palace troops rose against her circle, and Gazanfer was beheaded at the third gate of the palace in front of Mehmed.

Sunullah Efendi, the chief mufti, had already been retired once after a quarrel with the grand vizier Yemişçi Hasan. Restored in January 1603, he gave the rebel cavalry a fatwa for the grand vizier's death.

Yemişçi Hasan, grand vizier since Damat İbrahim's death in 1601, took refuge with the Janissaries, who cut down the rebel cavalry in February 1603; he had Sunullah dismissed. His killings and a new tax on trade made him enemies, and in October Mehmed had him strangled.

Mehmed's eldest surviving son, Mahmud, was popular with the Janissaries and begged to lead the army. In 1603 his mother's question to a seer was intercepted: Mehmed would die within six months and Mahmud succeed. Urged on by Safiye, Mehmed had his son strangled on 7 June; in December Mehmed himself was dead.

Damat İbrahim, grand vizier and husband of the sultan's sister, commanded on the Hungarian front. In October 1600, after a six-week siege, he took Kanizsa, the fortress that guarded Styria, and made it the seat of a new province. He died at Belgrade in July 1601.

Archduke Ferdinand, ruler of Inner Austria and the future emperor Ferdinand II, besieged Kanizsa with a large imperial army in September 1601. Hunger, cold and a garrison that would not yield wore his camp down, and in November a sortie routed it; he abandoned his guns.

Tiryaki Hasan, whom İbrahim had left in Kanizsa, held it with perhaps 9,000 men, sowing false rumours among the besiegers and hiding his guns until the final sortie. He was rewarded with the governorship of Bosnia, then Buda, and later led the Balkan veterans against the rebels at home.

Karayazıcı, 'the black scribe', a former cavalryman and deputy governor, gathered some 20,000 mercenary musketeers in eastern Anatolia; one chronicler says he styled himself Halim Shah. Bought off with governorships in 1600, he went back to plunder. Routed near Elbistan in August 1601, he died soon after in the Canik mountains.

His brother Deli Hasan took over the bands, besieged and killed the governor of Baghdad at Tokat, burned Kütahya and took tribute from Ankara. Unable to beat him, Yemişçi Hasan bought him: in 1603 he was made governor of Bosnia and led 10,000 men to the Hungarian war. He was later executed at Belgrade.

Far to the south, the Zaydi scholar al-Qasim had fled Ottoman Sanaa and proclaimed himself imam in the northern highlands in 1597. Near defeat by 1604, he recovered when the lord of Hajjah joined him, and in 1607 the governor of Yemen recognised his hold on the north.

Ahmed I came to the throne in December 1603, aged thirteen. Breaking with custom, he let his only brother, the small boy Mustafa, live, and sent his grandmother Safiye to the Old Palace. He inherited the Hungarian war, and the Persian one that had just begun.

Ahmed's mother Handan, a Bosnian-born consort of Mehmed III, governed beside him with his tutor, the first valide to act as a regent. She purged Safiye's clients and raised her own; with her backing the young gardener Derviş became chief of the palace gardeners in 1604. She died in November 1605.

Derviş, the sultan's favourite companion, became admiral and vizier in 1605. He pressed Ahmed to send the grand vizier Lala Mehmed against Persia; threatened, Lala suffered a stroke and died in June 1606, and Derviş took his seal. In December rumours of a plot against the sultan reached Ahmed, who had him strangled.

Lala Mehmed, a Bosnian of the Sokollu family and a veteran of the Hungarian front, became grand vizier in July 1604. In October 1605 he retook Esztergom, the fortress he had been forced to surrender ten years before, and backed the Hungarian rebellion against the emperor.

İbrahim Peçevî, born at Pécs to a mother of the Sokollu family, had attached himself to his kinsman Lala Mehmed as a boy and was inside Esztergom with him during the siege of 1595. He spent his career as a finance official; the history he wrote after retiring in 1641 is a chief source for these decades.

Stephen Bocskai, a Protestant Hungarian magnate, rose against Emperor Rudolf in 1604 with the hajduk soldiers and was elected prince of Transylvania in February 1605. That November he met Lala Mehmed at Pest and took the crown the sultan sent, though not as a king's. In June 1606 he made his own peace at Vienna.

Emperor Rudolf II had begun the Long War in 1593. With Hungary in revolt and his treasury exhausted, his family made him hand Hungarian affairs to his brother Matthias, who settled with Bocskai at Vienna and with the sultan at Zsitvatorok in November 1606. The war was over.

Shah Abbas of Persia struck while the Ottoman army was tied down in Hungary. In October 1603 he retook Tabriz, ceded to the Ottomans in 1590, and in June 1604 Yerevan, before an Ottoman army could reach the east.

Ahmed gave the eastern command to Cığalazade Sinan, born to the Genoese Cicala family in Messina. In 1605 Abbas routed his army near Tabriz. Retreating, he had the governor of Aleppo, Canbulad Hüseyin, executed for arriving late, and died himself that winter. The governor's nephew rose to avenge him.

After Derviş's execution Ahmed made Kuyucu Murad grand vizier, a soldier past seventy who had just finished the Habsburg peace. With the Balkan veterans under Tiryaki Hasan freed for service at home, he marched in 1607 as if against Persia, then turned south through the Taurus on his real target.

Canbuladoğlu Ali had risen in 1606 to avenge his uncle, made himself master of Aleppo and northern Syria and signed a treaty with Tuscany. On 24 October 1607 Kuyucu broke his army at Oruç Ovası. Pardoned and sent to govern Temeşvar, he was executed at Belgrade in 1610.

