The Danişmendname is a ghazi epic that tells the Turkification of Anatolia around the conquests of Melik Danişmend Gazi, weaving prose and verse together. In Turkish literature it comes after the great heroic narratives of the Battalname and the Ebû Müslimname; what sets it apart is that its hero is a Turk and that its events unfold from beginning to end on Anatolian soil. The work's connection to Amasya runs in two directions. The Yeşilırmak basin is the epic's principal stage, and the fortress of Harşana (Haraşna), that is, Amasya, presented as Danişmend Gazi's last great conquest, supplies the setting for one of the most crowded and eventful sections of the narrative. Because Danişmend Gazi's historical career and the political story of the Danishmendid principality are treated in a separate article, only the epic itself is discussed here.

Name and Genre

The work is best known as the Dânişmendnâme, but its manuscripts also carry titles such as Kıssa-i Melik Dânişmend, Kıssa-i Dânişmend Gazi, Kitâb-ı Melik Dânişmend and Hikâyet-i Melik Gazi. In his entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak defines it as an epic romance made up of conquest legends that gathered around the name of Danişmend Gazi, who rose to fame in the eleventh century through his campaigns against Byzantium in Central Anatolia, and regards it as the first heroic epic composed in Anatolia. Şükrü Akkaya is more cautious when examining the text. In his view the body of the book is prose and the verse sections are largely panegyric and prayer, so the label "historical heroic romance" suits the work's structure better than the word epic.

Its bond with the other links of the genre is visible from the very first page. The Danişmendname opens with sentences announcing the death of Battal Gazi and his companions in the holy war, giving the impression of continuing from where the Battalname left off. Fuad Köprülü found this bond so strong that he thought the Battalname had been composed almost solely as an introduction to the Danişmendname. The link is not limited to Battal Gazi. Danişmend Gazi's father descends from Mızrab of Khwarazm, a comrade-in-arms of Abu Muslim al-Khurasani, and Abu Muslim's banner is carried in his army together with Battal Gazi's standard. Ocak notes that this connection may already have existed in popular memory before the epic was written down, since the memory of both Abu Muslim and Battal Gazi remained strong among the Anatolian Turks.

Composition and the Three Stages of the Text

The history of the text is followed in three stages. According to the account, accepted by nearly all researchers, that rests on Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî's Mirkâtü'l-cihâd, the legends were first put into book form in 1245 (AH 642) by İbn Alâ, one of the secretaries of the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Kaykaus II (İzzeddin Keykâvus), at the sultan's command. Evliya Çelebi's remark that even in the seventeenth century the legends of Danişmend Gazi were alive among the people of that region supports the view that the compilation drew on stories told by the ghazis themselves. The date is nonetheless disputed. Osman Turan argues that the sultan was Kaykaus I rather than II and so pushes the date of composition earlier, while Mükrimin Halil Yinanç considers only the fourteenth century acceptable.

No copy of İbn Alâ's first Turkish text has ever come down to us. All existing manuscripts reflect the second form, in which Ârif Ali, the warden of Tokat Castle, reworked the book. Âlî places this second composition in AH 762 (1360-61), that is, in the early years of Murad I, whereas nearly all researchers, Fuad Köprülü first among them, accept the reign of Murad II (1421-1444, 1446-1451). According to what Ârif Ali himself says at the beginning of the epic, he divided the book into seventeen sections (meclis) so that it would be better understood, and added some verse passages. Akkaya observes that the verses in the manuscripts and the mention of Timur and Bayezid in the text suggest that the reworking fell shortly before Murad II, but that a firm judgment cannot be given without comparing the other manuscripts. How faithful Ârif Ali remained to İbn Alâ's text, and how the hostility between the Danishmendids and the Seljuks shaped the first author's stance, remain questions without a definite answer today.

The third stage is Âlî's own work. Having seen a copy of Ârif Ali's book during his service in Niksar, Âlî reshaped it into a history of the Danishmendids and named it Mirkâtü'l-cihâd. Some researchers count this work as the third writing of the Danişmendname. It is also from this work that we mainly learn the story of the first two compositions. After Âlî, Ottoman historians such as Cenâbî, Karamânî, Kâtib Çelebi, Müneccimbaşı and Hezarfen Hüseyin used the epic directly as a historical source, and in the nineteenth century Orientalists such as P. Casanova, J. H. Mordtmann and Jean Laurent, together with Turkish historians such as Necip Âsım, Halil Ethem and Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin, the author of the Amasya Tarihi, followed the same path.

