Lutfullah b. Ebû Yûsuf, known by the pen name (mahlas) Halîmî, was a philologist, jurist, physician and poet who lived in the reigns of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) and Bayezid II. The work that keeps his name alive is the Bahrü'l-garâib, a verse dictionary giving Persian words with their Turkish equivalents, popularly called the Lugat-ı Halîmî. His family came from Sivas, but he himself was born and brought up in Amasya. His real place in the history of Amasya, however, he owes to a poem: while Şehzade Bayezid (Prince Bayezid, the future Bayezid II) was governor of Amasya, Halîmî was dismissed from the judgeship of Sivas and imprisoned in Tokat through the slanders of the prince's entourage; once freed, he described what had happened to him to Mehmed II in an Arabic ode and its commentary, and this ode set off an inquiry that led to executions and flights at Bayezid's court in Amasya. His name, his date of death and the last years of his life, on the other hand, do not agree from source to source.

The State of the Sources and the Debate

In the ninth volume of his Amasya Tarihi Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar gives the poet under the heading "Halîmî Mehmed Efendi-Ebû Yûsufoğlu" and writes in a footnote that he saw his signature as "Mehmed bin Lütfullah bin Ebî Yusuf eş-şehîr bi'l-Halîmî el-Amasî". On this reading the poet's name would be Mehmed and his father's Lutfullah. Yet Hüsameddin himself, recounting the same events in his third volume, calls him "Sivas kadısı Mevlânâ Halîmî Lütfullâh Çelebi". Mustafa Erkan's article in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, relying on the statements in the works themselves, likewise gives his name as Lutfullah, his father's as Ebû Yûsuf and his grandfather's as Abdülhalîm. The reading of the encyclopaedia and of the third volume has been followed here, while the heading of the ninth volume has been kept as the name of the record in the master list.

The date of his death appears in three different forms. According to Hüsameddin, Halîmî went to Kefe (Caffa) in 896 (1490-91) as tutor to Şehzade Mehmed, son of Bayezid II, returned to Istanbul after the prince's death in 910, and died in Istanbul in 912 (1506-07). Kâtib Çelebi's Keşfü'z-zunûn records that he was killed in 900 (1495). Mehmed Süreyya's Sicill-i Osmânî and the sources that follow it give the date 922 (1516). Hüsameddin considers this last record mistaken, particularly because of its statement that Halîmî "came from the land of the Persians". Erkan, too, says that the sources giving 922 have confused him with Halîmî Çelebi, the tutor of Selim I (Selim the Grim), who died on the Egyptian campaign of 1516. This second Halîmî also appears as a separate person in Hüsameddin's third volume: "Mevlânâ Halîmî Çelebi, of the scholars of Kastamonu, the tutor of Sultan Selim", who came to Amasya with Selim's army in 920 (1514) and interceded for the pardon of Mîr Gıyâseddîn Şîrâzî, then held in the Amasya dungeon. The "d. 922" of the master list is a trace of this confusion.

Erkan points out that after Bayezid II came to the throne, Halîmî's enemies Tâcî Bey and Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi again took their places around the sultan in 887 (1482), and considers it likely that Halîmî was put to death at their instigation. The years in Edirne, Çirmen, Kefe and Istanbul that Hüsameddin describes do not fit this view. One may also ask whether the tutorship in Kefe in fact belongs to Halîmî Çelebi, but the sources at our disposal are not enough to settle the question. On the reports that Halîmî came from Persia the two sources come close to each other: Hüsameddin says that he "may have gone there and back for study", and Erkan, judging by his command of Persian, thinks that he received his main education in Iran.

Hüsameddin's Entry

At the beginning of the entry Hüsameddin describes Halîmî's lineage and early years as follows:

Amasyalıdır. Sultân Fatih Mehmed Hân'a takdîm eylediği kasîdesi şerhinden müstefâd olduğu üzere Lütfûllah Çelebi bin Ebû Yûsuf Çelebi bin Abdülhalim Çelebi bin Ahmed Çelebi bin Ahî Mehmed Yegâne bin Mevlânâ Şemseddîn Ahmed bin Yûsuf bin Ahmed mahdûmudur. Pederi ve ceddi Amasya'da medfûndur. Amasya ulemâsından ve hâssaten Mevlânâ Cemaleddîn Yûsuf bin İbrâhim Tokâdî'den tahsîl-i ulûm edib ders-i âm oldu. Tûl-i müddet tedrîs-i ulûm ile iştigâl edib fevkalâde iştihâr etdi. Lugât-ı Farisiyye ve Arabiyye'de rüsûh-ı tâmmı olduğundan Sultân Bâyezîd-i Sânî muallimlerinden oldu.