The Druze emir Fakhr al-Din, governor of Safed, had joined Ali's revolt and sacked Damascus with him. Before Kuyucu arrived he sent him 300,000 piasters and his son Ali as hostage. Kuyucu, who had first made him a governor in 1593, pardoned him.

Kalenderoğlu Mehmed, the strongest of the Anatolian rebel chiefs, accepted Kuyucu's offer of Ankara, but the townspeople shut their gates on him and he went back to raiding as far as Bursa. On 5 August 1608 Kuyucu caught him in a Taurus pass near Adana. He fled into Persia, where Kuyucu's detachments hunted him down.

Ayn Ali, steward of the treasury, was ordered by Kuyucu to set down how the empire's provinces, fiefs and their soldiers stood in the registers. In 1607 he presented the grand vizier with his Kavânîn-i Âl-i Osmân, listing every province and district with its revenue and the horsemen it owed.

Kuyucu died at Diyarbekir in August 1611, preparing to march on Persia. His successor, Nasuh Pasha, made peace instead: in November 1612 the empire gave back everything won from Persia in 1590, in return for a yearly tribute of silk. Fakhr al-Din had lost his protector in Istanbul.

Gazi II Giray, khan of Crimea since 1588, had led his horsemen in the Hungarian war, wintered with them at Pécs, where Peçevî was in his company, and acted as go-between with the emperor. He was also a poet in four languages. He died of plague in November 1607.

Gazi's son Toktamış, eighteen, was acclaimed khan as his father wished. Istanbul's factions split over him, and the sultan named his uncle Selamet instead. Toktamış fled toward Istanbul and was caught on the road by Selamet's new deputy, Mehmed Giray, who killed him in 1608.

Selamet Giray, the last surviving son of Devlet I Giray, had joined the Anatolian rebels and spent seven years in Yedikule. Freed and made khan in 1608, he drove out his nephews Mehmed and Şahin when they plotted against him in 1609, adopted his stepson Canibek, and died in 1610.

Canibek Giray was not a khan's son, but Selamet had adopted him. When Mehmed and Şahin seized the throne on Selamet's death in 1610, Janissaries landed from Ottoman galleys put Canibek in, and the brothers fled to the steppe to raid with the Budjak Nogays.

Nasuh distrusted Fakhr al-Din, who had allied with Tuscany and garrisoned his fortresses. In 1613 he sent Hafız Ahmed, governor of Damascus, with Janissaries and the troops of some sixty governors. Hafız blocked the mountain roads and the port of Sidon, and the emir's allies went over to him.

Fakhr al-Din bribed an officer of the blockade and sailed for Livorno, arriving in November 1613. He spent five years in exile in Tuscany and Sicily. After Nasuh's fall he was pardoned, and in September 1618 he landed at Acre and began rebuilding his power.

Cosimo II de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany and Galileo's patron, had signed an alliance with Fakhr al-Din in 1608. Surprised by his arrival, he lodged him at Livorno and Florence but would not send an army, and negotiated with Nasuh over his pardon.

In Tunis, Yusuf Dey, a soldier from Tripoli raised by Uthman Dey, succeeded him in 1610 and married his daughter. He commanded the Janissary militia and the corsair fleet and built the city's first Ottoman-style mosque, leaving the countryside to the bey.

Murad Bey, born in Corsica and taken by corsairs as a boy, rose in the household of Ramadan Bey. When Ramadan died in 1613, Yusuf Dey gave him the command of the tax-collecting columns of the interior. Murad won from Istanbul the title of pasha and the right of his son to succeed him.

İskender Pasha, once Tiryaki Hasan's steward, became governor of Kanizsa in 1612. In 1613 the Transylvanian exile Gabriel Bethlen came to Istanbul and, through him, laid complaints against Prince Gabriel Báthory before Nasuh. That autumn İskender led his troops, with Tatars and Wallachians, into Transylvania.

Báthory fled and was murdered; İskender proclaimed Bethlen prince, and the diet endorsed him in October 1613. By a charter of 1614 Bethlen promised tribute and peace with the sultan's other vassals. He would use Ottoman backing to fight the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years' War.

Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi, a former judge who had become a Sufi master in Üsküdar, founded the Celveti order. Ahmed I took him as his sheikh, and he led the first Friday prayer in the sultan's new mosque. Viziers came to his lodge; Halil Pasha was his disciple.

Halil Pasha, an Armenian-born palace recruit, had served as Kuyucu's right hand against the rebels and been made admiral. He had sought a Dutch alliance against Spain, writing to The Hague in 1610, and when the Dutch envoy reached Istanbul in March 1612 Halil was among the viziers who received him.

Cornelis Haga, the Dutch Republic's first envoy, was received by Ahmed I in 1612 and came away with a capitulation: the Dutch could trade in the empire under their own flag and jurisdiction, with tax exemptions and consuls in the main ports. He stayed until 1639.

Kösem, Ahmed's favourite consort, bore him several sons, among them Murad in 1612. Her daughters were married to the empire's great men: in 1612 the child Gevherhan to Öküz Mehmed, the governor of Egypt who would become grand vizier.

Öküz Mehmed had crushed a soldiers' revolt in Egypt before marrying into the dynasty. When Ahmed had Nasuh executed in October 1614 he became grand vizier and was sent against Persia. In 1616 he besieged Yerevan without heavy guns and failed; that November Ahmed dismissed him and gave the seal to Halil.

