Bâkî (1526-1600) is one of the greatest names of the age of Süleyman the Magnificent and of classical Ottoman poetry. He was a poet of Istanbul; there is no record that he was ever in Amasya or had any particular connection with it. The only reason for his place in the corpus of Amasya literature is that three of his ghazals are found in a manuscript verse notebook compiled in Merzifon, the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019. Hakverdioğlu attributes these ghazals to Bâkî, "the great divan poet", and shows where each of them stands in Sabahattin Küçük's edition of the Bâkî Dîvânı. This page sets out plainly this trace of Bâkî in Merzifon, the limits of his connection with Amasya, and the need not to confuse him with a namesake from Amasya.

Life

His real name was Mahmud Abdülbâkî. He was born in Istanbul in 933 (1526); his father was Mehmed Efendi, one of the muezzins of the Fatih Mosque. The sources relate that in his youth he served for a time as a saddler's apprentice; this tradition has been debated by researchers such as Orhan Şaik Gökyay. Attending the madrasa, he studied with Karamanlı Ahmed and Mehmed Efendi, and later with Kadızâde Şemseddin Ahmed Efendi. It is known that in his youth he visited Zâtî's shop and won the master's approval for his poems, and that Latîfî included him in his biographical anthology while he was still young. He spent about four years in Aleppo with his teacher. Through the kasides he presented to Sultan Süleyman and a ghazal recited in the sultan's gathering, he won the sultan's patronage; he became a professor at the Silivri, Mahmud Pasha, Eyüp Sultan, Sahn and Süleymaniye madrasas.

The elegy he wrote on the death of Süleyman in 1566 is one of the best-known elegies in Turkish poetry. He kept up his ties with the palace in the reigns of Selim II and Murad III; because his rivals induced the sultan to read one of his ghazals in a hostile sense, he was sent to Edirne. He then served as judge of Mecca and Medina, became judge of Istanbul, rose twice to the office of chief judge of Anatolia, and in 1592 to that of chief judge of Rumelia. He retired without attaining the office of şeyhülislam and died in Istanbul on 23 Ramadan 1008 (April 1600). His funeral prayer was led by Sunullah Efendi, his last rival for the office of şeyhülislam; he was buried in the cemetery outside Edirnekapı.

Works and the Spread of His Poetry

Bâkî's most important work is his Dîvân. The poet first arranged his divan at the request of Sultan Süleyman, then reorganised it several times, adding new poems. About 160 manuscripts of it are known in libraries. The divan was lithographed in Istanbul in 1859-60 and published by Rudolf Dvorak, Sadeddin Nüzhet Ergun and finally Sabahattin Küçük. Küçük's 1994 edition, prepared by comparing twelve manuscripts, contains 27 kasides, 9 musammats, 548 ghazals, 21 kıt'as and 31 matlas. Besides this there are his biography of the Prophet entitled Me'âlimü'l-Yakîn and his translations Fezâ'ilü'l-Cihâd and Fezâ'il-i Mekke.

Already in his lifetime Bâkî's poems spread beyond Ottoman literary circles and were read in Mughal India and in the cultural centres of the Safavids. Poems bearing the pen name Bâkî are very numerous in miscellanies; various researchers have identified in miscellanies and published poems by Bâkî not found in the editions of his divan. In the seventeenth century there were scribes who made their living by copying and selling Bâkî's divan, and musicians who sang his ghazals in musical gatherings. The three ghazals in the Merzifon Cönkü are an example of this spread, of the words of a great divan poet reaching the lovers of folk and divan poetry in a provincial town.

The Merzifon Cönkü and the Connection with Amasya

The Merzifon Cönkü is a 112-page verse notebook in ta'lik script, which Hakverdioğlu acquired from a second-hand bookseller with the information that it came from Merzifon. It contains 161 poems by thirty-two poets, and Hakverdioğlu thinks the notebook is about a hundred years old and was compiled within the literary circle of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon, probably by a poet named Fethî. The weight of the cönk lies with nineteenth-century minstrels such as Tokatlı Nûrî, Erzurumlu Emrah and Dertli. In the abstract of his article Hakverdioğlu says that the most interesting feature of the cönk is that it records folk and divan poetry equally, and he illustrates this with the example of Bâkî: the cönk contains "poems from a great divan poet such as Bâkî" as well as dozens of aruz poems by folk poets. This is one of the reasons why he regards the cönk as a document of the "brotherhood of syllabic metre and aruz".

Bâkî's connection with Amasya amounts to this: his ghazals entered a collection kept in Merzifon about three centuries after his death and were recited there. In the sources used there is no information that Bâkî was ever in Amasya, held an office there or had a particular relationship with anyone from Amasya.

The State of the Sources and His Namesake

There appears to be no doubt that the ghazals in the cönk belong to this Bâkî. For each of the three ghazals Hakverdioğlu gives the page in Küçük's edition (pp. 268, 260 and 151); that is, these couplets are found in the critical text of the divan. However, the article does not compare the text of the cönk with that of the divan couplet by couplet, and since only the first couplets from the cönk have been published, it is not known whether the poems are recorded in the cönk in full, incompletely or in a different order.

The pen name Bâkî was also used in Amasya. In the seventh volume of Amasya Tarihi, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar gives the biography of Cizyedâr Bâkî Ahmed Çelebi of Amasya: this poet, son of the cavalryman Kâsım Ağa, served as clerk to the city steward and for many years as collector of the poll tax (cizye), and died in 1058 (1648). Hüsameddin describes him as "poet, clerk and man of learning" and notes that one of his ghazals was in Abdî Efendi's biographical anthology, but that the anthology was burned. The ghazals in the cönk cannot belong to this Amasya Bâkî; as Hakverdioğlu shows, all three are in the divan of Bâkî of Istanbul. The two poets are noted here separately because they bear the same pen name.

Poetry

Three ghazals are recorded under Bâkî's name in the Merzifon Cönkü, and the article gives only the opening couplet of each. The first is the ghazal opening "Çeşm-i pür-ḫûnum yoluňda eşk-bâr itsem gerek" on page 78 of the cönk; the lover wishes to scatter his bloody tears like jewels on the dust of the beloved's feet. The second is the ghazal opening "Câm la‘liňdir seniň âyîne rûy-ı enveriň" on page 79; it sets the beloved's lips above the cup of Jamshid and her face above the mirror of Alexander. The third is the ghazal opening "Göňül her naġme kim çeng-i ġamıňda iḫtirâ‘ eyler" on page 94; it makes Venus, the musician of the heavens, listen to the melody the lover's heart plays on the harp of grief. The full text of all three poems is in Küçük's edition of the Bâkî Dîvânı. The surviving couplets are given with their original texts, English renderings and commentaries on three separate ghazal pages in this category.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Books

Online sources