In English: He is from Amasya. As appears from the commentary on the ode he presented to Sultan Mehmed Han the Conqueror, he is the son of Lutfullah Çelebi bin Ebû Yûsuf Çelebi bin Abdülhalim Çelebi bin Ahmed Çelebi bin Ahî Mehmed Yegâne bin Mevlânâ Şemseddin Ahmed bin Yûsuf bin Ahmed. His father and grandfather are buried in Amasya. He studied the sciences with the scholars of Amasya, and especially with Mevlânâ Cemaleddin Yûsuf bin İbrahim Tokadî, and became a teacher licensed to lecture. He spent a long time teaching and became exceptionally well known. Because he had a thorough mastery of Persian and Arabic lexicography, he became one of the teachers of Sultan Bayezid II.

At the end of the entry Hüsameddin writes that, as his ode and his other works show, he was "âlim, fâzıl, elsine-i selâseye bi-hakkın vâkıf, şâir-i kâmil", a scholar who truly knew Arabic, Persian and Turkish and an accomplished poet, but that because of the rancour of his rivals he never received the esteem his learning deserved.

Life

For his date of birth there is only an indirect clue. Erkan notes that a manuscript of his first dictionary bearing the date 850 (1446) may give its date of composition; if so, Halîmî must have been born in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. According to Hüsameddin he studied in Amasya, was a pupil of Cemaleddin Yûsuf Tokadî and became one of the teachers of Şehzade Bayezid, who was sanjak governor in Amasya. Erkan states that he enjoyed the patronage of Mahmud Pasha, one of the grand viziers of Mehmed II's reign. The dates of his works show a scholar close to the court, presenting books to both Mehmed II and the prince in Amasya from the 1450s to the 1470s.

The turning point of his life was the judgeship of Sivas. According to Hüsameddin, because "those who envied his good fortune" disparaged him to the prince, he was made judge of Sivas in 878 (1473) and so removed from the prince's household; inspectors of the religious courts were then set on him, and in Zilkade 879 (March 1475) he was dismissed and held for a time in the dungeon of Tokat. Erkan dates the dismissal to 1474 and attributes it to Halîmî's wish to stop those who were leading Şehzade Bayezid astray; the imprisonment lasted about three months. Hüsameddin's third volume also says that he was "kept in prison for about three months and ill-treated" and then released when his innocence became clear.

Deeply wounded by this treatment, and wary of his enemies, Halîmî wrote an Arabic ode telling what had happened in veiled, allusive language. Because every couplet ends in the letter "t" it is called the Kasîde-i Tâiyye; according to Erkan it has fifty-one couplets. When Halîmî went to Istanbul he wrote a couplet-by-couplet commentary on the ode, and in the commentary he openly named those who had accustomed Şehzade Bayezid to drink, gambling and narcotics and those who had wronged him. When the ode and commentary were presented to Mehmed II, the sultan sent the vizier Hamza Beyzâde Mustafa Pasha to Amasya; on his report the prince's tutor-guardian (lala) Hızır Paşazâde Mahmud Pasha was executed, while Tâcî Bey escaped to Baghdad and Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi to Iran. The episode as seen from the side of Tâcî Bey's family is also told on this site in the articles Tâcî Bey and Tâcîzâde Sâdî Çelebi.

Hüsameddin relates that Halîmî, having seen the effect of his ode, became professor at the school of hadith (dârülhadis) in Edirne, was appointed judge of Çirmen at the accession of Bayezid II in 886 (1481), came to Istanbul in 891 (1486) and taught there for a time, went to Kefe in 896 as tutor to Şehzade Mehmed, and died in Istanbul in 912. As noted above, this part may have become mixed with the life of Halîmî Çelebi.

Works

Halîmî's known works range over language, literature, medicine and law. Erkan's article lists eleven:

  • Bahrü'l-garâib (Lugat-ı Halîmî): a Persian-Turkish dictionary. First prepared as a dictionary without examples, then put into verse, it was furnished with a commentary in 872 (1467-68) and presented to Şehzade Bayezid in two volumes. According to Erkan's article on the Bahrü'l-garâib, the verse version consists of twenty-one poems in various aruz (quantitative) metres and eight quatrains, about 1,350 couplets in all; the commentary gives meanings for some 5,540 Persian words.
  • Kitâbü Tâʾiyyeti'l-Ḥalîmî maʿa şerḥihâ: the fifty-one-couplet Arabic ode presented to Mehmed II, with its commentary; the only copy, in the author's hand, is in the Süleymaniye Library (Ayasofya, no. 4088).
  • Gülşen-i Zîbâ: a Persian verse treatise on medicine presented to Mehmed II in 862 (1457-58).
  • An interlinear Persian translation of the Qur'an (882-883 / 1477-78), in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library.
  • Muḫtaṣarü'l-eşkâl ve şerḥuhû (Ferâiż-i Halîmî): on the law of inheritance.
  • Ḥâşiyetü Ḥalîmî ʿale'l-Ḫayâlî: a gloss on a work of theology.
  • Musarrihatü'l-esmâ: a dictionary giving Turkish and Persian equivalents for Arabic nouns (872 / 1467-68).
  • Tuhfe-i Mukaddimetü'l-luga: a short Persian-Turkish verse glossary in four parts.
  • Mirʾâtü'ṭ-ṭayyibîn: a Persian treatise on repentance (865 / 1460-61).
  • Risâle fî beyâni kavâidi'l-muammâ: a treatise explaining the rules of the Persian riddle (muamma) in Turkish.
  • Risâle fî tecnîsât ve't-teşbîhât ve'l-mecâzât: a treatise explaining in Turkish the rules of paronomasia (cinas), simile and metaphor.