Mustafa Safi, who had preached the first Friday sermon in captured Kanizsa in 1600, was recommended by Hafız Ahmed to translate a Persian poem for Ahmed I. Pleased, Ahmed made him his imam in 1608 and commissioned a history of his reign, the Zübdetü't-tevârîh. Safi died in 1616.

When Ahmed died in November 1617, the throne went for the first time to a brother: Mustafa, the boy Ahmed had spared, now grown but unstable. Within three months the chief black eunuch had him declared unfit, and in February 1618 he was deposed.

Mustafa's mother, an Abkhazian-born consort of Mehmed III remembered as Halime, became valide for those three months; her elder son Mahmud had been strangled in 1603. Sent back to the Old Palace when Mustafa fell, she kept her allies, among them her son-in-law Kara Davud, and waited.

Hocazade Esad, son of the great mufti Sadeddin, was chief mufti from 1615 and helped to make and unmake Mustafa. Osman never forgave his part in his uncle's accession, left him only the giving of fatwas, and handed the learned appointments to his own tutor. Esad also refused a fatwa for the death of Osman's brother Mehmed.

Osman II, fourteen, took the throne in February 1618 and meant to rule. He made peace with Persia at Serav, had his brother Mehmed strangled in January 1621 without the mufti's sanction, and set his heart on a war with Poland to win the prestige his elders had lost.

Ömer Efendi, Osman's tutor since his childhood, became his closest adviser and was given the appointment of judges and professors, which belonged to the chief mufti. He stood at Osman's side to the end and was killed in the rising of 1622.

Güzelce Ali, an admiral and Osman's favourite, married to a daughter of Mehmed III, replaced Öküz Mehmed as grand vizier in December 1619 and urged the war with Poland. He died in March 1621, before the army marched; rumour said Osman had strangled him himself.

Halil, grand vizier from November 1616, took the army east. In 1618 he entered Tabriz, which Abbas had emptied, but was ambushed on the march to Ardabil. The peace of Serav that September renewed the treaty of 1612, and in January 1619 Osman dismissed him; he retired to Hüdayi's lodge.

Gaspar Graziani, a Dalmatian linguist who had served the sultan as dragoman while spying for the Habsburgs, bought the throne of Moldavia in 1619. In 1620 he opened talks with Poland; when the sultan sent an officer to remove him, he had the man and his retinue massacred and called in the Poles.

Stanisław Żółkiewski, Grand Crown Hetman, marched into Moldavia in September 1620 with a small army. İskender Pasha beat him at Cecora; the retreat was cut to pieces, Żółkiewski was killed, and Graziani was murdered by his own boyars, who feared the sultan's revenge.

Khan Temir, lord of the Budjak Nogays between the Danube and the Dniester, harried the Polish retreat and refused to be given as a hostage. He fought again at Khotyn in 1621, and for his service the sultan made him governor of Silistra, a frontier power the Crimean khans could not command.

In September 1621 Osman led the whole army north against the Polish camp at Khotyn on the Dniester, where the Lithuanian hetman Chodkiewicz had dug in. For a month the assaults broke on his lines. Chodkiewicz died in the camp on 24 September, but his army held.

Petro Sahaidachny, hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, whose boats had raided the Black Sea coast for years, brought a Cossack army of 25,000 to 40,000 to fight beside the Poles at Khotyn. The siege was given up on 9 October with a truce, not a victory. He died the next spring.

In Yemen, al-Qasim had won a truce in 1619 confirming his hold on the highlands between Sanaa and Sa'dah. When he died in February 1620 the Zaydis recognised his son Muhammad, al-Mu'ayyad, as imam; for the moment he kept the truce.

Back from Khotyn, Osman blamed the Janissaries and shut their coffee houses. In May 1622 he insisted on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which no sultan had made, against Esad's fatwa that a ruler should do justice rather than travel; it was said he meant to raise a new army in Anatolia.

Dilaver Pasha, made grand vizier in the camp at Khotyn, had urged the peace and opposed the pilgrimage. On 18 May his men fired on soldiers who came to his house; the next day the rebels demanded his head. He hid in Hüdayi's lodge, but Osman surrendered him, and he was torn apart.

The rebels freed Mustafa from his rooms and set him back on the throne, and his mother returned from the Old Palace as valide; the Janissaries consulted her on the new appointments.

Kara Davud, married to Mustafa's sister, became grand vizier. On 20 May he had Osman taken to Yedikule and strangled, the first regicide in Ottoman history. When the provinces rose to avenge the dead sultan he was made the scapegoat and executed in January 1623.

Zekeriyazade Yahya, a mufti's son and the finest lyric poet among the jurists, became chief mufti when Esad resigned, unwilling even to attend his murdered son-in-law's funeral. In 1623 Yahya sat in the council that deposed Mustafa a second time.

Kemankeş Ali, grand vizier from August 1623, called the mufti, the jurists and the dignitaries together, and persuaded Halime to give up her son; Mustafa was deposed in September. Ali then accused Yahya of plotting the uncle's return and had him dismissed. He was executed in 1624 for hiding the loss of Baghdad.

Murad IV, Kösem's son, became sultan in September 1623, aged eleven. His mother governed in his name, through grand viziers who rose and fell with the soldiers' favour.

Abaza Mehmed, governor of Erzurum, swore to avenge Osman, killed the Janissaries in his province and marched west, taking Sivas and besieging Ankara. For six years he made Erzurum a rebel capital.

