254 postscript
cloak, pink trousers, and gold boots. He holds the golden reins in his right
hand and looks straight ahead.
White turban, ghazi aigrettes, and weapons for hunting were the most im-portant and intertwined symbols of Mehmed IV’s reign. Yet until today only
the last has been given prominence, as seen in the name of the exhibition at
the Pera Museum, “Mehmed the Hunter’s Imperial Procession,” and the text
accompanying the exhibit describing the ruler as “Sultan Mehmed IV, remem-
bered as Mehmed the Hunter because of his passion for hunting.” It is the
author’s aim that the reader take away a reinterpretation of the signifi cance of
hunting (bows and arrows) and an understanding of the importance of conver-
sion (white turban) and ghaza (ghazi aigrettes) during Mehmed IV’s era.
Like the sultan that he served during that epoch of constant ghaza, today inTurkey Kara Mustafa Pasha is also not a favored name from the Ottoman past.
None of his effects are on display at the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul.
Yet today at the Museum of Vienna several remnants of Kara Mustafa Pasha are
proudly exhibited. They include a portrait of the forlorn grand vizier, a painting
depicting his painful execution, and his battle tent along with captured horse
tail standards. Belgrade fell to the Habsburgs in 1 688, and with it, the mosque
where Kara Mustafa Pasha’s corpse had fi rst been buried. The mosque was con-
verted into a church. Monks in a monastery claimed to have dug up and kept
one of the grand vizier’s rib bones and sent his skull to the Habsburg capital.^1
Prior to setting out for the ill-fated Vienna campaign, Kara Mustafa Pashahad begun construction of a madrasa complex on the Divan Yolu, the main
avenue in the peninsula of Istanbul. Completed in 1 684, it became the fi nal
resting place of the former grand vizier’s skeleton. Today the main room and
dome of the madrasa appear as if about to fall down; the outside is overgrown
with weeds. The dome looks like a cap placed over fl owing locks of curly green
hair. The madrasa is the home of the Yahya Kemal Museum and Bookstore de-
voted to the works of the famous poet who once served as Turkish ambassador
to Warsaw, today’s capital of the country whose king had been responsible for
the Ottoman defeat in 1 683 that caused Kara Mustafa Pasha’s execution. The
library was established by the Istanbul Conquest Committee, a group formed
on the four hundredth anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
Traces of one successful conquest overshadow the unsuccessful campaign led
by Kara Mustafa Pasha.
Some of the insuffi ciently small cannons from Kara Mustafa Pasha’s siegeof Vienna, whose belching smoke and dull boom had articulated the Ottoman
attempt to take the city in 1 683, thereafter signaled a different intention. They
were melted down and reshaped into the bell of Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, the
massive church whose spires tower over the inner city. The tide was turning.