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their method of dispatching him was often bizarre. Murad IV used to send for the victim, entertain him with a particularly nice feast, and then hand him a black robe and call in the executioner. A number of Sultans gave the condemned man an opportunity to save himself if he could run faster than the executioner from the inner palace to a certain gate on the Marmara shore. If he won the race (he rarely did, most viziers being fat and out of training) he was allowed to keep on going through the gate into exile. Sultan Ahmed I, wishing to dispose of his Grand Vizier, one Nassuf Pasha, sent him two letters by the hand of the Chief Executioner. The first read, “Fail not presently upon the receipt hereof, to send me the Seals of my Empire,” the seals being the symbol of his office. Nassuf having handed over the seals, the Chief Executioner gave him the second letter which said, “After that thou hast sent me my Seals, send me thy head by him that shall give thee this note.” Michel Baudier, who reported this story in the West, observes, “This command was rough and the style of his letter troublesome, yet he must obey. Nassuf suffered himself to be strangled and the Bostangibassi [Head Executioner] carried away his head in the view of all his great family, whereof the least scullions might have broacht him with their spits. Yet no man moved, seeing the people of the Serrail, and knowing that it was the Prince’s pleasure.”

Heads, whether of viziers or of other slaves, were the usual adornment of the Seraglio’s second gate, which was called the Gate of the Executioner. Anyone on legitimate business might enter the first gate, but beyond the Gate of the Executioner no one went except by invitation or duress. At this gate, which leads through a wall some twenty feet thick, modern tourists buy their museum tickets and check their umbrellas. There are a few axes on display, but the fountain where the headsman washed up after work is overgrown with weeds, and there is no sign of the “seventy-seven instruments of torture—nails, gimlets, razors, matches for scorching … different powders for blinding, clubs for breaking the hands and feet,” which a court historian ascribed to Black Ali, Chief Executioner to Murad IV. Of Black Ali’s assistants, the record says, “No light shines from their faces, for they are a dark set of people.” Foreign ambassadors arriving to present their credentials were customarily kept waiting at this gate for hours and sometimes days in the society of this agreeable crew.

The Chief Executioner, for a reason whose significance seems to have been forgotten, was also the Chief Gardener and Chief Helmsman of the Royal Caïque, thus combining in his duties the two most striking characteristics of the Ottoman Turk: extreme ferocity and a touching pleasure in the out-of-doors. The Grand Seraglio was surrounded by gardens—not formal ones like those at Versailles and Schönbrunn, but rambling woods and orchards, like English parks, kept in good order by four thousand gardeners. “Nor indeed doth a Turke at any time shew himself to be so truly pleased, and satisfied in his senses, as he doth … in a pleasant garden,” reports Ottaviano Bon. “For, he is no sooner come into it but he puts off his uppermost Coat and lays it aside, and upon that his Turbant, then turns up his sleeves and unbuttoneth himself, turning his breast to the wind.… Again, sometimes standing upon a high bank to take the fresh air, holding his arms abroad, courting the weather, and sweet air, calling it his soul, his life, and his delight; with whole flowers he stuffes his bosom and decketh his Turbant, shaking his head at their sweet favors; and sometimes singing a song to some pretty flower, by whose name peradventure his mistress is called.”

The favorite flower of the Turk was the tulip, once a wild flower of the Asiatic steppes. Holland never heard of tulips until 1562, when a shipment of bulbs arrived from Constantinople; the word “tulip” comes from tulbend, meaning “turban,” a Turkish nickname for the flower. It was said of Ahmed III, a Sultan of the