Historiographical tradition has tended to view the Köprülü-era foreign policy as one of conscious expansion, fueled by religious fervor. The descriptions of the seventeenth-century Ottoman chroniclers to that effect influenced the researchers of the twenty-first-century, too. However, in the reports of European diplomatic representatives active in Istanbul at the time, we see that the expansionary policy in the Köprülü period was not actually a pre-planned phenomenon with religious motivations; it was more likely that the grand viziers responded to the urgent problems arising from the political conjuncture of the period. To be more precise, this study argues that events such as the Érsekújvár Expedition (1663), the Siege of Candia (1667-69), and the Campaign of Kamieniec (1672), which all took place during the reign of Köprülü Fazıl Ahmet Pasha (r. 1661-76), could not be explained by religious motivations alone. Instead, the present study argues that a better way to understand Fazıl Ahmed Pasha's foreign policy is interpreting it from an international relations perspective through the neoclassical realist parameters of the individual, state structure, and international system.

At the core of this article lies the argument that the Ottoman grand vizierate and the rise of the Köprülü family to power in the seventeenth century should be studied and analyzed mainly within two analytical and comparative frameworks. First, we should situate the office of the grand vizier in a diachronic view of the Islamic vizierate. Second, the Köprülü grand vizierate, in particular, should be viewed as one part of a synchronic ‘Eurasian age of the chief minister,” in a historical domain stretching from early modern Mughal and Safavid worlds to European empires and kingdoms. This article presents preliminary observations that may form a blueprint for future investigations into this global aspect of the grand vizierate and chief ministry. A broad perspective that merges these diachronic and synchronic approaches will allow us to detect theoretical and practical peculiarities of the Ottoman grand vizierate in comparison to its peers in Islamic history and across early modern Eurasia. Using that Eurasian macro perspective, I argue that the Köprülü grand viziers spearheaded the restoration of an independent vizierial authority that was idealized by generations of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman political writers and had numerous precedents in Islamic history.1