Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî was not only one of the most prolific historians of the sixteenth century but also a poet with five divans, four in Turkish and one in Persian. His centuries-long fame comes from prose works such as the Künhü'l-ahbâr; yet he first made himself known through poetry and never stopped writing verse until the end of his life. His connection with Amasya rests on the governorship of the sanjak, which he held for a few months in 1595, and on the Amasya müseddes he is known to have written at that time. In the biographical section of the Künhü'l-ahbâr Âlî also recorded the lives of poets of Amasya such as Mihrî Hatun, Münîrî and Tâcî Bey, leaving one of the important sources for the literary history of Amasya.

Âlî's life and his governorship of Amasya are told in a separate article in the Historical Figures section of our site. This page is devoted to his poetry, his literary works and his poem connected with Amasya.

His Life and His Years in Amasya

Âlî was born in Gelibolu (Gallipoli) on the night of 2 Muharrem 948 (24/25 April 1541). After his madrasa education he attracted attention with his poems and became divan secretary to Şehzade Selim (Prince Selim), to whom he presented his first work, Mihr ü Mâh. He served as secretary to Lala Mustafa Paşa and to Ferhad Paşa, beylerbey of Bosnia; he held finance posts in Erzurum, Baghdad and Sivas, and was frequently dismissed. When Mehmed III came to the throne (1595) he asked for the finance directorship of Egypt, but had to accept the governorship of the sanjak of Amasya together with the finance directorship of Rûm. According to Hüsameddin this post was granted as a reward for the accession kaside (qasida) he presented to the new sultan, and Âlî arrived in Amasya on 1 Şevval 1003 (June 1595). In the same year he was removed from the Rûm post, and early in 1005 (1596) he was transferred to Kayseri. His last post was the governorship of the sanjak of Jeddah, and he probably died there in 1600. For the details of his life see Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî: Author of the Künhü'l-ahbâr and Governor of Amasya.

His Beginnings as a Poet and His Pen Name

According to Ömer Faruk Akün, who wrote on Âlî's literary side in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the young Mustafa, who came from Gelibolu to Istanbul at the age of sixteen, received his literary training from leading masters of the time such as his fellow townsman and teacher, the müderris poet Sürûrî, and Hayâlî. He first began to write poetry under the pen name Çeşmî, and soon settled on the pen name Âlî ("exalted"), which suited the ambition to rise and the sense of superiority to everyone that would dominate his whole life. The years when his teacher Sürûrî served as tutor to Şehzade Mustafa (Prince Mustafa) in Amasya are among this circle's links with Amasya. During his finance directorship in Erzurum Âlî influenced the training of the young Nef'î, and it was he who gave Nef'î his pen name.

His Works

His divans. Âlî has four Turkish divans. He compiled the first in 975 (1567); he did not include in his later divans the eighty-six-couplet şehrengiz (city poem) on Gelibolu found in it. He arranged his second divan, Vâridâtü'l-enîka, on the accession of Murad III in 982 (1574) at Banja Luka; this is the divan with the most widespread copies. The third divan, Lâyihatü'l-hakîka, collects the poems he wrote from 988 to the beginning of 1000 and was compiled in Istanbul in Muharrem 1000 (October-November 1591). His fourth divan, containing his poems from 1591 until his death, was arranged by the poet Hisâlî; at the head of some poems in this divan there are notes, some in Âlî's own words, on where, when and on what occasion they were written, and its only copy is in the Istanbul University Library. His Persian divan, which he appears to have compiled before the age of forty, has not survived.

His mesnevis and other works in verse. Mihr ü Mâh, written in 968 (1561), is a classical love mesnevi. Tuhfetü'l-uşşâk, a 3034-couplet mesnevi of ideas written in Kütahya in 969 (1562) to complete the series of works on the same lines by Nizami, Amir Khusrau of Delhi and Jami, shows that he had already begun, at the age of twenty-two, to complain that his worth went unrecognised. The 2802-couplet Riyâzü's-sâlikîn deals with religious life and the discipline of the self. Sadef-i Sad-güher, prepared on his visit to Gelibolu in 1001 (1593), was arranged to bring together a hundred ghazals chosen from two of his divans; in its 261-couplet preface he claimed that in the divans of poets such as Hayâlî, Fevrî, Necâtî and Zâtî the ghazals worthy of being called fine did not exceed thirty or forty. In the same spirit he gathered a hundred opening couplets in Gül-i Sad-berk, and his Karbala poems and Muharram elegies in Sübhatü'l-abdâl. Câmiu'l-buhûr der Mecâlis-i Sûr, describing in 2772 couplets the fifty-two-day circumcision festival of Prince Mehmed in 1582, is among the most voluminous of his works in verse.

His Literary Personality

Akün writes that the wealth of Âlî's poetry did not earn him a place in the ranks of contemporaries such as Bâkî and Nev'î, but that, not holding to the aesthetic discipline of divan poetry to the degree of its great representatives, he took a freer path, closer to naturalness and to lived life. His style, which took conceits beyond the familiar, and his loose expression were thought strange in his day. Âlî did not devote poetry to love alone; he also brought into it the injustices he suffered, the posts withheld from him, his being cast aside by dismissals, and the feelings born of his ambition to rise. In this respect, according to Akün, he is one of the divan poets with the strongest social content. In a 247-couplet terciibend thought to have been written around 989 (1581-82), he describes with bitter humour the corruption of every class, from the sovereign to the merchants.

