1655,) but was cut off by an unanimous insurrection of the
spahis and janissaries, who forgot their feuds for the sake of
vengeance on the common enemy.

Mohamned Kiuprili was at this period nearly eighty years of age, and so
wholly illiterate that he could neither read nor write; yet such was the
general estimation of his wisdom and abilities, that the young sultan,
on entrusting to him the ensigns of office, voluntarily pledged himself
to leave entirely at his discretion the regulation of the foreign and
domestic relations of the empire, as well as the disposal of all offices
of state--thus virtually delegating to him the functions of sovereignty.
The measures of Kiuprili soon showed that these extraordinary powers
would not be suffered to remain dormant. The impatience of the troops at
the strict discipline which he enforced, erelong announced the approach
of a fresh tumult; and the ringleaders, in the confidence of
long-continued impunity, openly boasted that "the plane-tree would soon
bear another crop"--when on the night of Jan. 5, 1657, the grand-vizir,
accompanied by the aga of the janissaries, and fortified by a fetwa from
the mufti, legalizing whatever he might do, made the round of the
barracks with his guards, and seized several hundreds of all ranks in
the various corps, whose bodies, found floating the next day in the
Bosphorus, revealed their fate to their dismayed accomplices. The Greek
patriarch, on suspicion of having endeavoured to engage the Vaivode of
Wallachia in a plot for a general rising of the Christians, was summoned
to the Porte, and forthwith bowstrung in the presence of Kiuprili; and
in the course of a few weeks, not fewer than 4000 of those who had been
implicated in the previous disorders perished under the hands of the
executioner: "for as in medicine," remarks a Turkish historian, "it is
necessary to employ remedies which are analogous to the disease, so by
bloodshed alone could the state be purified from these lawless shedders