2

A Decade of Crisis

Ottoman chroniclers writing during Mehmed IV’s minority gave

Ibrahim’s murder meaning by composing didactic works that fi t into

the genre of advice literature (advice to kings, or mirror for princes,

Nasihatname) in which elite authors, aggravated by their own loss of

status and privilege and the unraveling of a legal order that served

their interests, articulated their grievances in the framework of

declining moral values that threatened the empire and dynasty. Their

works mainly consisted of writing that consciously aims to warn the

ruler to heed the mistakes of his predecessor and not repeat them.

They depict most of the decade of the 1 650s as a period of startling

insecurity for subject and ruler alike, blaming the situation on the

weakness of the sultan and the power of female royals. The solution

to the crisis offered by the writers of the advice literature was for a

strong sultan to reclaim power from the valide sultan, take charge,

and clean up the mess, making sure men were on top.

This chapter provides the crucial context of disorder and turmoil

perceived as crises within which conversion to piety among the lead-

ing members of the administration and dynasty are situated. Many

scholars writing about conversion agree that conversion is often

preceded by crisis, whether at the societal or personal level. Because

context is the “total environment in which conversion transpires,”

a context of crisis sets the stage for religious change to occur. When

that crisis is severe, prolonged, extensive, and external, offering a

startling contrast with what came before, a discrepancy between the