and reveal their hidden hoards.
Moreover, they were ever more wishful to dazzle and overawe the
Venetian Ambassador, Ballerino, who was still kept by them,
unrighteously, a prisoner in the said town.

A full hour or more was the long cavalcade in passing over the narrow
stone bridge that spans the turbid Maritza outside the walls of
Adrianople. In at the great gate, and down the one, long, meandering
street of the city, the imperial procession wound, moving steadily and
easily along, since, an hour or two previously, hundreds of slaves had
filled up the cavernous holes in the roadway with innumerable barrel
loads of sawdust, in honour of the Sultan's arrival. Surrounded by
multitudes of welcoming citizens, the procession wound its way at
length out on the far side of the city. There, amid a semicircle of
low hills, clothed with chestnut woods, the imperial encampment of
hundreds and thousands of silken tents shone glistening in the
sun.[39]

In one of the most splendid apartments of the Sultan's own most
magnificent pavilion, the two chief personages who presided over this
marvellous silken city might have been seen, deep in conversation, one
sultry evening in June 1658, a few months after the Court had taken
up its residence outside the walls of Adrianople. They formed a
strange contrast: the boy Sultan and his aged Grand Vizier, Kuprueli
the Albanian. Sultan Mahomet, the 'Grand Seignior' of the whole
Turkish Empire, was no strong, powerful man, but a mere stripling who
had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an
attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father,
the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he
was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been
seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his
harem, and in his fury had done his best to slay his own son and heir.
Happily he had not succeeded in doing more than maim the child, and,
before long, imprisonment and the bow-string put an end to his
dangerous career. But though the boy Sultan had escaped with his life,
and had now reached the age of sixteen years, he never attained to an
imposing presence. He has been described as 'a monster of a man,
deformed in body and mind, stupid, logger-headed, cruel, fierce as to
his visage,' though this would seem to be an exaggeration, since
another account speaks of him as 'young and active, addicted wholly to
the d