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of conflict, came down to the rescue, calculated to secure his tenure of trampling down victors and vanquish ed in his career across the plain, and thundered on the rear of the disordered Germans. The fortune of the day changed like the shifting of a scene: scattered without order through the vast encampment, and entangled by the cordage of the pavilions and the wrecks of equipages, the Imperialists offered a ready and helpless harvest to the scimitars of the spahis; and the return of the Tartars, whom their halgha, Fateh-Kherai, had succeeded in rallying, completed the work of destruction. Twenty thousand were left on the field, and those who escaped emulated in the confusion of their flight the Turkish corps routed in the morning and thus, while timariots and lanzknechts, janizaries and pandours, overspread the country far and wide with the wild disarray of their panic-stricken squadrons, carrying each towards their own frontier the tidings of defeat and dismay, Cicala, with his division, remained at nightfall in triumphant possession of the field of battle, and of the camps, cannon, and baggage of both armies.

The glory of this singular battle, the results of which were so unexpectedly disastrous to the Imperialists, rested evidently with Cicala; and Mohammed, measuring his gratitude by the extent of his previous fears, conferred the grand-vizirat on him the same evening, though no misconduct whatever had been imputed to the vizir Ibrahim- Pasha, who was thus summarily deprived of his office. The Sultan, indeed, hesitated on the following morning to confirm this precipitate appointment; but the remonstrances of Saad-ed-deen, who was attached to the interests of Cicala, at length prevailed, and a capi-aga was sent to demand the seals from Ibrahim, and carry them to the new prime minister.

Cicala had now attained the summit of his ambition, and the highest civil dignity in the empire below the sovereign; but his sudden elevation increased the number of his enemies, among whom all the partisans of the unfortunate vizir Ferhad were included: and the imprudent and unpopular acts of severity with which he commenced his administration were not

office :-" in fact," (says Naima,)
"when we consider that the late glo-
rious victory had been gained under
the auspices of Ibrahim, it was not
to be expected that Jaghalah-Zadah
would much enjoy his promotion."
During the whole of the night which
followed the battle of Keresztes, the
tabul-khani or imperial kettle-drums
had been sounded without intermission
to recall to the camp the timariots and
other troops who had fled from the
field in the early part of the engage-
ment: and the grand-vizir Ibrahim
had caused proclamation to be made,
that in consideration of the triumph
which had eventually crowned the
Moslem arms, no enquiry should be
held on account of their abandonment
of their colours. But this leniency was
highly disapproved of by Cicala, who had
been trained in the stern school of Osman
of the iron nerves and Khoja-Sinan.
A panic flight, like that which the day
of Keresztes had witnessed, (though
common in the irregular armies of
Asia, and abundantly frequent in the
subsequent military annals of the
Turks themselves,) had hitherto never
disgraced the strict discipline of an
Ottoman army, and the new vizir de-
clared his determination to preserve
the military institutions of the empire
in unimpaired efficiency by the signal
punishment of all the offenders. Three
days were occupied in the investiga-
tion; the whole army was passed in
review; and no fewer than 30,000,
principally Asiatic troops, being pro-
nounced to have fled from their stand-
ards, were mulcted of their pay and
allowances, and stigmatized with the
name of firaris, or runaways. Many
of those who were present were forth-
with decapitated in front of the army,
and among these Naima particularly
notices Yunus Aga, the commandant
of an oda of janizaries, in whose tent
the Sultan had sought shelter in the
confusion which followed the battle;
thus, according to Oriental notions, con-
tracting the ties of hospitality with the
unfortunate officer: others, who had
not come up after the battle, were put
to the ban, and, presenting themselves
on the faith of the proclamation of Ibra-
him, were led instantly to execution.
Sohrab-Pasha, an aged and merito-
rious officer, who had been governor

*The kalgha-sultan was the senior Tartar prince of the blood, and ranked next to the khan. See note, page 358 of our Sept. No. last year.

successively of Aleppo and Egypt, on remonstrating against these violent measures, was summarily degraded from his rank, and paraded through the camp in a tattered suit of female apparel and Ghazi-Kherai, the Khan of the Krim Tartars, was deposed by a firman, on the pretext of his not having joined the army in person, as he was bound by usage to do, when the Sultan himself took the field; while his brother the kalgha Fateh-Kherai, who had done distinguished service at Keresztes, received the investiture of sovereignty in his room.

