A six-year-old sultan reigned for 39 years, mostly while out hunting
Mehmed IV became Ottoman sultan at six, after his father was overthrown, and held the throne for 39 years, second only to Suleiman the Magnificent. Contemporaries nicknamed him the Hunter because the chase filled so much of his time, while powerful grand viziers ran the empire to its greatest extent in Europe.
Born at Topkapı Palace in January 1642, Mehmed was the son of Sultan Ibrahim and Turhan Sultan, a concubine of Russian origin. His infancy nearly ended in disaster: during a quarrel with the boy's mother, Ibrahim is said to have hurled the baby into a cistern, and although servants rescued him he carried the scar on his head for life. He took the throne in 1648 amid turmoil. His powerful grandmother Kösem Sultan, serving as regent, was suspected of plotting to replace him with a half-brother, and in 1651 the young sultan signed her death warrant.
The 1650s brought revolts in Anatolia, a naval defeat by Venice near the Dardanelles and bread riots in the capital. In 1656 his mother handed full executive power to a new grand vizier, Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, beginning an unusually stable era. Köprülü and his son Fazıl Ahmed won back Aegean islands, completed the long war for Crete in 1669, and campaigned successfully against Transylvania and Poland. When a Cossack leader, Petro Doroshenko, accepted Ottoman overlordship, the empire's reach extended into Podolia and right-bank Ukraine, at the price of war with Russia. Disaster struck at home too: the great fire of July 1660 reduced about two-thirds of Constantinople to ash.
The turning point came under the next vizier, Kara Mustafa, who backed a Hungarian revolt against Austria and marched on Vienna. On 12 September 1683, a relief army with Polish cavalry under King John III Sobieski broke the siege. That defeat opened the long Great Turkish War, in which the Holy League began pushing the Ottomans back toward the Balkans. After another loss at Mohács in 1687, the army mutinied and disintegrated, and in November 1687 Mehmed was deposed in favour of his brother Suleiman II.
He lived on under confinement, allowed occasional outings, and died at Edirne in 1693, two years after senior clerics were caught plotting to restore him. His favourite consort, the Greek-born Gülnuş, bore two future sultans, Mustafa II and Ahmed III, and another consort, the poet Afife, wrote verses about the family's grief after his fall.
Source: Mehmed IV
