Kuyucu Murad Pasha

Who was Kuyucu Murad Pasha?

Kuyucu Murat Pasha was a Croat who became Ottoman grand vizier during the reign of Ahmed I between December 9, 1606 and August 5, 1611. His nickname derives from the harsh methods he has employed in order to suppress to the Jelali Revolts, which were an extension and a prolongation of Kizilbash Revolts that had started about a hundred years before him and which had created disastrous turmoil in Ottoman Anatolia.

Information based on sources such as the contemporary Ottoman historians Ibrahim Peçevi and Mustafa Naima, as well the Armenian priest and chronicler Grigor of Kemah led later historians to arrive at estimates of between 50 to 150 thousand Anatolian Turks, rebels or otherwise, killed during Murat Pasha's office in his several campaigns against separate large rebel groups. The cited contemporary historians point that the wells that gave the Pasha his surname served to bury corpses, in very high numbers, of the executed.