Bekir, a Janissary subaşı, had held Baghdad since 1621 and wanted to be its pasha. When Hafız Ahmed, governor of Diyarbekir, marched against him, Bekir appealed for Persian help, and his envoy went to Shah Abbas himself. Hafız then offered him the governorship, too late.

Abbas came and besieged the city. Bekir's son Muhammad, holding the citadel, opened it to the Persians on 14 January 1624. Baghdad, Ottoman since 1534, was Persian again, and most of Iraq went with it.

Hafız Ahmed became grand vizier in February 1625 and married Kösem's daughter Ayşe. He besieged Baghdad for some eight months until Abbas came to its relief, gave up in July 1626, and lost the seal that December.

Çerkez Mehmed, grand vizier after Kemankeş Ali's execution in 1624, marched against Abaza and beat him at the Karasu bridge near Kayseri that September; Abaza fell back on Erzurum. Preparing to march on Baghdad, Çerkez died in his winter camp at Tokat in January 1625.

Mehmed Giray, the prince who had killed Toktamış and fought Canibek for years, was released from exile on Rhodes and made khan in 1623 by a grand vizier who was his friend. In 1624 Istanbul decided to bring Canibek back, and Mehmed refused to go.

His brother and deputy, Şahin Giray, armed Zaporozhian Cossacks against the sultan's men. After the victory the brothers signed the first known treaty between the khans and the Zaporozhian Host.

The admiral Topal Recep landed Janissaries at Kefe with Canibek in May 1624 and marched inland. Near Karasubazar in August, Cossack musketeers and Tatar horsemen routed his army. He saved himself by recognising Mehmed as khan, and Istanbul confirmed him.

Emir Çelebi, chief physician of the great hospital in Cairo, had sailed with Recep's fleet as his personal doctor and followed him to Istanbul, rising to chief physician of the palace. For Recep he wrote the Enmûzecü't-tıb, arguing that doctors must test the old books against what they saw.

Nefʿî of Erzurum, a treasury clerk who had come to Istanbul under Ahmed I, was the master of the court panegyric, writing for sultans and grand viziers, and of the satire that made enemies of the ministers he mocked.

Halil, grand vizier again from December 1626, marched against his former protégé Abaza and besieged Erzurum in the autumn of 1627, then fell back to Tokat as winter came. In April 1628 Murad dismissed him.

Hüsrev Pasha, a Bosnian who had led the Janissaries against Abaza at Kayseri, became grand vizier in April 1628, besieged Erzurum and took Abaza's surrender in September. Murad pardoned the rebel and sent him to govern Bosnia, as Deli Hasan had been sent twenty-five years before.

Giorgi Saakadze, the Georgian commander who had served Shah Abbas and then led Kartli's revolt against him, lost a civil war in 1626 and fled to Istanbul. He served Murad as a governor and commander on the eastern front; in October 1629 Hüsrev accused him of treason and had him put to death.

In 1627 Şahin Giray killed Khan Temir's kinsmen, and Temir offered his sword to the sultan. In spring 1628 he destroyed Şahin's army near the Danube mouth and followed the brothers into Crimea, but Cossacks came to their aid, beat him on the Alma, and shut him up in Kefe.

Ottoman galleys reached Kefe, Mehmed's commanders deserted to Canibek, and he was khan again by summer 1628. Mehmed fled to the Cossacks and was killed in 1629 trying to return; Şahin escaped.

Abbas died in January 1629, and his grandson Sam Mirza succeeded as Shah Safi. The new shah was young and his court still unsettled when Hüsrev's army marched east against him.

Zaynal Khan Shamlu, regent and commander-in-chief, met the Ottoman advance and was beaten at Mihriban in May 1630. Two months later Safi had him killed for the defeat.

Hüsrev pushed on toward Hamadan, then turned against Baghdad. His siege that autumn failed, and he fell back to Mardin; he stayed in the east through 1631 without trying again.

Kâtip Çelebi, a clerk in the army accounts since he was fourteen, had been at the siege of Erzurum against Abaza and marched with Hüsrev to Baghdad and Hamadan in 1629–30. The campaigns gave him the material for his later histories and geographies.

Back in Istanbul in 1628, Kâtip attended the sermons of Kadızade Mehmed, a preacher from Balıkesir whose attacks on what he called innovations drew crowds; they inspired him to take up his studies again.

Haydar Pasha governed Yemen from 1624. In 1626 the Ottomans executed one of the imam's scholars who had come to Sanaa, and the imam broke the truce: the tribes rose, most of the Tihama fell and Sanaa was besieged. In 1629 Haydar accepted the imam's terms and on 9 March handed the keys of Sanaa to the imam's son.

The Ottoman garrison withdrew to the coast under the imam's protection. Al-Mu'ayyad Muhammad made another son governor of Sanaa and took Taiz the same year; the sultan's Yemen was reduced to the coastal lowlands.

Hüsrev stayed in the east through 1631 without trying Baghdad again, and complaints of his harshness reached Istanbul. In October Murad dismissed him and ordered the Janissaries home; from Tokat, Hüsrev encouraged them to take up his cause when they reached the capital.

Hafız Ahmed, married to Kösem's daughter, took the seal again. In February 1632 the returning troops rioted for three days with a list of seventeen men they wanted dead. On 10 February Hafız walked out among them before the sultan and was stabbed to death.

