The Green Cord: The Rise and Fall of Kara Mustafa Pasha

The Green Cord: The Rise and Fall of Kara Mustafa Pasha In November 1676, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha received the imperial seal of the Ottoman grand vizierate, the most powerful administrative office in the world. Seven years later, on Christmas Day 1683, imperial executioners arrived at his winter quarters in Belgrade and applied the green silk cord. Between those two events lay one of the most consequential careers in the history of early modern empire: the administration of forty million people across three continents, the prosecution of wars in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, and the most ambitious Ottoman military projection of the seventeenth century, the siege of Vienna. The Green Cord is the full narrative history of Kara Mustafa Pasha's life, rise, and destruction. Drawing on Ottoman chronicles, European diplomatic dispatches, architectural evidence, and the latest scholarship, Franklyn Casey traces the man from his origins as an orphaned child of the Anatolian frontier to his formation in the Köprülü household, through the governorships and the admiralship and the years of the Kaymakate, to the decision that changed the history of Europe. This is a book about one extraordinary man, but it is also a structural argument: that the Köprülü system's concentration of supreme executive authority in a single household created a form of governance that worked brilliantly, until it produced a failure the system had no mechanism to survive.