introduction 11
defenders were offered the chance to convert to Islam and the besieging armies
were depicted as being on a mission to propagate the word of God. The failed
siege actually ended Ottoman conquest in Europe and marked the beginning
of withdrawal. Chapters 1 0 and 11 trace Mehmed IV’s sudden reversal of for-
tune during and after the siege of Vienna, narrating his dethronement and
death and revealing the sources of the negative image of the sultan advanced
in subsequent historiography.
The wave of religiously inspired warfare resulted in the successful conver-sion of many Christians and much Christian sacred geography into sanctifi ed
Muslim space and the purifi cation and rededication of Muslim sacred space pre-
viously lost to Christian armies such as at Bozca (Tenedos) Island. Mehmed IV’s
efforts ensured that the Muslim call to prayer was chanted from church bell
towers. The silencing of the pealing of bells demonstrated the truth of Islam,
as it was the aural and visible sign of victory.
Along with being depicted during his reign as pious and God-fearing, aruler who spread the faith within and without his domains, Mehmed IV was
also described as a warrior for the faith against the infi dels. Contrary to ear-
lier periods, the terms “mujahid” and “jihad” were commonly used by authors
during Mehmed IV’s reign interchangeably with “ghazi” and “ghaza” to desig-
nate warriors and warfare against Christian powers, whether the Habsburgs,
Romanovs, or Venice. Mehmed IV was depicted as a ghazi, the one who
“spreads a clamor to the East and West, a cry of horror and lament to all lands
of the infi del and all peoples,” and vanquishes the enemy with prophetic zeal.^3
Mehmed IV’s move to the former capital of Edirne, an “abode of glory, power,
and victory,” is described in the context of a noble intent to personally wage
perennial war against the infi dels.^4 The sultan “incited all to ghaza and jihad.”^5
One writer narrates how Ottoman soldiers “exerted and endeavored to obtain
the rewards of ghaza and jihad.”^6
To the chronicle writers of Mehmed IV’s era, he was a warrior fi ghtingghaza and jihad against the infi del. The sultan’s offi cial chronicler, Abdi Pasha,
promotes the view that he was a throwback to an earlier era, for Mehmed IV
acted to inculcate the position with greater symbolic and real power. He wished
both to return to an age when sultans were mobile, active military leaders and
warriors, bringing war to the heart of the Christian enemy, and to instill it with
new meaning—breaking out of the cage in the palace of Istanbul and spend-
ing most of his reign in Edirne and Rumelia, the heartland of the empire, hav-
ing contact with commoners, intervening in their lives, and, motivated by his
religious zeal and working with his pious mother, grand vizier, and spiritual
advisor, engaging in policies of religious patronage that Islamized people and
places, promoting the image of a worthy, virile Islamic sovereign. Mehmed