Topal Recep, the admiral married to another of Kösem's daughters, had urged the rioters on, and Murad gave him the seal the same day. In March Hüsrev was hunted down and killed at Tokat; in May Murad had Recep strangled.

Murad, nineteen, had watched his grand vizier die in front of him. After Recep's death he told his mother to keep out of the government and began to rule himself, with a severity the revolt had taught him.

Kösem had governed for her son since 1623 through grand viziers married to her daughters. Hafız's murder and Recep's execution destroyed that arrangement, and Murad shut her out of the government; she would return to power only after his death.

Tabanıyassı Mehmed, an Albanian who had governed Egypt, was made grand vizier the day Recep died. He served the sultan rather than the factions and marched with him to Yerevan; dismissed in February 1637 after Persian gains, he was pardoned, then executed in 1639.

Ahizade Hüseyin became chief mufti on 10 February 1632, when the rioters forced Yahya out. When Murad had the judge of İznik executed without trial, he wrote to Kösem asking her to restrain her son. His enemies said he was plotting a deposition, and in 1634 Murad had him strangled, the first chief mufti put to death.

Koçi Bey, a courtier from Görice in Albania whom Murad consulted, it was said, several times a day, presented him in 1631 with a memorandum: the empire's disorders came from abandoning the old rules, with offices bought, fiefs given to outsiders and the paid troops swollen. It read like a programme for what Murad did next.

Yahya, forced out by the rioters in 1632, was restored as chief mufti after Ahizade's execution in 1634. Against custom, Murad took him on the Yerevan and Baghdad campaigns for luck. He held the office until he died in 1644.

Silahdar Mustafa, Murad's sword-bearer and companion, used his closeness to the sultan to place his men and to work against the ministers, above all Kemankeş, whom he tried to have sent away. After Murad's death Kemankeş had him posted to Buda and then put to death.

Emir Çelebi, the chief physician, refused a post among the palace doctors to a relative of Silahdar Mustafa, and was denounced to Murad as an opium-eater. In 1638 the sultan made him swallow a deadly dose during a game of chess and drew the game out until no antidote could help.

Kadızade Mehmed, preacher at Ayasofya from 1631, told the crowds that the empire's disorders came from straying from the sharia: the dancing rites of the Sufi orders, coffee and tobacco. He backed Murad's ban on tobacco.

Abdülmecid Sivasi, a Halveti sheikh who had preached the first sermon in the Sultan Ahmed mosque, answered him from the pulpit in defence of the orders and their rites. Kadızade died in 1635 and Sivasi in 1639; their followers carried on the quarrel.

Murad was reading Nefʿî's satires when a thunderbolt struck near the throne; he took it as an omen, banned the poet's satire and sent him to Edirne. In January 1635 the vizier Bayram Pasha had him handed to the officer Boynueğri Mehmed, who strangled him in the palace woodshed.

Evliya Çelebi, a court jeweller's son with a fine voice, was presented to Murad by the sword-bearer Melek Ahmed, his mother's kinsman, and taken into the palace school. At the audience he saw beside the sultan the Persian khan who had surrendered Yerevan.

Küçük Ahmed, a veteran general, was made governor of Damascus and vizier in 1632 with orders to destroy Fakhr al-Din. In 1633 he marched on the mountains and beat the Ma'nids near Hasbaya, where the emir's son Ali was killed.

Fakhr al-Din, master of the coast from Sidon to Tripoli and the Medici's old ally, hid in a cave in the Shuf until fires set at its mouth drove him out. Küçük Ahmed took him to Istanbul in chains, and in spring 1635 Murad had him beheaded.

In Yemen al-Mu'ayyad Muhammad, master of Sanaa since 1629, ruled the highlands through his brothers, each with a province and an army. In 1632 he even sent a force to take Mecca, which troops from Egypt drove back.

His brother al-Hasan, who had put down a tax revolt at Sa'dah in 1622 and governed the north, was among the brothers who led the war. In 1635 an Ottoman counter-attack with fresh troops was beaten, and the last garrisons gave up Zabid, Mocha and Kamaran and sailed away.

In Tunis Hammuda, Murad Bey's son by a Corsican mother, succeeded as bey in 1631. He campaigned against the tribes of the interior and drew the divan and the Janissaries under his control, until by 1647 he named all the officials of Tunis.

Abaza Mehmed, the pardoned rebel, had governed Bosnia and then commanded on the Danube. In 1633 Murad sent him against Poland: he crossed the Dniester in October with Khan Temir's Nogays and attacked the Polish camp near Kamieniec.

Stanisław Koniecpolski, Grand Crown Hetman, taken prisoner at Cecora in 1620, held his fortified camp on 22 October 1633 and drove Abaza back. A treaty in 1634 renewed the terms of Khotyn, and that August Murad had Abaza strangled.

İnayet Giray, a son of Gazi II, was made khan in 1635 and ordered to lead his horsemen against Persia. Threatened by the sultan's envoy and denied his share of Kefe's taxes, he swore the Crimeans to resist, seized Kefe and in January 1637 marched on Khan Temir's Nogays.

Khan Temir fled to Istanbul. In June 1637 an Ottoman fleet reached Kefe, İnayet gave himself up, and on 1 July both men stood before Murad: the khan was strangled at once, Khan Temir ten days later, after cursing the sultan's men over his son's execution.

Bahadır Giray, Selamet's son, learned and something of a poet, was put on the throne in June 1637 and learned at once that the Don Cossacks had taken Azov, the sultan's fortress at the mouth of the Don. Trying to recover it filled his reign.