Manuscripts and Editions

The epic's manuscripts are found in private hands and various libraries in Turkey, as well as in libraries in Russia and Europe. Nineteen manuscripts have been identified to date. One of the copies Şükrü Akkaya described passed to the Faculty of Language, History and Geography; it has 225 leaves, eighteen lines to a page, and contains a verse section of 2,994 couplets. The Orhun manuscript, of the same size, runs to 430 pages and carries fifty more couplets than the other. The manuscript titled "Hikâyet-i Melik Gazi" in the Muallim Cevdet collection of the Atatürk Library in Istanbul is dated 1016 (1607). These manuscripts are not identical to one another; differences arose during later copying.

One example of such differences is the date on which Danişmend Gazi set out on the holy war. Some manuscripts give it as a Friday in the month of Rajab of AH 360, which corresponds to 970-71 in the Gregorian calendar, yet at that time there could be no question of a Turkish force setting out from Malatya. The Muallim Cevdet manuscript and some others correct the same day and month to AH 460, which corresponds to 1068 and agrees with historical fact. After this no date appears in the epic, except that at its end the Seljuk throne is recorded as held by Sultan Rükneddin, which points to the years 1262-1266. The narrative thus appears to gather events spread over roughly two hundred years into a single story of a campaign.

Scholarly study began late. Th. Houtsma and Smirnov were the first to mention the epic, but it was Fuad Köprülü who first drew attention to its importance and offered short analyses. The first comprehensive study to treat the work in all its aspects is Irène Mélikoff's La Geste de Melik Dânişmend, published in Paris in 1960: the first volume contains the introduction and a French translation, the second the critical edition. Necati Demir's four-volume work, published at Harvard University in 2001-2002 (critical text, Turkish translation, linguistic study and glossary, facsimile), and his Dânişmend Gazi Destanı, issued in Ankara in 2006, continue these studies. The language of the manuscripts is also of interest. According to Akkaya, the richness of its pure Turkish vocabulary and its notable grammatical features are among the work's most valuable aspects, and the verse sections are composed in the hazaj meter, mefâîlün mefâîlün feûlün, in language the common people could easily understand.

The Structure of the Narrative

The epic begins with Danişmend Gazi's birth and upbringing. The hero, whose original name is Melik Ahmed, is born in Malatya to the daughter of Emir Ömer of Malatya and to Ali b. Mızrab. He befriends Sultan Turasan, a grandson of Battal Gazi; he learns swordsmanship on the one hand and the Islamic sciences on the other, and since he becomes a scholar in a short time, he is given the epithet Dânişmend. One night he sees the Prophet in a dream and receives the command for holy war; that same night Turasan, too, receives a similar instruction in a dream from his grandfather Battal Gazi. The two go to Baghdad and ask the caliph for permission; the caliph hands over to them Battal Gazi's standard and Abu Muslim's banner. Thus, on a date given in the manuscripts as AH 360, the holy war in the land of Rum begins. Warriors such as Çavuldur Çaka, Hasan b. Meşiyya, Eyyûb b. Yûnus, Süleyman b. Nu'mân, Kara Doğan and Kara Tegin join the ghazi. The ruined fortress of Sivas is repaired and made the base, and from there campaigns are launched against the surrounding towns.

At this stage Danişmend Gazi encounters Artuhi, a famous Rum champion, defeats him, converts him to Islam and takes him into his company; from then on Artuhi is the ghazi's closest friend. The dispatch of Turasan with a group of ghazis to take Istanbul ends in failure, and Turasan falls as a martyr at Alemdağı. Campaigns are carried out toward Mâmûriye (Ankara), Mankūriye (Çankırı), Kastamonu and Gerede. After this, in Ocak's phrase, Danişmend Gazi devotes all his activity to the conquest of the Yeşilırmak basin. Fortresses such as Yankoniya (Çorum), Sisiya (Gömenek), Dokiya (Tokat), Karkariye (Zile) and Harsanosiya (Niksar), together with great monasteries such as Haç Deyri and Deryanos Deyri, cannot hold out against him.

The narrative ends at Niksar. While trying to take the Canik region as well, Danişmend Gazi falls into an ambush on the road and is wounded; he returns to Niksar, dies there and is buried opposite its fortress. His conquests are continued by his son Melik Gazi; the final section of the epic tells of Melik Gazi's journey to Baghdad, his recovery of the places his father had lost, and the tomb he had built over his father's grave in Niksar. At the end of the work the author turns to counsel on the transience of the world and recounts the history of the Danishmend and Seljuk dynasties in a few lines; Akkaya notes that the information in this part is fragmentary and wrong.

