“Che dirà il Crucifisso?”
The reproof brought the errant Marquis back to his actual milieu and its proprieties. He was, Sir John tells us, “struck dumbfounded and was filled with astonishment at so unexpected a glosse, which he sayd was a more efficacious sermon then he had heard from the Capuchin Fryers.”[184] What he said to himself we do not know.
From these trivialities, which enveloped his mind like fine-spun cobwebs, Sir John was suddenly roused by a very serious event: nothing less than the death of the great Ahmed Kuprili.
At the approach of the autumnal equinox the Grand Signor broke up his camp and began his migration to Adrianople. The Vizir was then ill—so ill that he refused Sir John’s request for a farewell audience with these words: “If God pleasd’, wee should meet in the Spring, but then he was not in a state to receive my Visit.” Nevertheless, Ahmed followed his master in a galley as far as Selivria, where our Ambassador’s Dragoman, who had been sent to obtain some Commands, saw him, on his landing, carried by four persons to a litter, on which, too weak to sit upright, he stretched himself at full length. In this critical condition he went on another day’s journey, and at that point, his strength failing him, he had to be taken a mile off the road into a private house. Mindful of the public interest to the very last, he called his Kehayah and ordered him to march with the army to Adrianople. The Kehayah, with tears in his eyes, begged to be allowed to stay and wait upon him, saying that no man could serve him with so much care or so much affection. “No,” replied Ahmed, “the Gran Signor’s Army ought not to want a Head, and since I cannot, you must Head them.”
The Grand Signor at the moment was, as usual, hunting; but as soon as news of the Vizir’s state reached him, he hastened to his bedside—a signal proof of the sentiments which the master cherished towards his illustrious servant. Sir John was deeply impressed: “I must needs say,” he writes, “That I have read of the Privacy’s of many Great Ministers of State with their Prince, I have livd’ to be no stranger to the story’s of the Modern one’s. But Nothing in Christendome neither Card: Richlieu, Card: Mazarin, or Don Louis de Haro, or any other Christian favourite can parallell either the Power, Influence, or Intimacy, That this Gran Visir had with this Emperour.” Thus Ahmed lingered on till the 24th of October, when he succumbed to a dropsy inherited from his father but intensified by worries of government, hardships of war, and excessive indulgence in strong waters. He had ruled the Ottoman Empire for fifteen years, and at the time of his death he was not above forty-five.
His body was brought back to Constantinople in a plain coach drawn by six horses and attended by only half-a-dozen footmen. It was taken to a mosque where the Kaimakam and other dignitaries awaited it with the religious ministers, and was laid in the same sepulchre as his father’s. No pomp distinguished Ahmed’s funeral from that of an ordinary pasha. But the mourning was universal. Moslems and Christians, natives and aliens joined in paying tribute to the virtues of the departed statesman, to his moderation, his justice, his inflexible probity. He was a pasha free from greed; he was an autocrat who knew how to temper absolutism with gentleness: a memorable, and in some respects a unique exemplar of a beneficent despot. The English, in particular, remembered with gratitude Ahmed’s scrupulous observance of their Capitulations, and his readiness to punish any official who violated them. It was not probable that they would see his like again.
To Sir John Finch the death of Ahmed, “my Great and Good friend,” came as a severe shock, and it evoked from him a eulogy more eloquent in its unaffected simplicity than any elaborate panegyric: “Most certainly He was a Great Minister of State, and Master of Great Resolutions; For whatsoever He sett upon He allwayes went through. He was undoubtedly Just; and the freest from Corruption of any that ever held that charge, for He was no lover of mony.” How was the event likely to affect himself? This question, naturally, mingled itself with Sir John’s sorrow: “I hope things will not upon the change of the Ministers change their Face too; But the Truth is In the Visir I lost a True friend, and with Him all the Rest, For they will be Turnd’ out of their severall charges, so that I must begin my Interest anew.”[185]
Immediately on Ahmed’s death the Seal was carried by his brother to the Grand Signor and, according to general expectation, was conferred upon Mustafa Pasha—commonly called Kara Mustafa, or Black Mustafa, from the darkness of his complexion. He was a man of fifty-three. Having begun as a page in the household of old Mohammed Kuprili and married his daughter, he had risen under that Vizir to the position of Capiji-bashi. Ahmed had made him Capitan Pasha, or Lord High Admiral, and, on going to Candia, left him as his Deputy with the Sultan. Mustafa had taken the utmost advantage of this proximity to the sovereign, pandering to all his passions and always accompanying him in his hunting. He was just about to marry one of the Grand Signor’s daughters—a damsel of six.
As soon as the appointment was announced, Sir John hastened to find out all about Kara Mustafa’s character and antecedents, so that he might from the past form a forecast of the future. Information was easy to obtain: a person who had for so many years been the second grandee in the Empire had naturally become an object of interested study to every one that came into contact with the Court. Had he access to the Foreign Office archives, Finch would have found a terse summary of the new Vizir’s character from the pen of Sir Daniel Harvey’s secretary: “well spoken, subtill, corrupt, and a great dissembler.”[186] As it was, he learnt that Kara Mustafa was reputed “a Great Souldyer, and a Great Courtier; and of a very Active Genious.” But these qualities were marred by two very pronounced vices: avarice and arrogance. The English merchants had suffered from his cupidity, and all the foreign envoys from his pride. These reports made Sir John uneasy: he saw the outlines of trouble in the future: he had a disquieting sense of uncertainty; but he hoped that the example of his famous predecessor and the responsibility of his present position might cure Kara Mustafa of his propensities.