[6] In a narrative by a writer named Chassipol, (Paris, 1676,)
professing to be the biography of the two first Kiuprili vizirs,
Mohammed is said to have been the son of a French emigrant, and
this romance has been copied by most European authors. But the
testimony of Evliya, Kara-Tchelibi, and all contemporary Turkish
writers, is decisive on the point of his Albanian origin.

Evliya, who seems to feel a malicious pleasure in relating this mishap
of the future grand-vizir, confesses to having himself received a horse
and a slave out of his spoils; but even before his departure from the
camp, the rebellion was crushed, and Kiuprili released, by the base
treachery of Ipshir-Pasha,[7] for whose sake alone Varvar-Ali had taken
up arms. Won by the emissaries of the Porte, by the promise of the rich
pashalic of Aleppo, he suddenly assailed the troops of his
father-in-law, and seizing his person, cut off his head, and sent it
with those of his principal followers to Constantinople--an act of
perfidious ingratitude, which, even among the frequent breaches of faith
staining the Ottoman annals, has earned for its perpetrator the
sobriquet of _Khain_, or the traitor, _par excellence_. After this
unlucky adventure, we hear no more of Kiuprili in his Anatolian sandjak,
till, in the spring of 1656, we find him accompanying Egri-Mohammed on
his way to the Porte to assume the vizirat: from which, in less than
four months, he was removed to make way for his quondam _protégé_, in
whose elevation he had thus been an involuntary instrument.

[7] Ipshir Mustapha Pasha was originally a Circassian slave, and
said to have been a tribesman and near relation of the famous
Abaza. During the revolutions which distracted the minority of
Mohammed, he became grand-vizir for a few months, (Oct. 1654-May