'My dear Father ... Let me not be forgotten of thee, but let thy prayers be for me that I may continue faithful to the end. If any of your Friends be free to come over, they may be serviceable; here are many convinced, and many desire to know the way, so I rest.'—MARY FISHER to George Fox. (Barbadoes, 1655.)
'This English maiden would not be at rest before she went in purpose to the great Emperor of the Turks, and informed him concerning the errors of his religion and the truth of hers.'—GERARD CROESE.
'Henceforth, my daughter, do manfully and without hesitation those things which by the ordering of providence will be put into thy hands; for being now armed with the fortitude of the faith, thou wilt happily overcome all thy adversaries.'—CATHERINE OF SIENA.
XXVIII. SILVER SLIPPERS:
OR A QUAKERESS AMONG THE TURKS
I
The Grand Turk had removed his Court from Constantinople. His beautiful capital city by the Golden Horn was in disgrace, on account of the growing disaffection of its populace and the frequent mutinies of its garrison. For the wars of Sultan Mahomet against the Republic of Venice were increasingly unpopular in his capital, whose treasuries were being drained to furnish constant relays of fresh troops for further campaigns. Therefore, before its citizens became even more bankrupt in their allegiance than they already were in their purses, the ancient Grand Vizier advised his young master to withdraw, for a while, the radiance of his imperial countenance from the now sullen city beside the Golden Horn. Thus it came about that in the late autumn of 1657, Sultan Mahomet, accompanied by his aged minister, suddenly departed with his whole Court, and took up his residence close outside the still loyal city of Adrianople. His state entry into that town was of surpassing splendour, since both the Sultan and his Minister were desirous to impress the citizens, in order to persuade them to open their purse-strings and reveal their hidden hoards. Moreover, they were ever more wishful to dazzle and overawe the Venetian Ambassador, Ballerino, who was still kept by them, unrighteously, a prisoner in the said town.
A full hour or more was the long cavalcade in passing over the narrow stone bridge that spans the turbid Maritza outside the walls of Adrianople. In at the great gate, and down the one, long, meandering street of the city, the imperial procession wound, moving steadily and easily along, since, an hour or two previously, hundreds of slaves had filled up the cavernous holes in the roadway with innumerable barrel loads of sawdust, in honour of the Sultan's arrival. Surrounded by multitudes of welcoming citizens, the procession wound its way at length out on the far side of the city. There, amid a semicircle of low hills, clothed with chestnut woods, the imperial encampment of hundreds and thousands of silken tents shone glistening in the sun.[39]
In one of the most splendid apartments of the Sultan's own most magnificent pavilion, the two chief personages who presided over this marvellous silken city might have been seen, deep in conversation, one sultry evening in June 1658, a few months after the Court had taken up its residence outside the walls of Adrianople. They formed a strange contrast: the boy Sultan and his aged Grand Vizier, Kuprüli the Albanian. Sultan Mahomet, the 'Grand Seignior' of the whole Turkish Empire, was no strong, powerful man, but a mere stripling who had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father, the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his harem, and in his fury had done his best to slay his own son and heir. Happily he had not succeeded in doing more than maim the child, and, before long, imprisonment and the bow-string put an end to his dangerous career. But though the boy Sultan had escaped with his life, and had now reached the age of sixteen years, he never attained to an imposing presence. He has been described as 'a monster of a man, deformed in body and mind, stupid, logger-headed, cruel, fierce as to his visage,' though this would seem to be an exaggeration, since another account speaks of him as 'young and active, addicted wholly to the delight of hunting and to follow the chase of fearful and flying beasts.' In order to have more leisure for these sports he was wont to depute all the business of government to his Grand Vizier, the aged Albanian chieftain Kuprüli, who now, bending low before his young master, so that the hairs of his white beard almost swept the ground, was having one of his farewell audiences before departing for the battlefield. Kuprüli, though over eighty years of age, was about to face danger for the sake of the boy ruler, who lounged luxuriously on his cushions, glittering with jewels, scented and effeminate, with sidelong, cunning glances and cruel lips. Yet even Sultan Mahomet, touched by his aged Minister's devotion, had been fired with unwonted generosity: 'Ask what you will and you shall have it, even unto the half of my kingdom,' he was exclaiming with true Oriental fervour.