His father was a jeweller who made rings in Amasya and was known in the city as "Yüzükçü Abdullah Çelebi" (Abdullah Çelebi the Ring-Maker); his son İbrâhim Çelebi, for his part, wrote under the pen name Hâtemî, derived from "hâtem", the seal ring. This closeness between the pen name and the father's craft may be a coincidence or a deliberate choice; Hüsameddin says nothing on the matter. İbrâhim Çelebi spent his life among the clerks of the Amasya court: first a scribe, then a registrar (mukayyid) responsible for entering the court records, he died in that post in 1068 (1657-58).

His Life

In the ninth volume of the Amasya Tarihi, the ninth chapter opens with Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's entry Hâtemî İbrâhim Çelebi-Yüzükçüoğlu:

Amasya'da Yüzükçü Abdullah Çelebi demekle meşhûr bir kuyumcunun oğludur. Biraz ilm ve kitâbet tahsîlinden sonra mahkeme-i şer'iyye ketebesinden oldu. Ba'dehû mukayyid olup sicillâtın kaydına me'mûren 1068'de vefât etdi. Şâir, ta'lîk-nüvîs, hoş-sohbet, Halvetî-meşreb bir zât idi.

In English: He was the son of a jeweller known in Amasya as "Yüzükçü Abdullah Çelebi". After acquiring some learning and the clerk's craft, he became one of the scribes of the Islamic court. Later he became registrar and died in 1068 while charged with entering the court records. He was a poet, a master of the ta'lik script, pleasant in conversation and of Halveti disposition.

The entry names no teacher and no licence. Judging by the phrase "some learning", İbrâhim Çelebi must have stopped short of the full madrasa course, studying only as much as the clerk's work required. Court scribes wrote down the cases heard before the judge, sales and purchases, endowment affairs and the division of estates; the registrar saw to it that these records were properly entered in the registers. Working at a desk where the daily life of the city was put into writing, İbrâhim Çelebi presumably put his mastery of ta'lik to use in this very work. When he was born, who else besides his father made up his family, and whether he left children are not recorded.

His Halveti Leanings

Hüsameddin describes him as "Halvetî-meşreb". The phrase is used less of a dervish formally initiated into an order than of someone who stayed close to the gatherings and remembrance ceremonies of the Halveti lodges and adopted the ethos of that path. Halveti lodges such as the Müftüzâde lodge were open in the city in those years; the entry does not say which one İbrâhim Çelebi frequented. Taken together with the epithet "pleasant in conversation", the portrait that emerges is that of a witty clerk who, after leaving the court office, spent his time in lodges and gatherings of friends.

His Poetry

The entry counts him as a "poet"; it gives no couplet and names no divan or anthology. No poems by Hâtemî İbrâhim Çelebi have come down to us. The year of his death places him within the span of 1000 to 1081 covered by the anthology in which Abdî Efendi of Amasya collected the city's poets; even so, Hüsameddin does not mention the anthology in this entry. His information may have come from elsewhere, perhaps from the court registers or from family memory, but that is only a guess. His name also appears in the list of poets Metin Hakverdioğlu drew from the Amasya Tarihi.

Other Men of Amasya Who Bore the Same Pen Name

In the ninth volume of Hüsameddin's work four men of Amasya with the pen name Hâtemî follow one another, and they are easily confused. The best known is the scholar Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi (d. 922/1516), son of Prince Bayezid's chancellor (nişancı) at Amasya, who later became a military judge (kazasker). The other two are the madrasa teacher and sheikh Hâtemî Abdülkerîm Çelebi (d. c. 903), who belonged to Prince Bayezid's circle at Amasya, and the seal engraver Hâtemî Mehmed Çelebi (d. c. 1051), a master of ta'lik. By their dates of death, İbrâhim Çelebi of the Yüzükçüoğlu family stands at the end of the series. That Mehmed Çelebi, who engraved seals, and İbrâhim Çelebi, the ring-maker's son, chose the same pen name brings to mind the word's link with the craft; no kinship or teacher-pupil relationship between the two men is known.

Chronology

1068 (1657-58): He dies while registrar at the Amasya court.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Online sources