Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

146 honored by the glory of islam

the signs of their existence, such as churches, with those of the conqueror,

including mosques, to demonstrate potency and give his subjects a vicarious

sense of invulnerability.

Fahri Derin has pointed out that when Abdi Pasha began to compose his

work he primarily relied on the histories of Karaçelebizade, Katip Çelebi, and

Solakzade to write about the period from Mehmed IV’s birth in 1641 through

the fi rst decade of his reign in 1 658.^33 However, while pointing to slight changes

Abdi Pasha made to the texts he transmitted, such as by shortening accounts

or correcting names, dates, and places, Derin does not comment on the radical

change in tone. Ibrahim hunted and launched war, but these actions were not

emphasized by earlier writers. In contrast to chronicle authors who structure

their narrative as diachrony, each entry marked by a date, Abdi Pasha uses

a strategy of temporal discontinuity, which is antisequential—skipping from

Mehmed IV’s birth in 1641 to his enthronement in 1 648—to pass over the

troubled reign of Ibrahim and to inscribe on a tabula rasa the model of manli-

ness that he promotes. He does not fi nd Ibrahim’s reign to constitute a us-

able past vis-à-vis his apparent authorial intentions or his seeming strategy.^34

Instead of heightening the contrast between the two reigns by mentioning

the fi rst, Abdi Pasha’s amnesia-prone text selectively skips ahead to concen-

trate on the reign of his main subject.^35 As Paul Strohm notes in a medieval

English context, “A wrinkle in the text’s time opens a door through which we

potentially pass to the utopian—a space between what is and what used to be

or might be.”^36

For Abdi Pasha, benefi ting from the luxury of fi fteen years’ retrospection

following Ibrahim’s disastrous reign, that ideal or normative vision consists

of Mehmed IV waging war abroad, reviving jihad, and sending his military

forces abroad, setting out on campaign in person as well. In this way, the au-

thor can represent the sultan, enthroned while a child, as a man with a thin

beard but thick mustache, a brave who, unlike his father, can prove himself

as sultan. Abdi Pasha linked the sultan’s hunting to waging war and Islamic

zeal.^37

Mehmed IV and his handlers, Hatice Turhan and Abdi Pasha, were not

unaware of the potential of ghaza for improving the sultan’s image at home.

Mehmed Halife notes that already in 1 658, after the conquest of Yanova and fol-

lowing a week of celebrations in the capital, “as the felicitous sultan arrived in

Edirne from Islambol with the intention of waging a military campaign, which

caused the army to become confi dent [in his warlike intentions], a noble fatwa

was issued declaring Mehmed IV a ghazi, and thereafter it was decreed that at

the Friday sermon his name was to be read as ‘Ghazi Sultan Mehmed Khan.’ ”^38

The sultan made warfare against the Republic of Venice, the Commonwealth