hunting for converts 195Mehmed IV between 1 654 and 1 686 and requested Muslim clothing and head-
gear. Correlating the petitions of new converts recorded by the imperial scribe
and the narratives chronicling the sultan’s movements, especially the chronicle
of Abdi Pasha, it emerges that converts appeared especially in Rumelia and Sil-
istre, primarily while the sultan was on hunting trips and secondarily while he
was passing through the province en route to military campaigns, thus belying
the bureaucratic, static nature and narrative of the archival documents. The fi ll-
in-the-blank nature of petitions for new clothes for converts refl ects more the
routinization of the practice than the actual circumstances in which conversion
occurred.
The conversion of commoners along Mehmed IV’s hunting trail becomes
traceable around the middle of the 1 660s.^32 Places such as Vize, which is situ-
ated east of Edirne less than halfway along the route to Istanbul, is one such
location. During the end of the 1 660s and the beginning of the 1 670s converts
also were collected while the sultan was traveling to Yenişehir by way of Dime-toka and Tırhala to support the imperial campaign against Crete, or participat-
ing in two military campaigns against the Commonwealth of Poland.^33 Other
than one conversion in Moldova, most conversions during the latter campaign
again occurred in Bulgaria. It should be borne in mind that even while on
campaign Mehmed IV devoted time to the hunt. Thus, Hajji Ali Efendi, who
recorded all the resting stations on the sultan’s fi rst campaign in 1 672, noted
that while in Kozluca, less than ten days’ journey north of Edirne in the district
of Silistre, the sultan set out to hunt after a number of peasants were prepared
to drive the game toward him during the chase. The conversions during the
second campaign mainly occurred at imperial rest stations in the province of
Silistre. The halting grounds of Kozluca (ten days), Hacıoğlu Pazarı (fourteen
days), Karasu (seventeen days), Hacıköy (twenty-one days), and Isakçı (twenty
days) were all within three weeks’ journey from Edirne in the province. The
journey followed a northeastern path along the Black Sea in the direction of
Moldova and the Commonwealth of Poland.^34 In 1 672, one of the imperial halt-ing stations was Karinabad (Karinova/Karnobat), which was a six-day journey
north of Edirne. That town was the home of a group of adults and children who
converted together in Istanbul at the court at the end of Mehmed IV’s reign
( 1 24b).^35 From the mid- 1 670s to the end of Mehmed IV’s reign in 1 687, one
fi nds that converts appeared wherever the sultan hunted in Edirne, Istanbul,
and their environs, especially Kurd kayası near Edirne; Silivri, which is near
Istanbul; and Davud Pasha, just outside Istanbul, a well-known assembly point
for Ottoman armies, where the sultan often held court at the Pavilion of the
Standard while on hunting outings. That kiosk possessed “a broad rectangular