His own bloody rule was meanwhile drawing to a close. His first reports and excuses for his failure before Vienna had been received at the court of Adrianople with simulated favour, and his messenger had returned with the usual tokens of royal approbation, a sword and a pelisse. Influence, however, both male and female, was busy for his destruction; the friends of the murdered Pacha of Pesth, and all those who had originally opposed the expedition, were powerful and zealous. Tekeli, and the dying Sultana mother, Validè, threw their influence into the scale. At length the vacillation of the Sultan was overcome, and a chamberlain of the court rode out from Adrianople with the simple order to return as soon as might be with the head of Kara Mustapha. The officer, on approaching Belgrade, communicated his mission to the Aga of the Janissaries, who gave his prompt acquiescence and ready assistance to the objects of the mission. The transaction was conducted, on the part of the servants of the crown, with that decent privacy and convenient expedition which usually attend the execution of Turkish justice, and submitted to by the patient with the quiet dignity with which the predestinarian doctrine of Islam arms its votaries against all accidents. The insignia of authority were politely demanded and quietly resigned. The carpet was spread, the short prayer uttered, the bowstring adjusted. In a few moments the late dispenser of life and death, the uncontrolled commander of 200,000 men, was a corpse, and his head on the road to Adrianople. It met with some subsequent adventures; for, having been returned to Belgrade by the Sultan, and deposited in a mosque, it was discovered after the surrender of that city to the Christians, and forwarded by them to the Bishop Kollonitsch. The prelate made over the grisly memorial of the man, who had threatened to send his own head on a lance’s point to the Sultan, to the arsenal of Vienna, where it still keeps its place among the other trophies of a long struggle of race and religion.