ialists and Turks had more than
once encountered each other as auxiliaries of the rival candidates, and
Kiuprili was on the point of repairing in person to the scene of action,
when he died at Adrianople of dropsy, (Oct. 31, 1661,) in the
eighty-sixth year of his age, and was buried in a splendid mausoleum,
which he had erected for himself, near the Tauk-bazar (poultry market)
at Constantinople--the vault of which, during his life, he had daily
filled with corn, which was then distributed to the poor to purchase
their prayers! "Thus," says a Turkish annalist, "died Kiuprili-Mohammed,
who was most zealous and active in the cause of the faith! Enjoying
absolute power, and being anxious to purify the Ottoman empire, he slew
in Anatolia 400,000[9] rebels, including seventeen vizirs or pashas of
three tails, forty-one of two tails, seventy sandjak-beys, three
mallahs, and a Moghrabiu sheikh. May God be merciful to him!"

[8] De la Haye, the French ambassador, was imprisoned in 1658,
and his son bastinadoed in the presence of Kiuprili, for being
unable or unwilling to give a key to some letters in cipher from
the Venetians; and some years later, the envoy of the Czar,
Alexis Mikhailowitz, was driven, with blows and violence, from
the presence of the sultan, who was irritated by the
incompetency of the interpreter to translate the Czar's letter!
This latter outrage, however, was not till after the death of
the elder Kiuprili.

[9] This monstrous exaggeration is reduced by Rycaut to the more
credible, but still enormous number of 36,000 victims during the
five years of his ministry.

The genius of the Ottoman institutions is so directly opposed to any
thing like the perpetuation of offices in a family, which might tend to
endanger the despotism of the throne by the creation of an hereditary
aristocracy, that even in the inferior ranks, an instance had hitherto
scarcely been known of a son succeeding his father. The immediate
appointment, therefore, of Fazil-Ahmed, the eldest son of the deceased
minister, to the vizirat, was so complete a departure from all
established usages, as at once demonstrated to the expectant courtiers
that the influence of the crafty old vizir had survived him, and that
"the star of the house of Kiuprili" (in the words of a Turkish writer)
"had only set in the west to rise again with fresh splendour in the
east." Ahmed-Kiuprili was now thirty-two years