introduction 19
entering fundamental debates concerning the reputation of Mehmed IV, the
understanding and implementation of ghaza and jihad, and religious conver-
sion. This book is distinct in three main ways. First, it presents Mehmed IV in
a new light. For generations of modern scholars, the chaotic state of affairs at
the beginning and end of Mehmed IV’s reign, the former the period of his mi-
nority between 1 648 and 1 656, the latter the debacle between the failed siege
of Vienna in 1 683 and Mehmed IV’s dethronement in 1 687, have constituted
all that was deemed worthy of knowing about this sultan’s epoch. In contrast
to contemporary accounts about Mehmed IV, many of which have not been
published or utilized by modern scholars, later chronicles have depicted him
as weak, ineffectual, and a spendthrift. This sultan has been either overlooked
or treated harshly by moderns, who, when they have written about his reign,
have been overly critical or dismissive, as they mainly rely on the published
eighteenth-century chronicles of Naima and Silahdar, arguing, for example,
that “although he reigned in a very important period of Ottoman history, he
was not a very important fi gure.”^47 Because Mehmed IV apparently had nei-
ther agency nor signifi cance, there has not been a single study in any language
devoted to him for thirty years. Modern scholars who have written about Meh-
med IV display disapproval of religious piety and an inability to take religious
faith seriously, neither accepting that religious zeal could be anything other
than a destructive force intimately tied to ignorance, nor even allowing that
the sultan’s religious feelings could have been sincere. The failure of the siege
of Vienna turned Mehmed IV and the Kadızadeli movement into a historical
dead end, another reason he is denigrated and little studied. Rescuing that
dead end is an important historical task, for it is important to understand not
only what happened in the past, but what might have been. Readers famil-
iar with Mehmed IV’s poor reputation as a hapless fool, manipulated by the
ignorant zealots around him, who wasted his reign hunting and satisfying
his pleasures in his harem while the empire crumbled, will be surprised to
meet the pious Mehmed IV who here rides to war converting Christians and
churches in his wake. This book explains this shift in historical memory by
focusing on his achievements and putting them in the context of what was
considered to be important to rulers at the time.^48
The Mehmed IV described in this book also stands in contrast to his de-piction in the secondary literature, which rarely extends analysis of changes in
the institution of the sultanate to the second half of the seventeenth century.^49
Studies do not extend beyond the point at which Mehmed IV is still a minor, or
skip over the second half of the seventeenth century altogether.^50 It is unfortu-
nate that scholars have been so reluctant to reconsider conventional wisdom,
since, contrary to most other sultans after Mehmed III (reigned 1 595– 1 603),