els
wherever they should be found to be staved, and the wine to be let out
into the streets. And that he might truly be satisfied his orders were
obeyed, he frequently disguised himself, and walked in that manner about
the city; and when he found any one carrying wine, he sent him to
prison, and had him bastinadoed almost to death. One day he met in the
streets a poor deaf man, who not hearing the noise usually made at the
approach of the sultan, did not soon enough avoid a prince whose
presence was so fatal. This negligence cost him his life. He was
strangled by order of the grand seignior, who commanded his body to be
cast into the street. But this great severity did not last long, and all
things returned to their former condition.

However, matters took again another turn under the reign of Mahomet the
IVth. who, in 1670, resolved to forbid all the soldiery the use of wine.
The terrible seditions that liquor had formerly raised were remembered,
and especially that which happened under Mahomet the Third, who saw his
seraglio forced by a great multitude of soldiers full of wine, and whose
fury he could not free himself from, but by sacrificing his principal
favourites. An edict was published, to prohibit entirely the use of
wine, and to command all those who had any in their houses, to send it
out of town. The same extended all over the empire. The sultan condemned
to death those who should violate this decree, in which he spoke of wine
as of a liquor infernal, invented by the devil to destroy the souls of
men, to disturb their reason, and put states into combustion. This was
rigorously put in execution, and to that extremity, that it cost the
ambassador of England, and the christian merchants of Constantinople,
great solicitations, and large sums of money, to get leave to make only
as much wine as would suffice for their own families. At Smyrna, the
officers of the grand seignior had not the same indulgence for the
christians, who were one whole year without wine; and it was with great
difficulty they got leave to import it from the isles of the
Archipelago, and other places not comprised in that prohibition; for
this prohibition reached only those places where there were mosques.
Besides all this, they made every Friday sermons stuffed full of
declamations against those who should drink it. In short, this edict was
so severe, that wine seemed to be banished for ever the states of the
grand seignior. But in about a ye