The Sultan Mohammed, indolent and voluptuous in the intervals of his fits of ferocity, was solicitous only to withdraw himself as soon as possible from the perils of the campaign, (the only one he ever made,) and appears to have at first acquiesced supinely in the arbitrary proceedings of his minister; but the tidings of these sweeping changes were not received in the provinces with equal indifference. The Tartars at once refused to receive Fateh-Kherai as their khan, and broke out into an open revolt, which ended in the murder of that prince by the adherents of his rival Ghazi: and the consequences of the disgraces and forfeitures inflicted on the firaris of Keresztes were still more disastrous. Many of these troops, knowing the fate which awaited them at headquarters, had disbanded and returned to their Asiatic homes, where they continued to retain their timars, or fiefs, in defiance of the edict of sequestration: and though this obnoxious mea sure was tacitly suffered to fall into abeyance when Cicala lost the grandvizirat, the disaffection which it engendered was one of the principal germs of the great Asiatic rebellion which broke out three years later under Kara Yazidji† and his brother Delhi-Hassan, and which, renewed from time to time, under different leaders, continued for more than twenty years to convulse and desolate that portion of the empire, and was not

the least influential of the causes which combined during the seventeenth century to save the once formidable power of the Porte. But the history of these troubles does not belong to the administration of Cicala, whose downfal, before he had held the vizirat a month, was as capricious and unexpected as his rise had been. The absolute dominion exercised by the Sultana-mother over the weak mind of her son has already been alluded to; her influence had decided in favour of Ibrahim the competition for the premiership on the death of Sinan : a word from her now sufficed to effect the removal of Cicala. The Sultan had quitted the army for the capital, when he was encountered on his route near Adrianople by the favourite mute of his mother, bearing her congratulations on the victory of Keresztes, and the expression of her disapprobation at the new appointment; " and no sooner," (says a cotemporary Turkish historian,)" were the imperial pavilions pitched for the halt, than a tchaoosh was dispatched to the camp to deprive the Vizir Jaghalah-Zadah of the ensigns of office, and re-invest with them Ibrahim- Pasha, who had been his predecessor."

The fall of Cicala was followed by his exile to Ak-shehr, in Anatolia, where he resided in retirement as a mazul, (a term employed to designate a deposed employé.) The Pasha of Belgrade, and others who had been instrumental to his elevation, shared in his disgrace; the mollah Saad-eddeen, who had trusted to his ascendency over his royal pupil to secure him against all reverses, was only spared on his solemn renunciation of future interference in politics; and even the nishandji, or private secretary of the Sultan, who had, in the official despatch announcing the victory, been lavish in his encomiums on Cicala, atoned by the loss of his office for his praises of the fallen favourite. "In fact," (says Naima,) "though Jaghalah was a man of the most dis

* The khans of the Crimea, although always of the line of Jenghiz, received the ensigns of royalty from the Ottoman emperor, as lord paramount. They were occasionally deposed and banished by the same authority, but never put to death except in the single instance of Mohammed, who was beheaded by Osman-Pasha Oz-demir for rebellion, as noticed above, twelve years before this period.

† He is called by Knolles, and other European writers, "the Scrivano." KaraYazidji implies "the black secretary."

tinguished courage and gallantry, he was remorseless and cruel, and his heart knew no pity: thus his reckless and uncompromising severity against the unfortunate firaris had turned against him the hearts of all the soldiery, and every rank and degree rejoiced at the restoration of Ibrahim." But, notwithstanding his unpopularity, his services were too valuable to be long dispensed with; in the following year, (1597,) he was recalled to Constantinople, and reinstated in his old station of capitan-pasha, and vizir of the divan; and his restoration to office was signalized by the equipment of a bashtarda, or imperial galley, carrying sixteen ranks of oars, with eight rowers in each, which was launched in the presence of the Sultan, and appropriated to his use. By this piece of courtly magnificence, and by well-timed gifts administered to the avarice of the Sultana- Walidah, his favour at the seraglio was completely re-established; and his interests were further secured by a reconciliation, which was not long after effected between Saad-ed-deen, then restored to favour and promoted to the venerable office of mufti, and Ibrahim, who after a second dismissal, became, in 1599, for the third time, grand-vizir of the empire.

The disappointment of Cicala in a former attempt to remove his family to Constantinople, and the vengeance which he wreaked on the neighbouring shores, have been already related: his partial success in a second effort has been noticed by both Turkish and Christian writers, and forms a singular episode in his wild and devious career. In the summer of 1598, after making his annual circuit of the Archipelago, and collecting the tribute of the Greek islands, he suddenly changed his course from the coast of the Morea; and appearing with all his force off Sicily, sent a flag of truce into the harbour of Messina, requesting the viceroy to allow him at least an interview with his mother, whom he had never seen since he was first carried to Constantinople: " and the viceroy again considering," to quote the plain but forcible language of old Knolles, "how that the angrie renegat, for the like courtesie to him at another time before denied, had in his rage done great harme all alongst the sea coast; covenanting with him to send her in safetie

backe againe, sent her honourably accompanied abourd the admirall gally: whom Cicala, her sonne, received with great joy and triumph, and having kept her with him one day with all the honour that might be, according to his promise, sent her backe againe to Messina; and so, without any harme done for her sake to any part of Christendome, peaceably returned backe againe with his fleet."

