These transactions illustrate sufficiently the graver side of Sir John’s employment during the festive season; what follows exhibits him in a lighter vein.
Our Ambassador knew that there is nothing people like better than attentions: those little offices of civility which, by flattering their pride, never fail to conciliate their friendship or at least their good-will; and he carried his attentions from the highest down to the lowest with an assiduity which would have done credit to Dudley North himself.
For instance, he had a large English mastiff which had worsted bears of the greatest size and savagery in single-fight. Aware of the Imperial Hunter’s tastes, he hastened to send him this ferocious dog as a present: “which,” the Rev. John tells us, “the Grand Signor took mightily kindly.”[126] This courtesy, let us hope, made the Avji more friendly towards us than a more important service would have done. His subordinates had to be wooed according to their own particular weaknesses.
Among these, sad to relate, none was more prevalent than a weakness for wine and spirits. The Sultan, himself an habitual abstainer, had twice (in 1661 and 1670) forbidden the use of intoxicants: the second time by a most drastic edict most drastically enforced: taverns pulled down, butts broken in pieces, wine spilt, and the making and selling of it banned “upon no less penalty than hanging, or being putt into the Gallies.”[127] Yet the cult of Bacchus flourished more luxuriantly than ever. Legislation had overreached itself. The abolition of the tax had lowered the price of the article, so that those who before could afford to drink only one bottle openly, now drank two in secret. During Sir John’s stay at Adrianople intoxication was common among Turks of all classes, and particularly rampant in Court circles. With the exception of the Grand Signor and the Mufti, there was hardly a sober grandee. Our Chaplain, whom nothing escaped, has much to say about this phase of Turkish life also: “I have seen,” he declares, “the Vizier himself _mamur_, that is, crop sick severall times.” Alas! it was only too true. Ahmed Kuprili, up to the end of the siege of Candia (1669), had never tasted a drop of anything stronger than sherbet. But on his return from that campaign he stopped at the fair isle of Chios to refresh himself from his toils. This holiday, the first he had ever had, proved his undoing. For a whole fortnight he refreshed himself among the mastic groves of Chios, allowing no public affairs, however urgent, to interrupt his potations. Ahmed was nothing if not thorough. From that date he seemed anxious to atone for his past temperance, and at such a rate that, by 1675, his stomach could no longer keep warm without the most fiery of liqueurs.[128]