Kâdirî was a sixteenth-century poet who wrote an elegy of eleven stanzas on the killing of Şehzade Mustafa (Prince Mustafa) in 1553. There is no direct information about his life in the biographical anthologies of poets (tezkire) or other biographical sources; apart from his pen name, his name, home town and date of death are unknown. Several poets with the pen name Kâdirî are mentioned in the anthologies, but none of them has been shown to be the author of the elegy. This page describes the only surviving poem of a poet of uncertain identity and the discussion surrounding it.

Kâdirî's connection with Amasya rests on the subject of his poem. The elegy was written for Prince Mustafa, who was sanjak governor (sanjak-bey) of Amasya from 1541 to 1553 and gathered a wide circle of poets and scholars in the city. No record is known that the poet was ever in Amasya or entered the prince's circle there.

Life

The elegy was introduced by Mustafa İsen in his 1984 article "Şehzade Mustafa İçin Yazılmış Üç Yeni Mersiye". İsen's source is a poetry anthology among the Ali Emîrî manuscripts of the Millet Library; an elegy for Prince Mustafa by a poet with the pen name Selîmî is in the same anthology, and according to Recep Hasar the two poems were written out by the same copyist. The poem is headed "Mersiyye-i Kâdirî Berâ-yı Katl-i Sultân Mustafa". On the basis of the elegy's style, İsen considers Kâdirî one of the soldier poets who were with the army when the event took place. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü repeats this view and infers from the existence of the elegy that Kâdirî lived in the sixteenth century. The same entry gives the date of the event as 1555; Prince Mustafa was killed in October 1553.

The State of the Sources

Two poets with the pen name Kâdirî are mentioned in the sixteenth-century anthologies, and neither is a likely candidate for the author of the elegy. The first is Kâdirî Efendi of Isparta. Beyânî, Âşık Çelebi and Kınalızâde present him as a judge from the town of Isparta whose real name was Abdülkâdir. He was Kınalızâde's maternal grandfather. According to Âşık Çelebi he became a candidate (mülazım) under Kara Seydî, was first a teacher and then a judge, refused to return to teaching when Kemalpaşazâde was military judge (kazasker), served as judge in Antalya and similar great cities, and died at Üsküdar when he came to Istanbul on some business. For the time of death of this scholar, praised for his skill in Arabic verse and prose, Kınalızâde uses the phrase "hudûd-ı erbâ‘în". The phrase suggests that he died around the age of forty or in the forties of the hijri century (the 940s, that is, between 1533 and 1543); on either reading it is unlikely that Kâdirî Efendi was alive in 1553. This assessment is our own.

The second poet is Kâdirî of Edirne, mentioned by Gelibolulu Âlî. Âlî describes him as one of the teachers (müderris) and writes that he presented a petition in verse to Bayezid II. Since Bayezid II left the throne in 1512, it hardly seems possible that this poet lived to see the death of Prince Mustafa. Âlî also attributes to Kâdirî of Edirne the ghazal "Leylî gibi çemende konup gül otag ile", which Beyânî assigns to Kâdirî Efendi of Isparta; the information about the two poets has become mixed in the anthologies. The Kâdirî of the elegy thus remains one of the poets in the army who never entered the anthologies. Semra Güler notes that the names of Selîmî and Kâdirî occur in the anthologies of the period but that nothing more is known about them; it has not been shown, however, that these names in the anthologies belong to the poet of the elegy.

His Poetry

Kâdirî's only surviving poem is his elegy for Prince Mustafa. Written in the metre "fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilün", the poem has eight lines in each of its first two stanzas and four lines in each of the remaining nine; the elegy begins as a müsemmen and continues as a murabba. The first stanza is a eulogy describing the prince as young, just, generous and brave, of delicate nature and one who knew the Quran by heart. In the second stanza all creation weeps, and from the third stanza on the people are addressed with the refrain "Agla sen iy halk-ı ‘âlem gitdi Sultân Mustafâ". The poet likens the prince to the martyr of Karbala, says that the angels came down and performed his funeral prayer, and sends his greetings to the prince's children, wives and retinue as well.

The second stanza of the poem is almost identical to the second stanza of Hasbî's elegy for Prince Mustafa: seven of the eight lines in Kâdirî's stanza are also found in Hasbî's, with small differences. This shared material is not discussed in the sources we examined; whether one poet borrowed from the other, or both used a common lament stanza, is unknown. The original text of the poem, its English prose rendering, textual variants and commentary are given in a separate article in this category. The other elegies are described in our article Elegies for Prince Mustafa, and the prince's life in the biography Şehzade Mustafa.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Beyânî Mustafa, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Aysun Sungurhan, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2017 (e-book), pp. 157-158, entry "Kâdirî Efendi". https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/55835,beyani-tezkiresipdf.pdf
  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâirü'ş-şuarâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2018 (e-book), pp. 572-573, entry "Kâdirî".
  • Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Aysun Sungurhan, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2017 (e-book), pp. 691-692, entry "Kâdirî". https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/55834,kinalizade-hasan-celebipdf.pdf
  • Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, Künhü'l-Ahbâr'ın Tezkire Kısmı, ed. Mustafa İsen, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (e-book), pp. 81-82, entry "Kâdirî".

Academic studies

Books

Online sources