The only naval service of importance which Cicala appears to have performed during his second tenure of the capitan-pashalik, was the frustrating, by his appearance with a fleet of fifty sail, the attack meditated in 1602 on Tunis and Algiers, by the Christian squadrons under Doria and Don Juan de Cordova; and the circumstances of the Ottoman empire, distracted by dissensions in the cabinet and revolts in the provinces, concurred with the civil wars between the Emperor Rodolph and his brother Matthias in the Austrian territories, in reducing the war of Hungary on both sides to an affair of outposts, which left no opportunity for distinction in the field; while the intrigues of Cicala's enemies in the divan, where they were again in the ascendant since the death of the Vizir Ibrahim, called all his address into requisition in order to maintain his ground. The triumphant progress of the rebel Kara-Yazidji in Anatolia, where he assumed the style of a monarch and issued firmans against such governors as refused to submit to his authority, afforded a tangible ground of accusation against the capitan-pasha, to whose severities in Hungary the beginning of the insurrection was ascribed; and the vi zir Hassan-Yemishdji (the fruiterer) loudly demanded from the Sultan the head of Cicala, as the prime cause of the calamities of the empire. But while Yemishdji was exerting all his influence to procure the ruin of his opponent, his own downfal had been already determined on. The suspicions of Mohammed, whose jealous cruelty increased as his health declined, had been roused by the popularity of the vizir with the janizaries, and the unbounded control which he arrogated to himself over all departments of the state in the mind of a monarch, who had not long before directed the execution of his eldest son, Mahmood, lest the martial temperament of the

young prince might lead him to aspire prematurely to the throne, there was but little interval between suspicion and punishment; and Hassan-Yemish dji was suddenly seized and strangled in the gardens of the seraglio, a few weeks only before the termination (Dec. 1603) of the short and inglorious reign of Mahommed III.

The insurrection in Asia Minor had been quelled for the time by the death of Kara-Yazidji and the defection of his brother Delhi- Hassan, who had purchased a pardon by submission, and had been appointed to the distant pashalik of Bosnia: but a still more dangerous enemy had arisen in that quarter. Shah Abbas had availed himself of the disordered state of the frontier provinces to attack the Porte in 1601; Tabreez and Erivan had fallen into his hands at the outset of the war; and he was rapidly reconquering the territories which, eleven years before, he had given up to the Turks. Both the pride and the fanaticism of the Osmanlis were awakened by this invasion: the Oulemah issued a fetva or decree, declaring that the death of a Persian schismatic by the sword of an orthodox believer was more acceptable in the sight of Heaven than that of seventy Christians! and as the laurels gained by Cicala in the last war with Persia apparently pointed him out as the commander best qualified to conduct the present contest, his appointment, soon after the accession of the young sultan Ahmed, as generalissimo of the armies against Persia, was universally hailed as an omen of success against "the audacious sheahs, who had presumed to break the peace so lately granted them." But both the political and military condition of Persia, in the interval which had elapsed since the last war, had undergone a change which rendered her a far more formidable antagonist than formerly: the incursions of the Uzbeks and Turkmans had been victoriously repelled, and the refractory tribes in the intes rior of the kingdom reduced by the

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arms of Shah Abbas; and great improvements had been introduced in the warlike institutions of the nation by three English travellers, the celebrated brothers Shirley, who are said to have first instructed the Persians in the management of artillery. armies of Persia had previously con sisted almost entirely of the cavalry of the different tribes, led to war by their khans, and entirely unacquainted with tactics or manœuvring; yet their fiery gallantry had more than once made them successful, when fighting under the eye of their monarch and their hereditary chiefs against the stubborn valour and superior discipline of the Turks; but the recent enrolment by Abbas, under the direction of the Shirleys, of a body of tuffenkdjis, or musketeers, and the corps of gholam-i-Shah, or royal guards, now gave him the disposal of a force on which he could place more personal reliance, than on the tumultuary host formed by the nobles and their followers, and enabled him to advance on more equal terms to the encounter of the redoubtable janizaries of Constantinople.