The World of the Epic

Unlike those of the Battalname and the Ebû Müslimname, the heroes of the Danişmendname have the characteristics of ordinary people. There are no giants, jinn, fairies or witches in the work; the only supernatural motif is Khidr appearing and healing wounds in a few places. Danişmend Gazi's miracles, as Ocak puts it, are not a constant part of his character but exceptional events. Even so, the examples Akkaya quotes from the manuscript he studied show that the narrative is not entirely free of exaggeration: the wrestler Atuş stands a hundred cubits tall, the tree in his hand weighs a hundred and sixty batmans, and each of the stones he hangs from it weighs forty batmans.

The heroes' world of belief is Sunni from beginning to end. All of them perform the five daily prayers and abstain from drink; Danişmend Gazi does not set out on a campaign without the caliph's permission, keeps the caliph's standard ready in his army and regularly sends the caliph's share of the booty to Baghdad. A trace of old Turkish belief appears only in a single motif, the slaughter of 150 horses at the ghazi's wedding. It is also striking that the warring sides know one another's languages: the Muslims know Greek, the Rum speak Turkish, and the two sides spy on each other in disguise from time to time. According to Ocak, this detail shows that, in spite of all their enmity, the parties shared a common way of life. Some of the warriors around the ghazi are Muslims bearing purely Turkish names such as Çavuldur Çaka, Kara Doğan and Kara Tegin; the others, Artuhi foremost among them, are converted Rum. Efromiya, the daughter of Şâh-ı Şettât, the lord of Harşana Castle, who became a Muslim out of love for Artuhi, is one of the epic's most interesting figures.

In geography the epic is unusually concrete. In contrast to the fairy-tale lands of the Battalname and the Saltukname, the places where events occur in the Danişmendname are real Anatolian towns: Sivas, Tokat (Dokiya), Kayseri (Kayseriyye), Çorum (Yankoniye), Gömenek (Sisiyye), Zile (Karkariyye), Niksar (Harsanosiyye), Turhal (Kaşan), Osmancık (Eflanus), Çankırı (Mankuriyye), Ankara (Engüriyye or Ma'muriyye), Sinop, Samsun and Amasya (Amasiyye and Haraşna). Events around Tokat are described in particular detail; this is attributed to the author knowing the region well or coming from it, and it fits the shape that Ârif Ali, the warden of Tokat Castle, gave the text. The Kızılırmak and the Yeşilırmak are mentioned by their old and new names. The occasional mention of Istanbul is part of the Turks' dream of conquering that city.

Amasya and Harşana Castle

In the epic Amasya appears under the name Harşana or Haraşna. In Ocak's summary, the last link in Danişmend Gazi's conquests in the Yeşilırmak basin is Harşana Castle, which is held by the father of Efromiya, the young, invincible warrior who has converted to Islam and married Artuhi. This sentence shows how the epic's main outline is set in Amasya but does not give the details. For the details one must turn to the manuscripts. In the manuscript Akkaya reports, Artuhi's own story is also tied to this region: Artuhi is described as the child of a woman, born to a Muslim scholar in Malatya and taken captive by the Rum emperor (Kayser), and when he has grown up, while out hunting around Amasya, he falls in love with a girl. Only later does he learn who she is: Efrumye Bânû, daughter of Şah-ı Şaddat, the Sultan of Amasya, the caliph of the Rum and uncle of the Kayser.

Artuhi tells Melik that he has carried this love in his heart for seven years, and Melik agrees to set out toward Amasya. On the road they learn that the girl is being sent as a bride to Nestor, the beylerbey of the Rum and a world-famous champion. They set an ambush for the caravan with its twelve thousand guards. Hearing Artuhi's war cry, Efrumye has her shackles undone by a ruse, leaps onto one of the choice horses brought to her, draws a sword, and declares herself the daughter of Şah-ı Şaddat and the dust beneath Melik Danişmend's feet. Her telling Melik of the dream of a garden with four rivers is the conversion scene that explains why she went over to the Muslim side. According to Ocak's observation, Efromiya, like the women of ancient Turkish tradition, is a warrior and becomes Danişmend Gazi's right hand in many battles.