Shah Safi, Abbas's grandson, lost Yerevan when Murad marched on it in person in 1635, and his armies took it back the next year. Murad turned instead on Baghdad, the city lost in the first months of his own reign.

Tahmasp Qoli Khan, Safavid governor of Yerevan, surrendered the fortress to Murad on 8 August 1635. Received with honour, he became a Sunni and an Ottoman pasha, Emirgüneoğlu Yusuf, and one of the sultan's companions; Emirgan on the Bosphorus is named after him. Ibrahim had him executed in 1641.

Bayram, a Janissary officer married to Murad's sister, became grand vizier in early 1637 and spent a year gathering guns and stores for the Baghdad campaign. Marching with the sultan from Aleppo, he died suddenly near Urfa on 27 August 1638.

Tayyar Mehmed took the seal on the march and directed the siege of Baghdad. He was killed in the final assault on 24 December 1638; the city surrendered the next day.

Kemankeş Kara Mustafa, admiral since 1635, took the seal at the walls of Baghdad and negotiated with Safi's envoys. The peace of Zuhab in May 1639 left Baghdad and Iraq Ottoman and Yerevan Persian, a frontier that has roughly held since.

Ibrahim, the last prince of the dynasty, came to the throne in February 1640 after years of waiting for the executioner; three of his brothers had been killed. He kept Kemankeş, who balanced the budget and cut the payrolls.

Turhan, said to have been taken in a Tatar raid and given to Kösem as a girl, bore Ibrahim his first son, Mehmed, in January 1642. The dynasty had an heir again.

Cinci Hüseyin, a faith healer from Safranbolu said to command the jinn, was brought by Kösem to treat Ibrahim. Royal favour made him judge of Galata in 1643 and chief judge of Anatolia in 1644, to the jurists' outrage, and pushed the old mufti Yahya aside.

Kemankeş's economies made enemies of the sultan's favourites. They turned Ibrahim against him, and on 31 January 1644 he was executed. His friends fell with him; the architect Kasım Ağa was jailed and escaped death only through Cinci's intercession.

Sultanzade Mehmed, a descendant of Süleyman's grand vizier Rüstem, had recovered Azov in 1642 and been sent off to Damascus by Kemankeş as a rival. He was given the seal in January 1644 and kept it by never contradicting the sultan.

Deli Hüseyin, from Yenişehir near Bursa, who had begun in the firewood service of the Old Palace and fought at Baghdad, was governor of Özü when he was sent with Bahadır Giray to retake Azov in 1641. The winter beat them, and Bahadır died on the way home.

Tsar Mikhail, whose Don Cossacks held the fortress, would not risk a war with the sultan for it. In spring 1642 he ordered them to leave, and Ottoman and Crimean troops took Azov back.

After Bahadır's death Kemankeş backed his younger brother Mehmed Giray against the elder, İslam, who was sent off to Rhodes. Mehmed's first reign saw Azov recovered, but when Kemankeş fell, Mehmed lost his patron.

İslam Giray, who had spent seven years a prisoner in Poland, owed his recall from Rhodes to Cinci Hoca, and in June 1644 he replaced his brother as khan. A favourite in Istanbul had made the khan of Crimea.

Silahdar Yusuf, a Croatian-born convert, Ibrahim's sword-bearer and son-in-law, led the expedition Ibrahim sent against Venetian Crete after Maltese galleys took a pilgrim ship in 1644. He took Chania in August 1645 after a siege of some fifty days; in January 1646 his rivals persuaded Ibrahim to have him executed.

Deli Hüseyin took command on the island, conquered its eastern half and in 1648 laid siege to Candia, the Venetian capital. For eight years he held the island army together without the fleet or the money to finish the siege.

Salih, a Bosnian and the second vizier, became grand vizier in December 1645 when Sultanzade fell. In 1647, with Kösem and the chief mufti, he plotted to replace Ibrahim with one of his sons. The plot failed; Ibrahim had Salih strangled in September and sent Kösem from the harem.

Ahmed Pasha, a finance clerk who had risen under Kemankeş, bought the seal, it was said, for 300,000 kuruş and was betrothed to Ibrahim's infant daughter. To pay for the sultan's sables and ambergris he levied a 'fur and amber tax' on officials, jurists and Janissary officers.

Kara Murad, an Albanian Janissary officer who had fought at Chania, was the man the Janissary chiefs gathered round when they refused the fur and amber levy. On 8 August 1648 they rose; Ahmed was strangled and hacked apart, and remembered as Hezarpare, 'thousand pieces'.

Hoca Abdürrahim, the chief mufti who had plotted with Salih, gave the rising its legal cover, and Ibrahim was deposed. When the new grand vizier asked whether the deposed sultan might be killed, he answered: if there are two caliphs, kill one. Ibrahim was strangled on 18 August.

Sofu Mehmed, an aged finance official and Mevlevi dervish, was the rebels' choice for grand vizier. To pay the accession bonus to the troops he seized Cinci Hoca's fortune and sent him to Damascus; Cinci, criticising him on the road, was executed. The six-year-old Mehmed IV was enthroned.

Varvar Ali, a Bosnian boy recruit who later wrote his memoirs, was governor of Sivas when Istanbul demanded 30,000 kuruş from him in 1647 and ordered İpşir's wife sent to Ibrahim's harem. He refused both, kept out the officers sent to kill him, rebelled, and took prisoner Köprülü Mehmed, sent against him.

