163 
T U R 
by the eloquence of the mufty, laid down their arms, and 
opened the gates of the city to him. The emperor s chief 
officers were put to death. Mustapha was necessitated to 
confirm the ministers appointed by the insurgents; the 
more the prince conceded, the more intractable the latter 
became; and the degradations to which the timed sultan 
submitted to preserve his sceptre assisted only to strike it 
from his hand. 
The emperor had no children but what were very young. 
His brother Aclimet, the heir to the throne, according 
to the law, was confined at Adrianople. The mufty wrote 
to him that Mustapha was unworthy to reign; that the 
good Mussulmans placed all their hopes in him; and that 
the general voice called him to the throne. This letter 
fell, as it was intended to do, into the hands of the sultan, 
who hastened to his brother’s apartments, ceded to him 
all his rights, and implored him 1o treat him with kindness. 
Mustapha was deposed on the 20th of September, 1702, 
at the age of forty years. He died of dropsy a year after his 
deposition. 
1702—1730— Achmet III.—The new emperor received 
the homage of the grandees and of his officers with affected 
kindness, bestowed large gratuities on the army; and 
knowing that the people had censured Mustapha for his 
residence at Adrianople, he resolved to return to the capital. 
He was thirty-six years of age; and owing to the humanity 
of his predecessors, his captivity had not been rigorous. 
In his prison he had acquired a variety of information by 
reading and conversation with certain effendys, who had 
given him some notion of politics and taught him to dis¬ 
semble with those whom he designed to punish. When he 
therefore regarded his power as secure, he displaced the 
vizir and the mufty, and proscribed all the chief actors in 
the late revolution. Executions struck terror into all classes, 
and his new ministers conceived that there was nothing 
which they might not attempt. 
All Europe meanwhile envied the Turks the political 
repose which they enjoyed. CharlesXII., king of Sweden, 
had just wrested the Polish sceptre from the hand of Augus¬ 
tus, elector of Saxony and given it to Stanislaus Leczinski: 
he then threatened Peter the Great, the protector of Augustus. 
In another quarter the Spanish succession had armed the 
house of Austria against France. Prince Ragotzki, a Hun¬ 
garian nobleman, married to the only daughter of count 
Tekeli, who was recently dead, being invited to Transylva- 
nia by a considerable party, assumed the title of prince of 
that country, the investiture of which he -solicited from 
the Porte. HBut whatever interest the sultan might have in 
raising up enemies against the Austrian monarch, he refused 
to break the peace which he deemed so necessary for his own 
dominions. 
At this juncture the Ottoman empire became the retreat 
of two fugitive sovereigns, Charles XII. king of Sweden, 
and Stanislaus, whom he had placed on the throne of Po¬ 
land. See Sweden and Poland. 
The peace enjoyed by Turkey was disturbed by a quarrel 
in which it was involved with the republic of Venice on ac- 
counLof the Morea. The divan made great preparations to 
reconquer that peninsula, and at the same time to cover the 
frontiers of Transylvania, Hungary and Poland. The Vene¬ 
tians were lulled into a fatal security, and before they had 
raised the force necessary for withstanding a powerful foe, the 
Morea was again under the yoke of the Porte. Austria in¬ 
terfered in this quarrel, and as her mediation was rejected, 
she declared war against the Turks. The two armies met at 
Peterwaradin: prince Eugene, who commanded the Impe¬ 
rialists, attacked the Turks on the 25th of August, 1716. 
He had the art to avoid their first onset, which alone is to be 
feared, surrounded and completely routed them ; and while 
their scattered troops were rallying at Belgrade, the Austrian 
general took Temesvar. In spite of this reverse, the Porte 
continued the war; and the Imperialists laid siege to Bel¬ 
grade. Notwithstanding the most vigorous resistance the 
city was taken. The sultan, convinced of the necessity of 
K E Y. 
peace which he ought not to have broken, now opened 
negociations. The congress of Passaro'witz, after some dis¬ 
cussion, concluded peace on the 21st of July, 1718, on the 
basis of uti possidetis, that is to say, each party retained 
what it possessed at the moment of signing the treaty. 