Hüsameddin, too, says that the Lugat-ı Halîmî was not merely a book for teaching Persian but a source for Turkish dictionaries as well. About the ode and its commentary he adds a personal note: while he was charged with inspecting libraries he saw the work in the Fatih Library, wrote "a good many things" about it and noted its number, but his notes were burned, and since the work was not entered in the literature catalogue he never found it again.

Connection with Amasya

According to Hüsameddin, Halîmî was "mevliden ve mevtınen", by birth and by home, a man of Amasya; his forebears were originally from Sivas, and his father and grandfather are buried in Amasya. Hüsameddin says he took this information from the commentary on the ode and from the Persian dictionary, under Halîmî's own signature. In a footnote in the third volume he also traces Halîmî's lineage to a family of emigrants from Khorasan who settled in Amasya. Erkan likewise writes that he was "probably born and brought up in Amasya".

Some of his works are tied directly to Amasya. The Bahrü'l-garâib was presented to Şehzade Bayezid, governor of Amasya; the phrase "şehzâde-i civânbaht" (the prince of youthful fortune) in one copy of the dictionary confirms this. The copy of the Gülşen-i Zîbâ now in the Süleymaniye Library was made in 866 (1462) for the Amasya hospital (darüşşifa) by the hand of the Amasya physician Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin; this link is also mentioned in the site's article Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin. The events that changed his life likewise unfolded amid the rivalries of the prince's court in Amasya. Bayezid II's years as a prince are told in detail in the site's article Bayezid II.

Poetry

One of the earliest judgements praising Halîmî as a poet comes from Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî. As Erkan reports, Âlî, who held even poets such as Necâtî and Bâkî in low esteem, describes him as a man of the pen with feeling and taste, says that the inventions and images of his odes approach a famously inimitable ode of Selmân-ı Sâvecî, and states that he had seen some thirty of his treatises and odes. Hüsameddin, too, calls him "şâir-i kâmil", an accomplished poet.

Halîmî's poetic legacy is largely didactic: verse dictionaries, a verse treatise on medicine and an Arabic ode. We were unable to reach a published complete text of any of them. Erkan, writing in 1991, notes that no serious study of the Bahrü'l-garâib had been made. The only verse text accessible today is the treatise on paronomasia, simile and metaphor published by Muhittin Eliaçık in 2013. In it the rules are given in lines of Persian verse, each followed by a Turkish prose commentary. At the end of the treatise Halîmî says that the rules were "naẓm olınup beyân olındı", set out in verse. In Eliaçık's edition some of these lines are given in full and some are cut short with the abbreviation "ilh" (etc.). The Persian couplets given in full appear, with an English version and commentary, on a separate poem page (Halîmî's poems). The Turkish couplets cited as examples in the treatise, such as the one beginning "Yüzüñ güldür ṣaçuñ sünbül dişüñ dür", are not attributed to anyone, and so they have not been counted among Halîmî's poems. The TDV article describes the treatise as "in verse", Eliaçık as "in prose". The discrepancy arises from the structure of the text: the lines stating the rules are in verse, the explanations in prose.

Chronology

850 (1446): Date found in a copy of Halîmî's first Persian-Turkish dictionary; according to Erkan, possibly its date of composition.

862 (1457-58): The Gülşen-i Zîbâ is completed and presented to Mehmed II.

866 (1462): Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin copies the Gülşen-i Zîbâ for the Amasya hospital.

872 (1467-68): The Bahrü'l-garâib, with its commentary, is presented to Şehzade Bayezid; the Musarrihatü'l-esmâ is completed.

878-879 (1473-75): According to Hüsameddin, the Sivas judgeship, dismissal and imprisonment in Tokat; Erkan dates the dismissal to 1474.

880-881 (1475-77): He goes to Istanbul and presents the Kasîde-i Tâiyye with its commentary to Mehmed II; inquiry in Amasya.

882-883 (1477-78): The interlinear Persian translation of the Qur'an is written and completed.

900 (1495): According to the Keşfü'z-zunûn, he dies a violent death.

912 (1506-07): According to Hüsameddin, he dies in Istanbul.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources