Sultan Murad IV

Ruled 1623-1640

Sultan Murad IVSultan Murad Han, known as Murad (or Murat) the 4th, was born on 27th of July 1612. His father was Ahmed I and mother Kosem Sultan (or Anastasia, of Greek origin). He was ascended to the Ottoman throne as the seventeenth sultan in September 1623 at the age 11, following his uncle sultan Mustafa I. Due to his young age, at first the Empire was ruled by his mother Kosem Sultan and other relatives, during which the empire had a very hard time with turmoils, corruption, territory loss and janissary uprising.

During his childhood sultan Murad IV received a good education and learned about state affairs while growing up (1623-1632), and then he struggled for strengthening the state and expanding the territories especially between 1632 until his death in 1640. When he took the control of the state at the age of 21, he took some extreme precautions in order to eliminate the corruption within the Empire, banned the use of alcohol and tobacco, implemented severe measures for the regular collection of taxes in order to increase the state's revenues, avoided unnecessary expenditures in the treasury, recovered the military discipline, participated in battles against the enemy to raise the morale of the commanders and soldiers in the trenches, and so on.

Murad IV would never tolerate disorder and not obeying his laws and directives. Sometimes he used to go around the city in plain cloths to check any undisciplined actions and irregularities by the locals, and personally punished the offenders. He was tall and strong, had a dense black beard and hazel eyes. He was an excellent horseman and very good at the use of sword and the archery. Besides his skills as a statesmen and in the military grounds, he was a good poet, a skilled calligrapher and he wrote beautiful edicts in handwriting.

sultan Murad IV died on the 8th of February 1640 at the age of 28 due to his illness. His brother Ibrahim followed Murad IV as the next sultan after his death.