Mihri Hatun was the first Ottoman woman poet whose complete divan survives. She was born in Amasya in the second half of the fifteenth century, spent most of her life in the city, died there, and was buried in the cemetery of her grandfather's dervish lodge. She says as much in her own divan: the line "Geçmiş ki hayf Mihrî Amâsiyye'de ömrün" (alas, her life has passed in Amasya) places the end of her days in this city.

In her own time Mihri drew attention because, in a poetic world dominated by male voices, she wrote of love, longing and resentment without veiling them. She took part in poetic contests with male poets in the gatherings of the princely court and received gifts from the sultan's court in return for her qasidas. What we know of her rests on brief entries in the biographical dictionaries (tezkires), on an account book of gifts from the reign of Bayezid II, and on her own verses. On many points, from her year of birth to the location of her grave, the sources disagree; these disagreements are noted where they arise.

Name, Family and Birth

Mihri is both her name and her pen name. Âşık Çelebi writes that her name was Mihri; contemporary biographers such as Sehî Bey, Latîfî and Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi give no information on the matter. Evliya Çelebi records her given name as Mihrimah and her pen name as Mihri. The forms Fahrünnisâ and Mihrünnisâ, which appear in later studies, rest on no source and are therefore not taken seriously.

Her father was Hasan, a judge (kadı) from Amasya who also wrote poetry under the pen name Belâyî. This link does not depend on the biographical dictionaries alone: two manuscripts of the divan carry the heading "Dîvân-ı Mihrî Duhter-i Mevlânâ Belâyî", that is, the divan of Mihri, daughter of Mevlânâ Belâyî, and Mihri herself states in two places in her divan that Belâyî was her father. Her grandfather was Pîr İlyas, one of the Halvetî sheikhs. Some studies call Pîr İlyas Şücâ'addîn her great-grandfather and describe him as a sheikh of the Gümüşlüoğulları family, reputed for miracles, who died in 1410-11. This difference in the degree of kinship remains a separate detail among the sources, but there is no disagreement about Mihri's ties to the Halvetî circle.

No source records her date of birth. The estimates rest on her relationship with the poet Hâtemî. It is known with certainty that Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi, who wrote under the pen name Hâtemî, was born in 1455-56; Mihri is thought to have been of about the same age, to have been present with him in the assemblies of Bayezid II, and to have grown up alongside him. By this reasoning her birth is placed between 1455-56 and 1460-61. The frequently repeated date of 1460 or 1461 falls within this range but is not a documented year. Mehmed Zihnî, in his Meşâhîrü'n-nisâ, calls her "one of the learned women of Istanbul". Scholars regard this as a mistake, since all the other sources agree that she was from Amasya.

The Setting in Which She Was Raised

As far as her poems and the accounts about her indicate, Mihri grew up in a household of high cultural standing. She learned Arabic and Persian and acquired a basic knowledge of the literatures of those languages, and she took her share of the sciences of rhetoric (bedî and beyân). Because her father was a judge, religious learning was also a subject discussed around her from childhood. Her knowledge, her intelligence and above all her poetry drew attention in her circle at an early age. She is also said to have been famous for her beauty. Evliya Çelebi says that she had memorized seventy volumes and that the scholars were unable to hold a scholarly debate with her; this account fits Evliya's well-known taste for exaggeration and is confirmed by no other source.

The Princely Court of Amasya and Its Literary Circle

The setting in which Mihri developed as a poet was the literary circle that formed around the princely court at Amasya. Bayezid II came to Amasya as a prince in 1454-55, at the age of seven or eight, and left the city when he became sultan in 1481-82. Mihri's entry into this circle is thought to coincide with these last years, when she was probably in her twenties. When Bayezid became sultan, his son Prince Ahmed became governor of Amasya; Ahmed's fondness for entertainment and his openness to conversation widened the circle further.

