three tails, forty-one of two tails, seventy sandjak-beys, three mallahs, and a Moghrabiu sheikh. May God be merciful to him!" [8] De la Haye, the French ambassador, was imprisoned in 1658, and his son bastinadoed in the presence of Kiuprili, for being unable or unwilling to give a key to some letters in cipher from the Venetians; and some years later, the envoy of the Czar, Alexis Mikhailowitz, was driven, with blows and violence, from the presence of the sultan, who was irritated by the incompetency of the interpreter to translate the Czar's letter! This latter outrage, however, was not till after the death of the elder Kiuprili. [9] This monstrous exaggeration is reduced by Rycaut to the more credible, but still enormous number of 36,000 victims during the five years of his ministry. The genius of the Ottoman institutions is so directly opposed to any thing like the perpetuation of offices in a family, which might tend to endanger the despotism of the throne by the creation of an hereditary aristocracy, that even in the inferior ranks, an instance had hitherto scarcely been known of a son succeeding his father. The immediate appointment, therefore, of Fazil-Ahmed, the eldest son of the deceased minister, to the vizirat, was so complete a departure from all established usages, as at once demonstrated to the expectant courtiers that the influence of the crafty old vizir had survived him, and that "the star of the house of Kiuprili" (in the words of a Turkish writer) "had only set in the west to rise again with fresh splendour in the east." Ahmed-Kiuprili was now thirty-two years of age, and joined to an intellect not less naturally vigorous than that of his father, those advantages of education in which the latter had been deficient. At an early age he had been placed under the historian, Abdul-Aziz Effendi, as a student of divinity and law, in the _medressah_ or college attached to the mosque of Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, and had attained, in due course, the rank of _muderris_ or fellow therein; but the elevation of his father to the vizirat transferred him from the cloister to the camp, and he held the governments successively of Erzroom and Damascus--in the latter of which he distinguished himself by his moderation and firmness in reducing to order the refractory chiefs of the Druses, of the two great rival houses of Shahab and Maan-Oghlu. Recalled, at length, to Constantinople to assume the office of kaimakam, he had scarcely entered on his new duties when he was summoned to Adrianople, to attend the deathbed of his father, and to succeed him in the uncontrolled administration of the empire.