A long series of battles follows. In one clash Efrumye falls from her horse, is caught with a lasso and is thrown into a dungeon well in Çorum. In the battles around Harşana, Behmen, the lord of Georgia, comes with his army, and from the direction of Sinop a wrestler named Atuş comes with seventy thousand men. The wounded Melik is healed in a dream by the Prophet's blessed saliva, receives the glad news that Battal Gazi will come to his aid, and during the fighting the dust, the lightning and the darkness that fall help the Muslims. Melik approaches Atuş on foot and takes off his head. Nestor and Şaddat take refuge in Harşana Castle. The narrator reports that on that day twelve thousand unbelievers were taken alive, thirty thousand were put to the sword, and eight thousand of the captives became Muslims; twenty loads of treasure left over from the booty are sent to Tokat and from there to Sivas.

The rescue of Efrumye is the most vivid part of the story that belongs to Amasya. İltekin, whom Artuhi meets at a fountain, says that his father was a merchant of Baghdad and that he himself saw the Prophet in a dream, and offers to show Efrumye's whereabouts. Through secret paths Efrumye and seven hundred captives are freed, the clothing and weapons in the storehouses are distributed, the castle is seized, and an imam and a judge are appointed. On the way back Artuhi gives the name Ahmed to a young warrior they meet, Serkiz; on the road a bridal convoy sent to Mamuriye, the retinue of Gülnüş Bânû, is captured in a raid. After this Melik Danişmend lays siege to Harşana and proposes that Nestor and Şaddat become Muslims and surrender. They call for help; the lords of the region stretching from Canik to Mount Bulgar gather ninety thousand men. The Muslims draw up in ranks with the caliph's standard and Abu Muslim's banner, and after fierce fighting the unbelievers scatter. Ahmed Serfiraz captures Şaddat and brings him before Melik; Harşana is taken partly by ruse and partly by war. Then the army's judge performs the marriage and a wedding lasting seven days and seven nights is held; Akkaya separately reports the list of provisions demanded for this wedding (ten thousand batmans of rice, a thousand sheep, a hundred camels and more). Şaddat escapes by promising wealth to the converted guards and sets about gathering troops for a new attack.

All these details belong to the manuscript Akkaya examined. Among the manuscripts, especially between Mélikoff's critical text and the copies Akkaya described, there may be differences in the order of events and the spelling of names; Akkaya also notes that the manuscript Yinanç summarized as "the epic in our hands" may differ in content from his own. For this reason the account of the Amasya section should not be tied to a single definitive text.

Comparison with the Historical Framework

In the section on the Danishmendids of the sixteenth-century historian Cenâbî Mustafa's el-Aylemü'z-zâhir (critical text and translation by Muharrem Kesik, 2001), it is told that Melik Danişmend set out to conquer Harşene (Amasya), the "capital of the land of the unbelievers" in that vicinity, that the city's ruler Şettât came out and fought a very fierce battle and was defeated, and that the Muslims encamped before the city, besieged it and took it by fighting. The same text also mentions Şettât's daughter Efrumiye among those who took Melik Danişmend's son Melik Gazi Muhammed to Baghdad. Cenâbî's summary reads like a translation of the epic's Amasya section into the language of history and forms an example of the Danişmendname's influence on Ottoman historiography.

The notes to this edition contain two interesting details concerning Amasya. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin mentions a tomb in which the Danishmendid vizier Nâsırüddevle İltekin el-Artukî and his son Emir Hüsâmüddevle Hasan Gâzî are buried; according to the Amasya Tarihi this structure stands above the İltekin Bağları locality, at the foot of the mountain, a cylindrical stone dome set on four stone columns. According to Cenâbî, Melik Gazi appointed Halfet, the son of his father's vizier İltekin, as vizier, and the Halîfet Madrasa in Amasya is said to have been built by him. Whether the İltekin of the epic and this historical vizier are the same person is not known with certainty; but the similarity of the names points to the narrative drawing on real places and persons of Amasya. Osman Turan's finding opens another angle: in his view Efrumiye was in reality Morphia, the daughter of Gabriel, the Armenian Orthodox ruler of Malatya. If this view is correct, the epic has turned a historical woman into the daughter of the Sultan of Amasya.

