hunting for converts 203
palace in Edirne concerning the Cossack prisoner of war seized by the governor
of Silistre, Vizier al-Hajji Hüseyin Pasha. [The prisoner] was sent to the imperial
presence where he acquired the honor of Islam” ( 1 76a). The following summer,
the governor-general of Bosnia Sohrab Mehmed Pasha brought 1 70 severed in-
fi del heads, fi fty-six prisoners, and ten banners, which the sultan viewed at the
Justice Pavilion in the palace in Edirne. Two of the prisoners became Muslim
and the sultan awarded them each gold coins (2 1 6b–2 1 7a). That fall Shabbatai
Tzevi became a Muslim under the sultan’s gaze. In the summer of 1 667, “since
three male servants from the infi del ambassadorial retinue of Poland became
numbered among those who fi nd honor in Islam, an order was issued in this
matter that they be adorned in Muslim garments and be appointed to the group
of palace pages attached to the external palace service” (236a). Finally, in autumn
1 668, the sultan and Vani Mehmed Efendi were en route to Yenişehir in Greece
in support of the renewed efforts to conquer Crete and had alighted in Tırhala,
where the sultan had just bagged forty-three deer. As reports of the conquest of
Candia seemed imminent, eighty Habsburg and French soldiers sent to assist
the Venetians were taken captive and brought to the sultan. One or two became
Muslim before him (286a–b).
The conversion of the Venetian admiral, the Cossack, French, Habsburg,and other Christian prisoners of war, and the members of the ambassadorial
retinue of the king of the Commonwealth of Poland demonstrate that no mat-
ter the wording of “The Statute of the New Muslim,” sometimes other forces,
such as the fear of death or impressment into servile status, or even the sultan’s
anger, were probably involved in religious change than merely the volition of
the Christian or Jew who desired to convert. Prior to the conversion of the
Polish pages, the sultan had been angered when the royal gatekeepers failed to
make the Polish ambassador kiss the ground. This ambassador had a reputa-
tion for being of violent temper and rude.^54 The sultan retired the head of the
gatekeepers and may have demanded the conversion of the pages to appease
his outrage (235b). In all these situations, as when the rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi ap-
peared before him, Mehmed IV compelled men in captivity to change religion,
being, like his mother, a convert maker.