The message was delivered to Kara Mustafa immediately after his noon prayers, and “he seemd’ to be very much surprisd’” by it--as well he might. After passing a whole hour in profound meditation, he said to his Kehayah: “Methinkes the Ambassadour should not thinke much to send me four thousand zecchins”--say, £2000. The Kehayah added four hundred on his own account. As the result of much haggling, the demand fell to 6000 dollars, or £1500, which included the usual presents, amounting to 600 dollars.
This was Kara Mustafa’s prescription for Sir John’s diplomatic fever. It plunged the patient into gloom. What could he do? He could, no doubt, continue staying in his house, even in his bed. But that would have deprived the English of their protector and delivered them up to the tender mercies of every official robber in the Empire. There was already the wretched Ashby groaning in his chains. There was a claim on the Aleppo Factory for silk dues, and an accusation of buying Turkish goods from Christian pirates at Scanderoon. There was the charge, which Kara Mustafa had brushed aside when in a good temper, against the English factors of Smyrna of attempting to rescue Ashby by main force: now that Kara Mustafa was in an ugly mood that charge might be brought on the tapis again. Sir John considered these things, and also another thing that concerned him more directly--the old pretensions of the Pasha of Tunis, which, should a breach take place, were not likely to remain dormant long. Even as it was, Sir John had reasons to apprehend a revival of that nasty affair. The Pasha, it is true, was still in his distant province on the borders of Arabia, “where,” Sir John says, “I pray God detayn him”; but he had at Constantinople a Vekil or Procurator in the person of--the Grand Vizir’s Kehayah: an ominous connection. Lastly, Sir John had to consider the feelings of the English merchants about him. Their standard of values was the standard of the counting-house, not of the Court. They thought it worse than futile to resent affronts which we had not the means of resisting. Where the Turks knew that big words were empty bluster, where business men could be hurt without hope of redress--the only way to peace lay through bakshish.[196] The factors with one voice urged Sir John to pay up.