Historical Source or Book of Superstitions

The twentieth-century debate over the value of the Danişmendname also directly concerns those who write the early history of Amasya. From the sixteenth century on, Ottoman historians used the epic uncritically as a chronicle of events. Mükrimin Halil Yinanç reacted most sharply against this tendency; he called the work "a book of superstitions unfit to be cited as evidence," argued that its contents are wholly fabricated and that its place names have nothing to do with real geography, and that the conquests of Artuk Bey in the Yeşilırmak basin were attributed to Danişmend Gazi in the epic, with Artuhi a reflection of this fact. Relying on the vague statements of some late Armenian sources, he even claimed that Danişmend Gazi himself was a convert of Armenian origin.

Irène Mélikoff, on the other hand, compared the epic meticulously with the native and foreign sources of the period and showed that the work is neither a genuine chronicle, as the old Ottoman historians supposed, nor a book of superstitions, as Yinanç said. The epic carries important clues concerning Danişmend Gazi's personality, his conquests and geographical names. Osman Turan likewise noted that Yinanç had gone too far and showed that, compared with other sources, the Danişmendname is a usable historical source. The middle path between these two extremes remains valid today and requires that the epic's details be used only after testing them against other sources. For Amasya the meaning is clear. That the Danishmendids came to control the Yeşilırmak basin, Amasya included, is a historical fact; but Efrumiye's love, Nestor's ambushes or Atuş's hundred-cubit height belong to the epic's own world and cannot be considered confirmed by documents.

Literary Value

Akkaya holds that the work's real value is literary. In his view, the Danişmendname cannot be neglected because a Turkish romance on the subject of heroism was written in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, because despite repetitions and stock phrases it contains motifs that later took shape in the Mevlid and in the Köroğlu song, because of the richness of its pure Turkish vocabulary, and because it records customs of weddings, feasts, war and peace. Another feature that shapes the spirit of the work is its human types. Artuhi, regarded as the right hand of the Muslim-Turkish commander Danişmend Gazi, is said to have been born of a Turkish mother who, mythologically, scorned even the lion, lord of the steppe. In the manuscript Akkaya reports, the menu of the banquet Nestor gives in honor of Atuş's victory is listed at length, from pork stew to pickled cabbage, from fish stew to barrel caviar; such details also offer material for the history of food culture.

In this literary world Amasya appears as a real town: the fortress on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, the vineyards around it, the tombs in the vineyards and the madrasa. The real value of the work's Amasya sections lies less in documenting historical events in detail than in showing how Amasya's place in the Turkification of Anatolia came alive in popular memory. In an epic voice, the work preserves on the one hand the traces of Danishmendid identity in the city and on the other Amasya's experience of siege and war.

Chronology

1068 (AH 460): According to the Muallim Cevdet manuscript and some others, the date on which Danişmend Gazi set out on the holy war from Malatya; other manuscripts give AH 360 (970-71).

1245 (AH 642): The date at which, by order of Kaykaus II (Kaykaus I according to Osman Turan), İbn Alâ is believed to have first put the legends into book form. This first text has not survived.

1262-1266: The reign of Sultan Rükneddin, recorded at the end of the epic as holding the Seljuk throne.

1360-61 (AH 762): According to Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, the date at which Ârif Ali reworked the book; most researchers place it in the reign of Murad II (1421-1451).

1607 (AH 1016): The date of the "Hikâyet-i Melik Gazi" manuscript in the Muallim Cevdet collection of the Atatürk Library, Istanbul.

1960: Publication in Paris of Irène Mélikoff's critical edition, La Geste de Melik Dânişmend.

2001-2002: Necati Demir's four-volume edition published at Harvard University.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Şükrü Akkaya, "Kitâb-ı Melik Dânişmend Gazi: Danişmendname", Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi, VIII/1-2 (1950), pp. 131-144.
  • Muharrem Kesik, "Cenâbî'ye Göre Dânişmendliler", Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi, 4 (2001), pp. 227-250.

Other sources

  • Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, "Dânişmendnâme", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 8, Istanbul 1993, pp. 478-480. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Irène Mélikoff, La Geste de Melik Dânişmend: Étude critique du Dânişmendnâme, I-II, Paris 1960.
  • Necati Demir, Dânişmend-name, I-IV, Harvard University 2001-2002; Dânişmend Gazi Destanı, Ankara 2006.
  • Mükrimin Halil Yinanç, Türkiye Tarihi, Selçuklular Devri I: Anadolu'nun Fethi, Istanbul 1944; Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye Tarihi, Istanbul 1984.
  • Vikipedi, "Dânişmendnâme" entry: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dânişmendnâme
  • Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı, "Danişmendname - Danişmend Gazi Destanı": https://www.turkedebiyati.org/danismendname/

Online sources