Mehmed II, who took Istanbul and led campaigns reaching from Trebizond to Otranto, was also a poet who recited ghazals under the pen name "Avnî" in the gatherings of his court. His poems have come down to us in a single small divan and in a few pieces scattered through anthologies of response poems. Muhammet Nur Doğan's latest edition gathers these texts into 85 pieces: mostly ghazals, together with a murabba, a few kıt'as, single couplets, and one couplet each in Persian and Arabic. His life, his campaigns and every detail of his connection with Amasya are in the article II. Mehmed: Fatih Sultan Mehmed'in Hayatı ve Amasya Bağı.

Life and Connection with Amasya

Mehmed, the fourth son of Murad II, was born in Edirne on 30 March 1432. In the spring of 1443 he was sent with his tutors to the province of Manisa, and in the same year, on the death of his elder brother Alâeddin Ali Çelebi, governor of Amasya, he became the sole heir to the throne. After a brief first reign between 1444 and 1446 he returned to Manisa, came to the throne a second time on 18 February 1451, and conquered Istanbul on 29 May 1453. He died on 3 May 1481 at Hünkârçayırı between Üsküdar and Gebze; his tomb is in the graveyard of the mosque he built.

His connection with Amasya is disputed, and the inclusion of this page among the divan poets of Amasya does not settle the dispute. Local tradition, in an account also found in Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi, says that Mehmed was made governor of Amasya at the age of six on the death of his elder brother Prince Ahmed. Halil İnalcık finds this claim doubtful and stresses that Mehmed's governorship began, as documented, in Manisa in 1443. The documented links lie elsewhere: his two elder brothers Ahmed and Alâeddin Ali served as governors of Amasya and died there; his son Bayezid governed Amasya from 1454 to 1481; and Mehmed himself stayed in the city for about a month on his way back from the victory of Otlukbeli in 1473. The name of Amasya appears in none of his poems, and no poem is known to have been written in Amasya.

The Pen Name Avnî and His Poetry

"Avn" means help, God's help, in Arabic; "Avnî" carries the sense "one favoured with help, belonging to my help". There is no record of how the pen name was chosen. In some of his poems the name "Avnî" appears in the final couplet, while in others the sultan, instead of a pen name, refers directly to sovereignty or servitude.

The biographers of poets of the sixteenth century praise him as a ruler, but they also take his poetry seriously. Sehî Bey writes that his words are "manly", his ghazals "lover-like", that his style is distinguished in the ghazal, that his poetry can be counted "bî-bedel" (without equal) and that it is full of sayings that pass from mouth to mouth like proverbs. Latîfî records that the sultan had a nature inclined to poetry and composed, under the pen name Avnî, sometimes single couplets and sometimes ghazals, and he quotes two of his opening couplets as examples: "Sâkiyâ mey vir ki bir dem lâle-zâr elden gider" and "Senün zincir-i zülfünden dil-i dîvâne bend ister". In the same place Latîfî also quotes the couplet "Bizümle saltanat lâfın idermiş ol Karamânî", which he says was spoken because of the enmity with the Karamanid ruler. Âşık Çelebi, after a long introduction describing the conquest of Istanbul and the mosque and colleges Mehmed II built, says that he too wrote "perfect ghazals and well-made qasidas and kıt'as" under the pen name Avnî.

Mehmed II's court was full of poets. Ahmed Paşa was his teacher and companion, and the young Necâtî became a secretary of the council in the sultan's last years; Melîhî, Aşkî, Mahmud Paşa (Adnî), Sinan Paşa and many poets who came from Iran belonged to this circle. Gönül Tekin notes that in the figures he used and in his manner Mehmed II took Şeyhî and Ahmed Paşa as his masters. The traces of this circle are seen in the divan too: Ahmed Paşa wrote response poems to some of Mehmed II's ghazals, and the sultan himself composed poems on the patterns of other poets. One of his poems is found in the Câmiü'n-Nezâir, six in Edirneli Nazmî's Mecmaü'n-Nezâir and seven in the Pervâne Bey Mecmuası; poets such as Ahmed Paşa, Âhî, Hâkî, Hayretî, Kemalpaşazâde, Lâmiî, Zâtî and Mahmud Paşa wrote response poems to them.