The members of this circle were numerous. Alongside Turkish poets such as Çeşmî, Şermî, Figânî, Kâmî, Melîhî, Münîrî, Makâmî, Âfitâbî and Zeynep Hatun, there were Persian poets such as Basîrî, Penâhî and Kutbî, as well as calligraphers, illuminators and musicians, some of them from Iran. Well-known figures of the age such as Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi and Tâcîzâde Câfer Çelebi also belonged to this circle. The court at Amasya worked like a small-scale model of the court in Istanbul. Mihri took part in religious and literary gatherings and did not fall behind the male poets in poetic contests. It is known that she also held literary gatherings and musical evenings in her own house and exchanged witty verses with other poets. Because it was far from usual for a woman to have a say in such assemblies, nearly all the entries the biographical dictionaries devote to her concern events that took place in these gatherings.

Qasidas Presented to the Sultans

Sehî says that Mihri gave many qasidas and ghazals to Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim) and to Prince Ahmed. Abdülkadir Karahan also notes that nearly all the qasidas in the divan were presented to Prince Ahmed, especially on the occasion of festival greetings. The source that broadens the picture is the account book of gifts from the reign of Bayezid II, covering the years 909-917 (1503-1511), published by İsmail E. Erünsal. From the entries in the register it is understood that Mihri regularly sent qasidas to Bayezid II, whom she had met while he was in Amasya, and that she presented her divan to him when she completed it.

The entries, with their dates, are as follows: 20 Şaban 910 (26 January 1505), 2 Cemâziyelevvel 914 (29 August 1508), 3 Zilkade 915 (12 February 1510), 10 Şevval 916 (10 January 1511) and 27 Zilhicce 917 (16 March 1512). The entry of 1508 reports that the divan was sent and that 3000 akçe were granted. In total, Mihri received 13,000 akçe across the five entries. The copy of the divan in the Süleymaniye Library (Ayasofya, no. 3974) bears the seal of Bayezid II at its end and contains only one qasida for Bayezid; the copy sent to the sultan is thought most likely to be this one. That most of the qasidas were written for Prince Ahmed and that qasidas were sent regularly to Bayezid do not exclude each other; Mihri evidently maintained her ties with both courts.

Features of Her Poetry

Mihri wrote in a plain language and tried above all to express her feelings; her style is natural, sincere and unaffected. Instead of resorting to heavy wordplay and forced conceits, she preferred to state the feeling itself openly. She did not abandon the conventional lover and beloved molds of divan poetry either; but as a woman poet obliged to take on the roles of both lover and beloved in the same poem, she developed a distinctive manner of speaking within those molds. Other women poets, bound to the classical manner, praise the stock figure of the beautiful beloved without hinting at any difference of gender, whereas in Mihri's poems sincere expressions of the feelings and longings of her own sex are frequent. In some poems she describes her love, or her loves, in a way that can be called reckless, even if platonic; this stance also drew criticism from her contemporaries.

The first couplet of one of her ghazals shows the tone of complaint and reproach in her poems well: Ben umardım ki seni yâr-ı vefâdâr olasın / Ne bileydim ki seni böyle cefâkâr olasın (I hoped you would be a faithful friend; how could I know you would be so cruel). In the same ghazal she says that she does not curse the beloved but only asks God that he too be struck by love as she was. Her poetry reflects less an artistic concern than a woman's dreams, curiosity and experience of love.

The judgment of her contemporaries is cautious. Sehî praises her as "a woman of good nature; her verses are famous among the people and her ghazals are spoken of among the people of the heart" (hoş-tab' hatundur; eş'ârı halk içinde meşhur ve gazeliyyâtı ehl-i dil-i yârân arasında mezkûrdur). Latîfî says that her rank among the poets was not worthless and that she could not be considered lacking in the capital of learning. Âşık Çelebi, on the other hand, writes that her poems contain improper words and imperfect gestures and that, taken as a whole, they could be considered mediocre. This mixed assessment shows that Mihri's poetry was measured against the stock expectations applied to a woman poet.

