On Mustapha’s short reign of three months followed the unhappy time of the second Othman, who lacked all the good qualities of his great namesake. His chief pastime was archery, using prisoners of war, even his own pages, as targets, but for actual warfare he cared nothing, and entered into a very disadvantageous peace with Persia. His Janissaries grumbled at their sovereign’s inertia, so to please them, and probably to bleed them a little, he engaged in war with Poland, which, proving disastrous, made the Sultan very unpopular. His disgusted soldiery therefore took him to Yedi Koulé, kept him there for some time a prisoner, and finally strangled him.
Palace and harem intrigues brought about such an impossible state of affairs in the country that even the army, generally ready to profit by confusion, became alarmed for the welfare of the Empire. The steps they took proved disastrous to themselves in the end. They placed Amurath, brother of Othman II, a child of eleven, on the throne, and then proceeded to govern the country under their own leaders and in their own interests. Western Europe was becoming more and more aware of the decline of Ottoman power in Europe, and there were not wanting prophets who foretold the speedy dissolution of the Turkish Empire, among these Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador from James I, who bemoaned the misery, anarchy, and general decay, as evident in 1622. A wise woman, his mother, Sultana Mahpeiker, guided Amurath IV through the troubled days of his childhood, and brought up a Sultan endowed with vigour of body and mind to man’s estate. The first acts of his reign, the swift and secret killing of the rebel leaders, cowed the soldiery into submission. Amurath punished with death right and left, and even the Chief Mufti’s head went to the executioner for the bad state of the roads over which his sovereign chose to travel. Amurath led his armies to war as former Sultans had been wont to do, and brought them back victorious, for Persia had been badly beaten and Bagdad retaken. The story is told of how at the siege of that city a Persian giant threw down the gauntlet to the Turkish army, how Amurath took it up, and in single combat clove the giant’s skull to the chin with his sabre. The Persian garrison of thirty thousand was slaughtered, three hundred only making their escape. So Amurath returned to Constantinople, to enter the City in triumph at the head of his troops, and no Sultan has done so since that time.