11

Mehmed IV’s Life and

Legacy, from Ghazi

to Hunter

Hunting to Excess and the Downfall

and Death of the Sultan

Once the sultan returned to the capital, he sought to resuscitate his

reputation as a pious, just sovereign, but as Silahdar relates, circum-

stances did not permit him to improve his image. The numerous

conversions at his feet were overshadowed by his hunting habit.

Mehmed IV visited Eyüp as he had at the very beginning of his reign.

He upbraided his servants who did not bring rebels to justice, decry-

ing their femininity in an imperial writ: “Why did you not attack the

bandits as you were ordered, why do you instead saunter and stroll

about like women?”^1 Silahdar was eyewitness to a renewed campaign

against rebels, the fruit of which was scores of rebel heads arriving

before the gaze of the sultan. That fall, the sultan watched from the

Alay Pavilion at the edge of the palace walls as a brigand was paraded

through the city in a humiliating and torturous fashion and then

hanged at Parmak Gate (2:244). At the same time, in the spring and

summer of 1 686, the sultan was in, but not within, Istanbul. He

preferred Davud Pasha Palace and the gardens near the dockyards

for hunting, riding, and promenading, and Üsküdar garden and the

village of Çengelköy on the Asian side of the Bosporus, where he

amused himself among the cherry blossoms along with half of the

people of the harem (2:24 1 , 244). Yet while the sultan was enjoying

the delights of the city on the Bosporus, the empire had entered the