Âlî's poetry also contains subjects seldom found in other poets. Because he witnessed scenes of war in Bosnia and on the Iranian campaigns, he is one of the poets who gave most room to the war poetry called "hamâsiyyât" in divan literature. He has a strong descriptive power, and the number of his winter poems is striking. He expressed his love for Rumi and the Mevlevi order, often gave a place to death and the grave, and wrote his elegies mostly for people who had entered his own life. In language too he brought a remarkable richness of redif (refrain) to poetry and tried words and turns of phrase that others did not dare to use. Akün adds that, because he wrote so much, some of his poems fell into the commonplace.

Âlî in Hüsameddin's Eyes

In his Amasya Tarihi Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar speaks of Âlî often, both as a source and as a sanjak governor. His judgement on Âlî's administration in Amasya is brief: Âlî Bey, governor of Amasya, was a learned, virtuous man and a historian, but he was helpless against the rebels who sprang up on every side. His view of Âlî as a poet becomes clear in his entry on Edâyî Receb Bey, a poet of Amasya. Objecting to the disparaging words Âlî wrote about Edâyî in the Künhü'l-ahbâr, Hüsameddin writes:

Âlî Bey, bütün üdebâ ve müverrihîn nezdinde meşhûr ve kendi âsâr ve müellefâtından ma'lûm olduğu üzere kendini pek yüksek görür, muâsırlarını bir türlü beğenmez. İzzet-i nefsine pek mağlûp bir zâttır.

In modern English: As all men of letters and historians know, and as is evident from his own works, Âlî Bey thinks very highly of himself and cannot bring himself to approve of his contemporaries; he is a man much overcome by his pride. In the same place Hüsameddin notes that the dates Âlî gives about Edâyî are also wrong, while his passage describing the death of Piyâle Paşa is a literary specimen that shows the power of Âlî himself, who set out to belittle Edâyî. This assessment agrees with Akün's observation on Âlî's habit of ranking his own poetry above that of others. On Edâyî see the category Edâyî Receb Bey.

Recorder of the Poets of Amasya

Âlî's greatest contribution to the literature of Amasya lies perhaps less in his own poems than in the biographies of poets in the Künhü'l-ahbâr, arranged by the reigns of the sultans. In this section he says of Mihrî Hatun "she is of Amasya" and of Münîrî "he is a native of Amasya"; he tells of the ties of Tâcî Bey, Âfitâbî, Seyfî of Sinop and Şehzade Korkud with the princely courts of Amasya, and quotes couplets by them. His records do not always agree with the other sources, as when he counts Zeyneb Hatun as a native of Kastamonu. These records of Âlî's are among the sources Hüsameddin too consulted often. The details are discussed in Âlî's biography.

The Amasya Müseddes

Âlî's only known poem directly connected with Amasya is the "Müseddes-i Ünsiyye Der-Vasf-ı Şehr-i Amâsiyye", published by Mehmet Arslan in 2018. Arslan states that Âlî wrote the poem "while governor in Amasya". Each stanza of the seven-stanza müseddes ends with the refrain "Cây-gâh olmagıla şehr-i Amâsiyye baña / Muttasıl feyz olınur kuvvet-i kudsiyye baña": since the city of Amasya has become my abode, grace flows to me without cease from a holy power. The first four stanzas are an outpouring in which the poet likens himself to a high-flying falcon, complains of hypocrites and the envious, and says he is outwardly a bey with drum and banner, inwardly a dervish in a woollen cloak. The fifth and sixth stanzas praise the city as the home of many a prince and the meeting place of saints, and name the tomb of Pîr İlyâs and the Gümüşlüzâde family. In the last stanza the poet plays on his pen name, saying he has become "governor of the realm of talent". The poem is a record of Âlî's habit of carrying his personal grievances into his poetry, and of his short post in Amasya.

The müseddes is given in this category on a separate page with the original text, an English rendering and commentary; the same poem also appears, with detailed notes on the places named in it, in the Poems on Amasya section. Arslan's paper is the only accessible source for the text of the poem, and Arslan does not indicate from which copy of the divan he took it; it would be expected to be in the fourth divan, but no comparison with the manuscripts of the divans could be made in this study. Since no connection with Amasya could be established for the other poems in Âlî's divans, they have not been included in this section.

Chronology

1541: Born in Gelibolu on the night of 2 Muharrem 948 (24/25 April).

1561: Writes his first work, Mihr ü Mâh, and presents it to Prince Selim.

1562: Writes Tuhfetü'l-uşşâk in Kütahya.

1567: Compiles his first Turkish divan.

1574: Arranges his second divan, Vâridâtü'l-enîka, at Banja Luka.

1581-82: Thought to have written his 247-couplet terciibend on the corruption of society.

1591: Compiles his third divan, Lâyihatü'l-hakîka, in Istanbul.

1593: Visits Gelibolu and prepares Sadef-i Sad-güher.

1595: Becomes sanjak governor of Amasya; according to Hüsameddin he arrives in Amasya at the beginning of June. The Amasya müseddes is said to have been written in this period.

1596: Transferred from Amasya to the governorship of the sanjak of Kayseri.

1600: Probably dies while governor of Jeddah; his poems after 1591 are collected in his fourth divan.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources