The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

occasions he looked ‘a wretched contrast to his splendid trappings’, as a Venetian diplomat had commented earlier in the year; but, however unimpressive his parade
horsemanship might be, Mehmed remained ‘the Grand Turk’. 6 A single military defeat, even as distant from his capital as the middle Danube,
signified an ominous diminution of imperial power. His Grand Vizier had failed Mehmed in the very lands where, for ten generations, the Sultans had been accustomed to expect victories from their
army.
    When on 17 November Kara Mustafa reached Belgrade’s citadel, on its limestone cliff above the confluence of Danube and Sava, his expectancy of life was low. He could not execute every
witness of his lacklustre generalship without confirming suspicions already circulating at the Sultan’s court; and, though he sought to bribe many survivors of the campaign, there was no
certainty that money would ensure a lasting silence. His fate—and, a few years later, the fate of his sovereign—illustrates the inherent self-discipline which still shaped Ottoman
ruling institutions as the Empire embarked on a long delaying action against the resilient West.
    At Belgrade Kara Mustafa was still, for the moment, Grand Vizier. In the Kalemegdan Fortress he retained the symbols of office with which Mehmed IV had invested him seven years before—the
Imperial Seal and the Key to the Kaaba—and also the Holy Banner ( sancaci ş erif ) which the Sultan had handed to him in May, here in Belgrade, on his appointment as Commander-in-Chief.
But although his office ensured that Kara Mustafa still possessed a terrifying authority over his battered army andthe towns and villages of Serbia, he knew that generals
who suffered defeat while carrying the sancaci ş erif into battle had no right to expect pardon. Old personal enemies surrounded Mehmed IV, who was holding court at Edirne, a favourite
residence where Kara Mustafa had often ridden beside him on hunting expeditions. When a Grand Vizier set out to lead a campaign for his sovereign the day-to-day business he would have undertaken as
chief minister was entrusted to a deputy, and as reports from the Danube seeped through to Edirne it was easy for the deputy and other members of the Divan to convince the Sultan that Kara Mustafa
had shown himself unworthy of the responsibilities assigned to him. Mehmed realized that if the Grand Vizier were allowed to live, the humiliating burden of a defeat by infidel armies would pass to
the Sultan-Caliph himself.
    Such reasoning sealed Kara Mustafa’s fate. On the last Saturday in December he was at his midday prayers when two senior Court dignitaries reached the Kalemegdan citadel from Edirne. They
brought with them a double command from the Sultan to his son-in-law: he must surrender to the imperial emissaries his symbols of civil and military authority; and he should then ‘entrust his
soul to Allah, the ever Merciful’. Kara Mustafa completed his prayers, took off his turban and mantle of state, and allowed the executioner to throttle him speedily. There was about the
timing of his death a strange irony. As the bowstring tightened around Kara Mustafa’s neck in Belgrade, far away in Vienna and Esztergom and in towns and villages which had so long feared the
coming of ‘the Turk’, the church bells were ringing out to celebrate Christmas. It was on 25 December that his co-religionists executed the arch-persecutor of Christians. 7
    The body was decapitated, the head skinned, stuffed, and sent to Mehmed IV as proof that the sovereign’s orders had been carried out. But Nemesis had not finished mocking the unfortunate
Kara Mustafa. In later campaigns the head fell into Austrian hands. Three hundred years after the siege the curious tourist could see it mounted in a glass case on the first floor of Vienna’s Historisches Museum , a grisly relic of a turbulent age. But the skull is no longer on display. A spirit of reconciliation now