chains round their necks to stakes in front of the tent of Varvar-Ali,
while the seghbans, and even the surridjis" (irregular horse)
"brandished their sabres before their faces, threatening them with
instant death. Thus we see the changes of fortune, that those who were
the drivers become in their turn the driven," (like cattle.)

[6] In a narrative by a writer named Chassipol, (Paris, 1676,)
professing to be the biography of the two first Kiuprili vizirs,
Mohammed is said to have been the son of a French emigrant, and
this romance has been copied by most European authors. But the
testimony of Evliya, Kara-Tchelibi, and all contemporary Turkish
writers, is decisive on the point of his Albanian origin.

Evliya, who seems to feel a malicious pleasure in relating this mishap
of the future grand-vizir, confesses to having himself received a horse
and a slave out of his spoils; but even before his departure from the
camp, the rebellion was crushed, and Kiuprili released, by the base
treachery of Ipshir-Pasha,[7] for whose sake alone Varvar-Ali had taken
up arms. Won by the emissaries of the Porte, by the promise of the rich
pashalic of Aleppo, he suddenly assailed the troops of his
father-in-law, and seizing his person, cut off his head, and sent it
with those of his principal followers to Constantinople--an act of
perfidious ingratitude, which, even among the frequent breaches of faith
staining the Ottoman annals, has earned for its perpetrator the
sobriquet of _Khain_, or the traitor, _par excellence_. After this
unlucky adventure, we hear no more of Kiuprili in his Anatolian sandjak,
till, in the spring of 1656, we find him accompanying Egri-Mohammed on
his way to the Porte to assume the vizirat: from which, in less than
four months, he was removed to make way for his quondam _protege_, in
whose elevation he had thus been an involuntary instrument.

[7] Ipshir Mustapha Pasha was originally a Circassian slave, and
said to have been a tribesman and near relation of the famous
Abaza. During the revolutions which distracted the minority of
Mohammed, he became grand-vizir for a few months, (Oct. 1654-May
1655,) but was cut off by an unanimous insurrection of the
spahis and janissaries, who forgot their feuds for the sake of
vengeance on the common enemy.

Mohamned Kiuprili was at this period nearly eighty years of age, and so
wholly illiterate that he could neither read n