The Vizier, while he dazzled the latter with splendid visions of ulterior conquest, was influenced in secret by ambition on his own account. He destined for himself the plunder of Vienna, and he considered his own advancement to the throne of Hungary, at least as a tributary to the Porte, a reasonable and attainable reward for his anticipated success as leader of the army of the faithful. His influence with the Sultan, exerted to the utmost, gained the ascendancy over that of the Sultana. He contrived to win over the chief of his spiritual opponents. The soldiery, including that formidable body the Janissaries, were naturally of the faction which promised them plunder and blood. The strong party which appealed by various methods against the injustice of the war was silenced by harsh measures; and by the autumn of 1682 the army was in motion under the immediate command of the Vizier, and accompanied by the Mufti and the principal dignitaries of the empire. It was halted, and encamped for the winter, at Adrianople, to refresh the contingents which had marched from the more distant Asiatic provinces, and to prepare for effective operations in the spring. Here also it was joined by the Sultan, the pomp and expenditure of whose progress, and especially the hundred carriages devoted to the female portion of his retinue, moved the soldiery to rough comparisons with the practice of Murad IV., who took the field with one wife and two pages. The army had to contend with those autumnal rains which more than once had impeded under Soliman the progress of similar expeditions. The superstition of the people interpreted these incidents of climate into omens of failure; but the Vizier, though his own tent was swept away by an inundation which, on the first night after the troops were halted, ravaged the camp, was unshaken in his purpose, and the horse-tails continued planted before the royal residence in the direction of Hungary. The tedium of winter quarters was relieved by a royal chase, for which 30,000 peasants were collected to drive the game. The result, if the beaters themselves are not reckoned, was small—one wild boar, six roes, and thirty hares—but a much larger number of the beaters perished from exhaustion. Where the Sultan met with their corpses he observed that they had probably spoken ill of him, and had met with their reward—a safe and satisfactory assumption. In the following spring, while the army was mustered in presence of the Sultan, a still more violent storm occurred, which among other exploits of its fury carried off the turban from the head of the sovereign. Undeterred by this omen, the Sultan accompanied the march of his army as far as Belgrade, where on the 12th May he received the ambassadors of Tekeli. Here, however, he also received intelligence of an event which, could his Arabian soothsayers have predicted its results, might still have made him pause in the prosecution of his purpose.