İpşir Mustafa, an Abkhaz officer who had raided Poland under Abaza Mehmed and risen under Kemankeş, was given Sivas and the command against Varvar. On 20 May 1648 he defeated and killed him and freed Köprülü from his prison.

In Yemen, when al-Mu'ayyad Muhammad died in 1644, his brothers fought over the succession until they submitted to al-Mutawakkil Isma'il. He took Aden that year and later the Hadramawt, ruling a larger Yemen than any imam before him.

Mehmed IV was six when he came to the throne in August 1648. Custom would have sent his grandmother to the Old Palace; instead the viziers asked Kösem to stay as regent over his young mother, Turhan, and the Janissary chiefs stood behind her.

Sofu had one of the Janissary chiefs killed and was said to want Kösem removed; Kara Murad warned her and was promised the seal. When the Venetians shattered the fleet at Foça in May 1649, Sofu was dismissed on that pretext, and that June he was executed, past eighty.

Kara Murad became grand vizier on 21 May 1649 with Kösem's backing. Squeezed by his fellow Janissary chiefs, he resigned in August 1650 and went to govern Buda.

Melek Ahmed, an Abkhaz page named 'angel' by Ahmed I and married by Kösem's decision to Murad IV's daughter Kaya, took the seal from Kösem's own hand in August 1650. His new levies and bad coin brought the merchants of Istanbul out in August 1651, and he fell.

Bektaş Ağa led the Janissary chiefs who ruled through Kösem. In 1651 his faction had Abaza Hasan stripped of his Türkmen command, and with his help Karaçelebizade became chief mufti. His power lasted as long as Kösem's.

Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz, the jurist who had led the boy Mehmed to the throne by the arm, became chief mufti in May 1651 with Bektaş's help; the rioting merchants dragged him to the palace. Dismissed the day after Kösem's death, he was exiled to Chios. His history, the Ravzatü'l-ebrâr, records these years.

Siyavuş, an Abkhaz raised as Abaza Mehmed's treasurer, was made grand vizier on 21 August 1651 with Turhan's favour, over Kösem's candidate, and set about breaking the Janissary chiefs.

Kösem, it was reported, now meant to replace Mehmed with his half-brother Süleyman, whose mother she thought easier to manage. Meleki, one of Kösem's own slave women, betrayed the plan to Turhan's side; she became Turhan's favourite retainer.

Uzun Süleyman, Turhan's chief black eunuch, led the palace men into Kösem's apartments on the night of 2 September 1651; they found her hiding in a cupboard and strangled her. Siyavuş punished the Janissary chiefs, and Turhan ruled as regent.

Bahai Mehmed, grandson of the mufti Sadeddin and a poet of Yahya's school, became chief mufti in July 1649. In 1651 the Kadızadeli preachers pressed Melek Ahmed and Bahai for warrants against the Sufi lodges, got a fatwa, and tried to burn the Halveti lodge at Demirkapı; Bahai, a friend of the orders, quietly shielded them.

Giacomo da Riva, with nineteen Venetian sailing ships, caught the Ottoman fleet in the harbour of Foça near Smyrna on 12 May 1649 and destroyed much of it. The defeat gave Kösem's men the excuse to remove Sofu.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Cossack officer who had been a captive in Istanbul after Cecora, rose against the Polish magnates in 1648 and turned to Crimea for cavalry.

İslam Giray sent it, and Cossack infantry and Tatar horse won victory after victory. In 1649 the khan's mediation produced the Treaty of Zboriv; in June 1651, at Berestechko, his Tatars left the field and carried Khmelnytsky off, and the Cossacks were crushed.

Tugay Bey, the khan's commander at Perekop, rode with Khmelnytsky to his first victories at Zhovti Vody and Korsun in May 1648. He died in June 1651.

John II Casimir, king of Poland from late 1648, fought the Cossack–Tatar alliance, had to accept the Zboriv settlement in 1649, and won at Berestechko in 1651 once the khan withdrew.

Tarhuncu Ahmed, an Albanian said once to have sold tarragon, took the seal in June 1652 on condition he controlled the revenues, and drew up an advance account of the treasury's income and spending. His enemies persuaded Turhan the figures were worthless; on 21 March 1653 he was dismissed and strangled.

Kasım Ağa, the Albanian architect who had nearly died with Kemankeş, became steward of Turhan's household in October 1651. He urged her to make his fellow Albanian Köprülü Mehmed grand vizier; when the grand vizier learned of it, Köprülü was exiled and Kasım thrown into Yedikule. He kept trying.

Boynueğri Mehmed, past eighty, once the officer who strangled Nefʿî, was made grand vizier in 1656 on the advice of the chief mufti and the Kadızadeli preachers. He could not break the Venetian blockade, prices rose, and the preachers turned on him.

In September 1656 Turhan took Kasım's advice and sent for Köprülü Mehmed, an Albanian past seventy who had governed half of Anatolia. He took the seal only on his own terms: a free hand in appointments and no hearing for those who spoke against him.

Abaza Hasan, an Abkhaz officer given charge of the Yeni İl Türkmen in 1648, was stripped of it in 1651 at Bektaş's insistence. He rebelled, plundered Bektaş's caravans and farms, and was joined by İpşir; the government bought them both off with governorships.

İpşir, governor of Aleppo, was named grand vizier in 1654 and entered the capital in February 1655 with his provincial followers. He killed and exiled opponents, quarrelled with the admiral Kara Murad and lost Abaza Hasan's support. On 8 May the troops rose at Murad's urging; İpşir was executed and Murad took the seal.

