280 chapter 7
soon after a re-arrangement of factions in the palace itself would bring about
the fall of Kösem Sultan, who was murdered upon the order of Mehmed IV’s
mother Turhan, and the subsequent fall of the janissary aghas as well. The
grand vizier, Tarhuncu Ahmed Pasha, tried to reduce state expenditure, to farm
out vacant timars, and to force well-to-do officials and subjects to contribute to
the treasury, but he was dismissed and executed in 1653. Anarchy in the capital
continued: the domination of the harem aghas, which had succeeded that of
the janissaries, came to an end in 1656 after a joint revolt of the sipahis and
janissaries (the so-called “plane-tree incident”, vak’a-ı çınar or vak’a-ı vakvakiye;
the harem aghas’ bodies were suspended from a plane tree, hence the name),
only to be replaced with a “sipahi junta”.
Finally, Turhan was forced to name as grand vizier a protégé of hers, the aged
pasha Mehmed Köprülü (1656–61). To assume this post, Köprülü explicitly laid
down his terms, asking for almost absolute power in order to restore the em-
pire. He suppressed rebellions in Istanbul and Anatolia, broke the Venetian
blockade in the Dardanelles, and in general became so powerful that, upon
his death, he was succeeded by his own son, Köprülüzade Fazıl Ahmed Pasha
(1661–76), an unprecedented phenomenon in Ottoman politics. According to
Rifaat Abou-El-Haj, the beginning of the Köprülü “dynasty” marked the rise of
a new source of power, the vizier and pasha households (kapı): these officials
and magnates promoted their own relatives, servants, and protégés to high ad-
ministrative posts, gradually diminishing the percentage of people originating
in the palace or the army. Metin Kunt, however, has argued that this process
started much earlier, and that private households had been established by the
beginning of the seventeenth century.5
The influence of the Kadızadeli movement in Köprülü internal policies was
described in chapter 6; in other fields, Fazıl Ahmed was credited with the cap-
ture of Candia in 1669 (he went to Crete and led the campaign in person), as
well as with victories in Transylvania and Podolia. Later campaigns were not
so successful: the siege of Vienna in 1683 was a complete disaster, as a Polish
army routed the Ottoman besiegers; in the aftermath, a Holy League uniting
Austria, the papacy, Poland, and Venice conquered Buda (1686), while a little
later Venetian armies took possession of the Peloponnese. An army revolt on
the Habsburg front led, in 1687, to Mehmed IV’s deposition and a short period
5 Abou-El-Haj 1984, 7–9, 89–91 and passim; Kunt 1983, xvii, 40, 46, 64–67 and passim; Kunt 2012;
Hathaway 2013. For an example of such a career see the biography of Mahmud Paşa (d. 1685)
in Silahdar – Refik 1928, 2:223 (Silahdar – Türkal 2012, 1019): initially an Istanbul merchant, he
became agha of Kara Mustafa Paşa and managed to rise to hold the posts of vizier and deputy
grand vizier.