240 honored by the glory of islam
tolerate reclaiming only a lifeless Mehmed IV. By bringing his corpse to Istan-
bul and burying it in the tomb that was part of the mosque complex his mother
made, Sultan Suleiman II could create a public ceremony that would add to
the pomp and circumstance of the dynasty. As its centerpiece was the body of
a sultan who “had cheeks burned by the sun” and “was a little bent forward in
stature since he frequently rode horses,” hardly the type of man one would have
imagined to have been Ottoman sultan in the late seventeenth century.^13
Mehmed IV probably would have preferred to have been buried in his be-loved palace in Edirne, whose Hunting Gate offered easy access to the fi elds
and forests of Thrace that he so loved. Like his Chinese contemporary, Meh-
med IV loved the sense of liberation that travel and hunting afforded him. As
K’ang-hsi, who enjoyed riding and shooting every day he could outside Peking,
relates, “But it is when one is beyond the Great Wall that the air and soil refresh
the spirit: one leaves the beaten road and strikes out into untamed country; the
mountains are densely packed with woods, ‘green and thick as standing corn.’
As one moves further north the views open up, one’s eyes travel hundreds of
miles; instead of feeling hemmed in, there is a sense of freedom.”^14
During his reign, the former sultan was repeatedly compared to the sunand his comings and goings to the rising and setting of that celestial body.
When writing of Mehmed IV’s death a generation after it occurred, Silahdar
also marks his passing with references to the sun (2:690–9 1 ). He does not call
him a ghazi, or mention ghaza or jihad. Instead, Silahdar claims that Meh-
med IV died in the harem at sunrise. A man who spent his life breaking free
of the harem institution ends his life in it. His death is coolly noted by another
comparison to the sun, this time separating the man from the star. At the start
of a new day, the world-illuminating and all-seeing sun rises, but the mobile
conqueror Mehmed IV does not.
Mehmed IV’s Posthumous Reputation
Within a decade of Mehmed IV’s death, writers reinterpreted his reign. Already
at the turn of the eighteenth century, everything positive that Meh med IV
had achieved for his dynasty, empire, and religion, namely, a restored name,
greatest territorial extent, and hundreds of conversions of people and places,
seemed to have been forgotten. A harsh anonymous chronicle, written from
a post- 1 684 point of view, which repeatedly refers to Mehmed IV simply as
“Sultan Mehmed,” devotes but four of 1 58 folios to the period between 1661
and 1 675, an era that witnessed the conquests of Uyvar, Crete, and Kamaniça.^15
It describes Crete and Kamaniça in one folio without using the terms ghaza,