Given the earlier events in Baghdad, it seems surprising that the Ottoman authorities did not anticipate what would result from the establishment of Bahá’u’lláh in another major provincial capital. Within a year of His arrival in Adrianople, their prisoner had attracted first the interest and then the fervent admiration of figures prominent in both the intellectual and administrative life of the region. To the dismay of the Persian consular representatives, two of the most devoted of these admirers were _Kh_ur_sh_íd Pá_sh_á, the Governor of the province, and the _Sh_ay_kh_u’l-Islám, the leading Sunni religious dignitary. In the eyes of His hosts and the public generally, the exile was a moral philosopher and saint the validity of whose teachings was reflected not only in the example of His own life but in the changes they effected among the flood of Persian pilgrims who flocked to this remote center of the Ottoman Empire in order to visit Him.(75) These unanticipated developments convinced the Persian ambassador and his colleagues that it was only a matter of time before the Bahá’í movement, which was continuing to spread in Persia, would have established itself as a major influence in Persia’s neighboring and rival empire. Throughout this period of its history, the ramshackle Ottoman Empire was struggling against repeated incursions by Tsarist Russia, uprisings among its subject peoples, and persistent attempts by the ostensibly sympathetic British and Austrian governments to detach various Turkish territories and incorporate them into their own empires. These unstable political conditions in Turkey’s European provinces offered new and urgent arguments supporting the ambassador’s appeal that the exiles be sent to a distant colony where Bahá’u’lláh would have no further contact with influential circles, whether Turkish or Western. When the Turkish foreign minister, Fu’ád Pá_sh_á, returned from a visit to Adrianople, his astonished reports of the reputation which Bahá’u’lláh had come to enjoy throughout the region appeared to lend credibility to the Persian embassy’s suggestions. In this climate of opinion, the government abruptly decided to subject its guest to strict confinement. Without warning, early one day, Bahá’u’lláh’s house was surrounded by soldiers, and the exiles were ordered to prepare for departure to an unknown destination.