The arrangements consequent on a new reign, prevented Cicala (who still continued in the post of capitan-pasha) from leaving the capital till late in the summer of 1604, when he repaired with a large body of janizaries to Erzroom, and there took the command of a numerous but disorderly army, a great proportion of which consisted of troops who had been implicated in the late revolts under Delhi-Hassan, and had received a pardon on condition of their joining the forces destined to act against the heretics of Persia. The Shah was engaged in pressing the siege of Kars, then, and now, an important fortress on the frontiers of Anatolia ; but his forces were too inferior in number to risk a general action; and, on the arrival of Cicala, whose prowess in the former war had made his name well known among the Persians,† he retreated rapidly to Tabreez, which he was suffered to reach

* Ahmed was the first of the Ottoman line who mounted the throne without having previously held the government of a province, being only fourteen at the death of his father: his sparing the life of his brother Mustapha, who afterwards succeeded him, (thus breaking for the first time the continuous series of succession from father to son,) was another unprecedented exception to established usages.

"The Persians," says De Govvea feared Cigala more than a whole Turkish army."

unmolested. The Turkish officers in vain urged the seraskier to pursue and crush the retiring "rabble of kuzzilbashes," (as an Osmanli historian contemptuously calls them), before they recovered from their panic; and the brave Sefer, beglerbeg of Erzroom, offered, if he were allowed to take only the élite of the cavalry, to bring the Shah bound hand and foot to headquarters; but Cicala was deaf to both arguments and entreaties, and, alleging as a reason for his inaction the advanced season, and the necessity of awaiting the junction of the Pasha of Wan, suffered the golden opportunity to escape. He now announced his intention of leading the army into winter-quarters in Shirwan, where his own son, Mahmood-pasha, was governor, and thus preventing the Shah, by the fear of a movement on his flank, from advancing from Tabreez till the spring. But the troops rose in open mutiny, and, exclaiming, "When Cicala was capitan-pasha he went with the fleet to Messina to visit his mother, and now that he is seraskier, must he go at the head of his army to visit his son?" declared their determination to winter in Anatolia, and not in the inhospitable and half-subdued territory of Shirwan. The seraskier attempted to coerce the refractory troops; but they overthrew his pavilions by cutting the tent-ropes, (a usual mode among Turkish soldiers of expressing their dissatisfaction with their general;) and Cicala, finding himself compelled to forego the project of advancing into Shirwan, sent the army into cantonments on the frontiers of Anatolia, persisting with characteristic obstinacy in establishing his own headquarters at the advanced position of Wan, till the forays of the Persian light troops, who ravaged the country up to the walls of the town, rendered it necessary for him to withdraw to Erzroom.

The campaign of 1605 opened with a series of bloody but indecisive actions along the whole line of the contested frontier, in which, however,

the numbers and discipline of the Ottomans gave them gradually the advantage; till, in the middle of the summer, Cicala issued orders for a general advance of all his divisions on Tabreez, the recovery of which would have enabled him to execute his avowed design of marching into the interior of Persia. Contrary to the advice of his counsellors, Abbas determined to hazard a decisive engagement for the defence of this important city; and having strengthened his army by recalling his favourite general Ali-Verdi Khan from the siege of Bagdad, confronted the Turkish army (Aug. 10) on the banks of the lake of Tabreez.

The tactics usually adopted by the Ottomans in their great battles with the Persians, and with other Asiatic armies, consisting principally of cavalry, differed in some degree from those employed against the more regular armies of Europe; and as the present engagement was in a great measure decided by the peculiarities of this order of battle, it merits a particular description. Their long series of field artillery (of which the Per sians, before the travels of the Shirleys, were almost entirely destitute) was ranked in front of the position, and the guns were frequently secured to one another by massive chains,* to guard against any sudden onset which might penetrate the intervals of the line. The heavy fire of the ordnance was supported by the musketry of the janizaries, whose odas or regiments, drawn up in steady array behind the cannon, with their flanks protected by the squadrons of spahis or regular cavalry, formed the main strength of the Turkish battle: while a countless swarm of Tartars, and other irregu lars, thrown out in advance as skirmishers, served to bear the first impetuous shock of the enemy, or at least to exhaust their ardour and blunt the edge of their weapons. It was not till the hostile forces were fatigued by the slaughter, or dispersed in the pursuit of these worthless auxiliaries, that the disciplined battalions of the Otto

*This linking together of the field-pieces is frequently alluded to in the Autobiography of the Mogul Emperor Baber, who calls it "the practice of Room" or Turkey: vide pages 314 and 362 of Leyden's translation. Among the miracles related by Persian historians of Shah Ismael, the founder of the Sooffee dynasty, it is asserted that at the battle of Tchalderoon, in 1514, the huge chain connecting the Turkish cannon was severed by the holy monarch with a single blow of his scimitar!

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