Power in the Ottoman state has for…
September 1656 CE
Power in the Ottoman state has for more than half a century been determined as a result of struggles and compromises between rival groups.
Grand viziers who are supposed to represent the sultan's absolute power have virtually become dependent on the palace and the Janissary corps, or provincial forces, with the result that there is a lack of authority and complete disorder in the administration.
During the regency of the Sultan Mehmed IV, factions led by his grandmother and mother, Turhan Hatice, have exercised power while the chiefs of the Janissary corps have dominated the state administration.
Revolts have broken out in Constantinople and Anatolia, and a series of grand viziers have sought in vain to solve the empire's financial crisis.
Faced with crisis, the palace chooses Mehmed Pasa, an old vizier in retirement who had been recommended to the sultan's mother by a clique as the wisest and most experienced man available.
A product of the peculiar Ottoman institution of trained palace pages, he comes from a village in Albania.
After his services and training in the palace, he had become a governor-general in the provinces of Trabzon (Trebizond; 1644), Egri (Eger; 1647), Karaman (1648), and Anadolu (1650) and sat as vizier in the imperial council for only a week in 1652, and then, dismissed, had retired to Köprü, his father-in-law's seat, a small town in northern Anatolia, hence his nickname Köprülü (“of Köprü”).
Offered the post of Grand Vizier, Mehmed Pasha accepts only on the condition that he be given extraordinary powers and political rule without interference, even from the highest authority of the Sultan.
His conditions accepted, he is on September 15, 1656, appointed Grand Vizier by Mehmed IV .
His first task is to advise Sultan Mehmed IV to conduct a life of hunts and traveling around the Balkans and to reside in the old capital of Edirne, thus stop his political interventions.