From the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, the courts of the princes who governed Amasya were among the liveliest centres of Ottoman poetry outside Istanbul. Many of the men who served in the princes' households as treasurers, chancellors, companions or tutors were also poets, and the scholars trained in the city's madrasas wrote verse in Turkish, Arabic and Persian. The biographical dictionaries of poets mention a good number of them in connection with Amasya.
This section introduces the divan poets who were born or educated in Amasya or who wrote at its princely courts. Each article outlines the poet's life, assesses his or her works and literary personality in the light of the biographical dictionaries and modern scholarship, and gives examples of published poems in the original with a rendering. For poets whose works are lost, the articles draw on couplets preserved in the biographical dictionaries and anthologies of parallel poems. Full biographies are found in the Historical Figures section.
Münîrî of Amasya: His Literary Personality, Works and Poems examines the divan, the translation of Mihr ü Müşterî and the verse life of the Prophet by Münîrî, chancellor to Prince Ahmed. The article on Tâcî Bey deals with the surviving couplets of the stylist and calligrapher who served as treasurer to Bayezid II in Amasya while he was still a prince, and the article on Tâcîzâde Sa'dî Çelebi with his Arabic kasides, his letters and the Hayrü'l-ahlâm, written in praise of Amasya. Because of their extent, the poems of Mihrî Hatun and of Bayezid II, who wrote as Adlî, are published under separate headings in the Literature section.
