Mihrî Hatun lived in Amasya in the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, and is among the earliest known women poets to leave a divan. Her father was a judge who wrote poetry under the pen name Belâyî, and she mentions him in her poems. Mihrî moved in the circle of Prince Ahmed's assembly in Amasya; the biographers of poets record her skill in verse and the witty exchanges she had with the poets of that court. The details of her life are given in her biography in the Historical Figures section.
In this section Mihrî's poems are published one by one on the basis of the critical edition of her divan prepared by Mehmet Arslan from four manuscript copies. The divan contains seventeen kasides, two hundred and ten ghazals, nine murabba, a müstezat, a tahmis, a terci-i bend, mesnevis and single couplets, to which the Tazarru-nâme of four hundred and sixty-one couplets is added. Ten of the kasides were presented to Prince Ahmed and some to Bayezid II. Twenty ghazals found under the pen name Mihrî in an anthology outside the edition, whose attribution is not yet settled, are included with a note to that effect.
Each article opens with the original text of the poem, followed by a couplet-by-couplet rendering. The commentary examines the metre, rhyme and refrain, the figures of speech and the themes, and records any information the sources give about the person to whom, or the occasion on which, the poem was written. Amasya itself appears in her verse: one of her murabba contains the line "Bir zamân şehr-i Amâsiyye'de İskender idüñ" (Once, in the city of Amasya, you were an Alexander), which is read together with the biographers' account of İskender Çelebi.