Manuscripts and Editions of the Divan

The only known manuscript giving Avnî's poems as a collection is kept in the Millet Manuscript Library, in the verse section of the Ali Emîrî collection, under no. 305. Ali Emîrî Efendi found this small divan, copied it twice in his own hand and made it known to the world of scholarship. One of the copies, Manzum 530, adds some poems and couplets not found in the main manuscript, gathered from the tezkires. According to the folio numbers given by Doğan, the main manuscript runs from fol. 1b to 23b and contains 71 of the 85 pieces known today.

The first to publish Mehmed II's poems together was the German orientalist Georg Jacob, who in 1904 printed in Berlin a text compiled from an anthology in the library of Uppsala University and from some tezkires. Towards the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest, Saffet Sıtkı (Bilmen) brought out in 1944 a Fâtih Dîvânı based on Ali Emîrî's copies, and Kemal Edip Ünsel (Kürkçüoğlu) in 1946 published Fâtih'in Şiirleri with the Turkish Historical Society. Ünsel's edition, which also gives a facsimile of the Ali Emîrî manuscript and reaches 87 poems with ten pieces of additions, is the first scholarly edition. Ahmed Aymutlu's Fâtih ve Şiirleri (1959, 1992) added prose renderings of the couplets; İskender Pala's Fâtih'in Şiirleri (2003) and the doctoral thesis prepared by Şahmaran Baltacıoğlu at Istanbul University (2003) continued this line.

Muhammet Nur Doğan's Fâtih Dîvânı ve Şerhi first appeared in 2007 from Yelkenli Yayınları. The printings made by the Turkish Manuscripts Institution together with Michael D. Sheridan's English translation (the third in 2023) give the text, a prose rendering and commentary for every couplet, a colour facsimile of the Millet manuscript, and images of the sources of the poems not found in the main manuscript. Doğan has left out of the text some poems attributed to Mehmed II in earlier editions whose style differs or whose sources he finds doubtful; he notes that a considerable part of them belong to Mehmed III. He shows that some places Ünsel took for copyist's errors are in fact misreadings and proposes corrections. The text and numbering of the poem pages on this site are based on Doğan's 2023 printing.

Poems outside the Main Manuscript

Fourteen pieces in Doğan's edition are not in Millet Manzum 305, and their sources differ from one another. From the Pervâne Bey Mecmuası, one of the great anthologies of response poems of the sixteenth century, come a ghazal (50) and a murabba of two quatrains (76); the ghazal was published by M. Ali Tanyeri in the journal Pınar in 1977. Three ghazals come from anthologies of response poems: one (64) is found in three sources, the Câmiü'n-Nezâir, Ali Emîrî's copy and Nazmî's anthology; one (68) in Ali Emîrî's copy and the Câmiü'n-Nezâir; and one (69) comes from an anthology of poems in the National Library and was made known by a congress paper of Müslüm Yılmaz in 2015. Ali Emîrî's copy adds two pieces (77, 78) compiled from Âşık Çelebi, Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi, Riyâzî and Enderunlu Atâ. One Persian (79) and one Turkish couplet (80) are taken from Jacob's edition, an Arabic couplet (81) and a Turkish couplet (84) from Ali Emîrî's Cevâhirü'l-Mülûk, two couplets (82, 83) from the Ahmet Halit bookshop printing, and one piece (75) from Mehmed Şâkir Paşa's Yeni Osmanlı Tarihi.

Jacob's edition also contains a short record (XXI), based on Enderunlu Atâ, concerning a chronogram said to have been composed by Mehmed II himself for the conquest of Istanbul; Doğan did not include it among the poems. The attribution of these pieces is not as firm as that of the poems in the main manuscript. Latîfî records the three-couplet piece (78) that Ali Emîrî ascribes to Mehmed II as a poem of Bayezid II. Some of the single couplets were printed without a source. On this site each is published on a separate page, and the record concerning its attribution is stated on that page.