The peace lasted some years, when troubles breaking out 
in Persia, excited the ambition both of the Turks and the 
Russians. The latter threatened an invasion of the country, 
which the grand-signor made preparations to oppose or to 
profit by. France offered her mediation, which was ac¬ 
cepted, and for that time the storm blew over. A treaty 
fixed the limits of Turkey and Russia, and Persia alone suf¬ 
fered by this compromise. In 1721 the Ottomans renewed 
their hostile pretensions against that kingdom, then distracted 
by internal revolutions. The death of the czar Peter the 
Great, left an open field to the Turks, who already threat¬ 
ened Ispahan; but revolts at Cairo and Smyrna compelled 
the divan to accommodate matters with Persia, by a peace 
which was nevertheless highly advantageous to the Turks, 
since they retained the possession of great part of that exten¬ 
sive kingdom and the acknowledged supremacy over almost 
all the rest of it; but this glorious prosperity was soon 
eclipsed by a phenomenon which none of the powers that 
occupied the great theatre of the world could either have 
feared or expected. Nadir Gagatir, afterwards so celebrated 
by the name of Thahmas-Kuli-Khan, son of a shepherd, sold 
his father’s flocks, expended the money in collecting a band 
of robbers, and began to plunder caravans. After carrying 
on these depredations for seven years, and increasing his 
troop to 5000 men, he resolved to engage in a more glorious 
warfare; he therefore offered himself and his little army to 
his sovereign. Shah Thahmas, closely pressed by the Af¬ 
ghans, accepted this assistance, for which he was doomed to 
pay dearly. While Nadir was engaged in reducing Kho- 
rasan, Shah Thahmas, being apprized that the Ottomans 
threatened Persia, marched against them, was defeated in a 
great battle near Erivan, and signed a disgraceful peace. 
This peace, instead of being ratified by the ambitious Nadir, 
excited his indignation, and war was resolved upon. 
The Persians demanded the provinces of which the Porte 
had possessed itself. The latter expected nothing less than 
war: the troops were disbanded or dispersed; the sultan and 
his ministers, engaged in frivolous pursuits, were lulled to 
sleep in the lap of sloth and effeminacy, regardless of the 
discontent of the people and the complaints of the janis¬ 
saries. Recourse was had to a very dangerous expedient, 
particularly among the Turks, that of imposing a fresh tax 
to defray the expenses of the war. The news of the taking of 
Tauryz by the Persians excited murmurs, and the minds of 
the people became more and more inflamed. An Albanian, 
named Khalyl Patrona, a turbulent man, who had escaped 
capital punishment, and two other janissaries, who like him, 
followed the trade of pedlars, became the instruments of the 
ruin of a powerful monarch. 
These factious men began with declaiming against the new 
tax- On the 28th September, 1730, about nine o’clock in the 
morning, the populace rose at their instigation, and the 
troops assembled in the Atmeidan, and murdered their 
officers who came to appease the tumult. The grand-signor, 
shut up in his seraglio, ordered the rebels to lay down 
their arms and disperse, but to no purpose : he had no 
Soldiers to send against them, and at length enquired the 
object of their assembling. Patrona demanded that the 
mufty, the grand-vizir, his kiahya, the caimacam and the 
reis-effendy should bo given up to them to be put to death. 
While waiting for the sultan’s answer, they plundered the 
residences of those officers, and as they threatened to force 
the seraglio, Achmet was obliged to deliver to them those 
ministers with the exception of the mufty, who was exiled, 
because the law does not allow his life to be taken away. 
The audacity and insolence of the insurgents increased with 
their success: not content with this concession, they openly 
demanded the deposition of the sultan, on the 2d of October, 
1730. Achmet, forsaken by all his supporters, and con¬ 
vinced 
