In this way, to quote Sir John’s phrase, “the Gran Visir thunders amongst us.” The phrase is one of those that make a picture leap to the mind’s eye: the picture of a monster, half-human, half-diabolic, whose voice was thunder and whose gesture lightning. This picture is, of course, over-drawn and over-coloured. But there can be no doubt that it is a faithful enough portrait of Kara Mustafa as he appeared to the contemporary diplomats who had the misfortune to come into contact with him. They all speak of his cruelty, avarice, and cunning in terms of unqualified abhorrence. They all describe him as a creature whose soul was as black as his face, whose heart held not one generous or merciful sentiment, whose appetite for gold was as insatiable as that of a ghoul for blood: a fiend incarnate.[238] In truth (things have become sufficiently remote to be visible in their true perspective) Kara Mustafa, a miscreant of imposing magnitude as he was, was not much more violent, grasping, and unprincipled than the average Grand Vizir:[239] he was only more consistent. His iniquities, historically viewed, are but a memorable instance of the misery which it was in the power of a Turkish Prime Minister to inflict. But men who smarted under his lash could not be expected to see current events in the proportions in which, after the lapse of centuries, they appear to the philosophic historian. “These things,” says Finch, “will appear to others as they doe to me my selfe incredible.” He consoles himself, however, by reflecting that “_Res nolunt male administrari_--Things mend themselves when they become insupportable.”
Sir John based his hopes of a “mending” on France. A new French Ambassador, M. de Guilleragues, had arrived in the autumn of 1679, with instructions to demand redress for all the wrongs which M. de Nointel had failed to prevent: restoration of the Holy Sepulchre to the Latin Fathers; exemption from the poll-tax for Frenchmen married to country-born women; and, above all, restitution of the Stool upon the Soffah. He was understood to be a man of determination, and he had shown the spirit in which he meant to approach the Porte on his very arrival by refusing to salute the Seraglio as he sailed into the Golden Horn, or to suffer his men-of-war to be searched before they left. In the treatment that awaited M. de Guilleragues the other foreign Ministers would read their own fate. They could not hope, as Finch said, to fare better than the envoy of France, seeing that he possessed two great advantages over everybody else: a large quantity of new presents, and a number of French renegades in high places about the Vizir. Would his advent make the clouds grow lighter, the thunders roll away, and the horizon at length clear up?