Themes and Style of His Poems

The great majority of the divan consists of ghazals of love and wine. The beloved's face, hair, brow and glance; the lover's tears, the wound of separation, the rival and the strangers; spring, rose and nightingale; cupbearer, cup and tavern build the familiar world of the fifteenth-century ghazal. A sultan's gaze also enters this world: the beloved is often a "shah", the lover his slave or beggar, and Mehmed II uses this mould by playing with his own position. The ghazal that opens "Bir şâha kul oldum ki cihân aña gedâdur" works with the world's sovereign becoming the slave of a beauty. The first ghazal of the divan praises the Prophet as the beloved; many ghazals have images open to a Sufi reading.

Some poems bear traces of the ruler's life. The threatening couplet against the Karamanid ruler is known through the occasion Latîfî relates. In pieces such as "Gör ol Türk-i Hıtâyî" and "Eger ân gebr-i efrencî" the beloved's being a foreigner, a Christian or a Frank is used as a conceit; the two ghazals (14 and 61) in which the name "Kalâtâ" (Galata) appears refer to the Genoese quarter of Istanbul, and the final couplet of the fourteenth ghazal calls the poet "the king of Istanbul". In the final couplet of the sixty-seventh ghazal Avnî says that because he became the slave of beauty's king, the "mülk-i 'Osmân", the Ottoman land, has been granted to him; this is the only place in the divan where the poet names his state. Still, no memoir can be drawn from these traces; as Doğan warns, firm conclusions about Mehmed II's personality drawn from the ghazals sit ill with the figurative order of divan poetry.

İnalcık writes that with his plain expressions and flowing style Mehmed II produced fine examples of a Turkish poetry not yet smothered in ornament, and that he preferred Turkish expressions to Arabic and Persian compounds. Vasfi Mahir Kocatürk says his language is strong and personal, and Coşkun Ak sees the ease of spoken language in some of his couplets. Doğan, however, finds these judgements insufficient: in his view Avnî is not a "middling poet" but, with the richness of his imagination and learning, should be counted among the first-rank poets of his age. The examples of simile, personification, allusion, hüsnütalil and double meaning in the poems are the basis of this assessment.

Poems

In this category each of the 85 pieces of Avnî in Doğan's edition stands on a separate page with its original text, English rendering and commentary. The numbers in the page titles are the poem numbers of the edition. Nos. 1-73, apart from the muhammes no. 48, are ghazals; 74 and 75 are kıt'as, 76 a murabba, and 77 and 78 are fragments of incomplete ghazals. 79 is a Persian and 81 an Arabic couplet; 80, 82, 83 and 84 are single couplets. The last piece (85) is a single line that Mehmed II spoke and left unfinished: in the main manuscript the second lines of twenty poets of his age, and later of eight more in another hand, are written beneath it. The opening poem of the divan is on the page Ghazal 1 — Yüzüñ meh-i 'îd ü ser-i zülfüñ şeb-i İsrâ, the wine ghazal quoted by Latîfî on Ghazal 22 — Sâkîyâ mey vir ki bir gün lâle-zâr elden gider, and the Karamanid couplet on Couplet 80 — Bizümle saltanat lâfın idermiş ol Karamânî.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Fâtih Sultan Mehmed (Avnî), Fâtih Dîvânı ve Şerhi / Dīwān of Sultan Mehmed II with Commentary, ed. Muhammet Nur Doğan, English trans. Michael D. Sheridan, 3rd ed., Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, 2023, pp. 15-22 (Preface), 41-62 (Introduction), 541-559 (poems not in the main manuscript). https://ekitap.yek.gov.tr/urun/fatih-divani-ve-serhi--ucuncu-baski-_794.aspx
  • Avnî (Fâtih Sultan Mehmed), Dîvân, Millet Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Ali Emîrî, Manzum no. 305 (Ali Emîrî's copy: Manzum no. 530).
  • Georg Jacob (ed.), Der Divan Sultan Mehmeds des Zweiten, des Eroberers von Konstantinopel, zum ersten Male nach der Uppsalaer Handschrift, Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1904. https://archive.org/details/derdivansultanm00jacogoog
  • Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-Şuarâ ve Tabsıratü'n-Nuzamâ (İnceleme-Metin), ed. Rıdvan Canım, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (e-book), 2018, pp. 99-101 (entries on Sultan Mehmed and Sultan Bâyezîd).
  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâirü'ş-Şuarâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, vol. 1, Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2010, pp. 190-192 (as quoted in Doğan's edition).

Academic studies

Books

Online sources