40 honored by the glory of islam
ideal and reality, people may be compelled to look inward and try to understand
how their religious beliefs and practices triggered such a troubled situation.^1
Before Mehmed IV underwent his own conversion and subsequently em-barked on a journey of bringing others to his interpretation of Islam and wag-
ing war, he had to fi rst mature and weather the crises triggered during his
father and predecessor Ibrahim’s reign that the empire and dynasty faced. Meh-
med IV’s chaotic enthronement, following an uprising and the dethronement
of Ibrahim in 1 648, set the unfortunate tone for the fi rst decade of his rule.
This chapter surveys the interrelated administrative, economic and fi nancial,
and military crises that beset the empire during Mehmed IV’s minority. These
crises included a sorry parade of grand viziers and power struggles between the
leading women of the dynasty, fi nancial quandaries, war with Venice, and con-
tinual rebellion. These issues are presented to provide the background against
which can be understood the emergence of the convert maker Mehmed IV in
the 1 660s, as depicted by contemporary chroniclers.
Making Sense of Ibrahim’s Execution and a Turbulent Decade
We cannot reach the past other than by viewing it mediated through the artifacts
that survive in stone or script. Historical narratives and archival documents are
the textual remnants of that lost world used to grasp the past. Texts allow no
more than a glimpse of a no longer present material reality and of how people
in the past perceived or imagined that reality. Ottoman chronicles are merely
accounts or stories about what happened; they are not complete portraits of
what happened, they do not represent the totality of what occurred.^2
Historians attempt to narrate a history or give an account of what appearedto have happened in an era. They also try to understand how the period about
which they write was depicted at the time, how that epoch was understood by
the writers who lived through it. Historians have a duty to attempt to draw a
picture of a period of time and describe changes over time while acknowledg-
ing that access to the worldviews of the past emerge primarily from literary
sources shaped by men who not only imagined the world from a distinct stand-
point, but who also wrote about it with an eye toward past models and future
posterity.
As Gabrielle Spiegel argues, “What is the past but a once material exist-ence now silenced, extant only as sign and as sign drawing to itself chains of
confl icting interpretations that hover over its absent presence and compete for
possession of the relics, seeking to invest traces of signifi cance upon the bodies
of the dead?” Spiegel offers a “theory of the middle ground,” which encourages