Mehmed IV
Mehmed IV reigned for thirty-nine years, hunted through most of them, and was deposed for a siege he had not attended. He was six when the soldiery strangled his father and put him on the throne, and the first decade of his reign was the low point of Ottoman government: the treasury empty, the fleet blockaded inside the Dardanelles by Venice, and the capital ruled by whichever faction of the palace guard had last rioted. It was saved by an appointment. In 1656 an eighty-year-old Albanian was made grand vizier on the condition of absolute authority, and he executed his way through the factions, restored the finances and broke the blockade; his son and then his son-in-law held the office after him, and for thirty years the empire was governed competently by one family while the sultan hunted. Under them it reached its greatest extent. Crete was taken from Venice after a siege of Candia lasting twenty-one years, one of the longest in European history. Podolia was taken from Poland. The frontier in Hungary and Ukraine was pushed further than it had ever been. Then in 1683 the third of the viziers took the army to Vienna, invested the city for two months, and was destroyed by a relief force of Poles and Germans that came down off the Kahlenberg into his rear. He was executed for it at Belgrade. The defeat was not a repulse but a reversal: a Holy League formed against the empire, Hungary was lost within five years, and in 1687, after a second catastrophe at Mohacs, the army marched on the capital and deposed Mehmed in favour of his brother. He spent his last six years confined in the palace he had spent his reign avoiding, and the treaty that ended the war in 1699 was the first the Ottomans signed as a defeated power.
- Lived: 1642 CE – 1693 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
