The genius of the Ottoman institutions is so directly opposed to any
thing like the perpetuation of offices in a family, which might tend to
endanger the despotism of the throne by the creation of an hereditary
aristocracy, that even in the inferior ranks, an instance had hitherto
scarcely been known of a son succeeding his father. The immediate
appointment, therefore, of Fazil-Ahmed, the eldest son of the deceased
minister, to the vizirat, was so complete a departure from all
established usages, as at once demonstrated to the expectant courtiers
that the influence of the crafty old vizir had survived him, and that
"the star of the house of Kiuprili" (in the words of a Turkish writer)
"had only set in the west to rise again with fresh splendour in the
east." Ahmed-Kiuprili was now thirty-two years of age, and joined to an
intellect not less naturally vigorous than that of his father, those
advantages of education in which the latter had been deficient. At an
early age he had been placed under the historian, Abdul-Aziz Effendi, as
a student of divinity and law, in the _medressah_ or college attached to
the mosque of Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, and had attained, in due
course, the rank of _muderris_ or fellow therein; but the elevation of
his father to the vizirat transferred him from the cloister to the camp,
and he held the governments successively of Erzroom and Damascus--in the
latter of which he distinguished himself by his moderation and firmness
in reducing to order the refractory chiefs of the Druses, of the two
great rival houses of Shahab and Maan-Oghlu. Recalled, at length, to
Constantinople to assume the office of kaimakam, he had scarcely entered
on his new duties when he was summoned to Adrianople, to attend the
deathbed of his father, and to succeed him in the uncontrolled
administration of the empire.

The numerous executions which marked the accession of the new vizir, (in
accordance, as was believed, with the dying injunctions of his father,)