When İslam Giray made peace with Poland in 1653, Khmelnytsky turned to Moscow, and in 1654 at Pereiaslav the Cossacks swore allegiance to Tsar Aleksei, Mikhail's son. Muscovy and Poland went to war, and Crimea changed sides.

İslam Giray died in 1654, and his brother Mehmed came back as khan. He spent his second reign fighting the Muscovites and their Cossacks in alliance with Poland.

Kâtip Çelebi, a clerk in the military accounts and a collector of books, had begun his world geography, the Cihânnümâ, in 1648. To use the European atlases he needed Latin.

Mehmed İhlasi, a French-born convert, translated Latin works for him, among them Mercator's Atlas Minor. Through their work European atlases entered Ottoman scholarship for the first time.

Üstüvani Mehmed, a Damascene preacher who had settled in Istanbul, led the Kadızadelis after Kadızade; palace servants were among his followers, and in 1651 his men had pressed Bahai for the fatwa against the lodges. A soldiers' rising in March 1656 cost him his friends at court.

Lorenzo Marcello, Venice's captain-general of the sea, led the fleet into the Dardanelles on 26 June 1656 and destroyed the Ottoman navy, the worst defeat at sea since Lepanto; he was killed by a cannon ball in the battle. The Venetians took Tenedos and Lemnos and closed the Straits.

When the Kadızadelis gathered to purge Istanbul's lodges by force, Köprülü obtained a fatwa and the sultan's order, and in 1656 exiled Üstüvani and two companions to Cyprus. He soon went home to Damascus; the movement survived, but it no longer moved governments.

Köprülü crushed a cavalry mutiny in the capital in January 1657 and executed or exiled the men he thought dangerous. He also had the Orthodox patriarch tried for treason.

Parthenios III, patriarch since July 1656, had written to a Greek bishop in Muscovy, the sultan's enemy, to raise funds. His letters were intercepted and brought to Köprülü; though the charge was not proved, he was hanged on 24 March 1657.

Lazzaro Mocenigo, the one-eyed Venetian captain who had beaten an Ottoman fleet off the Dardanelles in 1655, fought the blockade's last battle in July 1657. On the 17th a shot from a shore battery brought down a mast that killed him. The blockade broke, and Köprülü's fleet retook Lemnos and Tenedos that autumn.

George II Rákóczi, prince of Transylvania, joined the Swedish invasion of Poland in January 1657 against the sultan's orders. Crimean Tatars caught his army on its way home and carried some 11,000 men off to the Crimea; on Ottoman orders the diet deposed him that November.

Ákos Barcsay, raised at Gabriel Bethlen's court, was named prince by Köprülü on 14 September 1658 during his campaign into Transylvania, and the diet had to accept a heavy tribute. Rákóczi would not give up.

Mihnea III, raised among the Greeks of Istanbul, was given Wallachia in 1658 with Ottoman backing. In 1659 he turned on the Turks in concert with Rákóczi and raided the Danube fortresses.

Can Arslan, governor of Silistra, with Crimean troops, routed Mihnea's army near Jassy on 12 November 1659. Mihnea fled to Transylvania and died the next spring.

Köprülü recalled Deli Hüseyin from Crete, where Candia had held out for eight years. Popular, and protected by Turhan, Hüseyin could not be touched at once; Köprülü made him admiral, then governor of Rumelia, gathered complaints against him and had him strangled in Yedikule in the winter of 1658–59.

In summer 1658 Abaza Hasan, governor of Aleppo, refused Köprülü's summons to the Transylvanian campaign, gathered the eastern pashas and demanded the grand vizier's head. The sultan would not give it.

Murtaza Pasha, commanding on the Persian frontier, led the loyal army against them; Abaza Hasan beat him at Ilgın on 11 December 1658, but winter scattered the rebels. Murtaza invited their leaders to Aleppo with promises of pardon and had them killed on 16 February 1659.

Ivan Vyhovsky succeeded Khmelnytsky as hetman in 1657 and broke with Moscow, signing the Treaty of Hadiach with Poland in September 1658. When a Muscovite army besieged Konotop, Mehmed Giray brought some 30,000 horsemen, and on 29 June 1659 they routed its cavalry. Opposition to Hadiach drove Vyhovsky out that autumn.

Seydi Ahmed, a Circassian, governor of Buda, was ordered to finish Rákóczi. On 22 May 1660 he beat him at Szászfenes near Kolozsvár; Rákóczi, wounded, died at Várad on 7 June. Seydi Ahmed died that August.

Köse Ali, governor of Temeşvar, besieged Várad, Transylvania's strongest fortress, from 15 July 1660. It surrendered on 27 August, and he let its garrison go with honour. Várad became the seat of a new Ottoman province.

Yurii Khmelnytsky, Bohdan's son, hetman since 1659, had been forced into alliance with the tsar. When Polish troops and Crimean horsemen trapped a Muscovite army at Chudniv in October 1660, he stayed passive and then went back to the Polish side.

Vasily Sheremetev, the Muscovite commander, left alone and surrounded, capitulated on 4 November 1660. He was handed to Mehmed Giray and spent more than twenty years a prisoner in Crimea.

Köprülü's son Fazıl Ahmed had studied under Karaçelebizade and taught in the great medreses from the age of sixteen. His father moved him into government: Erzurum in 1659, Damascus in 1660, where he cut taxes and brought the Shihab and Ma'n families to heel.