Her Relationship with Necâtî

In poetry Mihri took Necâtî as her model and wrote nazires (response poems) to his ghazals. According to tradition she would also send these poems to Necâtî. According to Latîfî, Necâtî was not very pleased with this; he wrote a quatrain revealing his thoughts on the matter and, through a friend, sent Mihri, who had asked his opinion of her poems, a veiled reply in the words "şâire-i Şîrîn ma'nâdır... ihâmını beğenir ve musâbahetin özenir". According to rumor there was also an emotional closeness between the two poets; no record documents this. Whatever Necâtî's reaction, these nazires indicate that Mihri's poems were heard beyond Amasya as well.

Mihri in the Biographical Dictionaries: Beauty, Chastity and Gossip

The information the biographical dictionaries give about Mihri rests largely on events between her and other poets. Âşık Çelebi, Latîfî and Hasan Çelebi imply that there was a bond of the heart between Mihri and İskender Çelebi, son of Sinan Pasha, and they cite as evidence the İskender conceit that appears in some of Mihri's poems. Âşık Çelebi also notes an emotional closeness between Mihri and Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman, who wrote under the pen name Hâtemî.

The same dictionaries record that, while praising her beauty, no one doubted Mihri's chastity. Âşık Çelebi reinforces this by writing that "although she had many suitors, no one obtained his desire from her, and that she came into the world a maiden and went out of it a maiden". What is striking is that the same sources, on the one hand, almost unanimously defend the poet's honor, and on the other use expressions, as Latîfî and Âşık Çelebi do, that evoke associations bordering on the obscene. That the dictionaries open no such topics for other women poets such as Zeyneb Hatun and Ayşe Hubbî Hatun shows that Mihri drew attention especially through her beauty. Being in the same assembly as men was not well regarded by the standards of the time; even so, the sources did not find the situation especially objectionable and, even where they included insinuating remarks, used the language of praise for her.

Her Decision Not to Marry

That Mihri never married is repeated in the biographical dictionaries and in later sources. She is said to have had many suitors, but the dictionaries offer no comment on the reason she did not marry. Whether the platonic loves that can be inferred from some poems in her divan stood in the way, or whether there was some other unknown reason, is uncertain; there is not even a small clue on the matter in the sources.

The only marriage proposal the sources state explicitly came from Paşa Çelebi, a professor at the Eyüp madrasa, a nephew of Akşemseddin whose real name was Gıyâseddin. Paşa Çelebi was older than Mihri, and the proposal was refused. The news became so widely talked about that the poet Zâtî, one of the poets of the age, composed an obscene quatrain with a heavy insinuation on the subject, and the quatrain passed from mouth to mouth. It is told that Mihri smiled when she heard the quatrain and said "I wish I had written this quatrain" (Nolaydı bu kıt'ayı ben demiş olaydım), but did not reply for fear that the matter would grow. In Zâtî's Letâ'if the sentence "There was a woman poet from Amasya, they called her Mihri Hatun, she used to be in Istanbul" (Amâsiyyelü bir şâ'ire var idi, Mihrî Hâtûn dirlerdi, İstanbul'da olurdı) appears. Together with Mehmed Zihnî's mention of Istanbul, this sentence raises the possibility that Mihri spent some time in Istanbul. No source confirms it; even if true, Mihri later returned to Amasya, since all the important sources say that she died and was buried in Amasya.

Her Works

The work of Mihri Hatun that has come down to us is her divan. According to the edition published by Mehmet Arslan by comparing four manuscripts, the divan totals 1987 couplets and contains 17 qasidas, 210 ghazals, 1 müstezad, 9 murabbas, 1 tahmis, 1 terci-i bend, 2 mesnevis and 7 müfreds. The Russian Turkologist E. İ. Maştakova published the divan on the basis of four copies, and Sabiha Gemici made a study of the work from the point of view of language. The Tazarru'-nâme, which appears in all the surviving copies of the divan, is a mesnevi of 461 couplets. Mihri most probably wrote it in the last years of her life. It contains sections of tawhid, supplication, praise of the Prophet, entreaty, prayer, lament, repentance, counsel to the self and pleas for forgiveness of sins; it is adorned with verses of the Qur'an and has the character of a poem full of the confessions and regrets of a believing woman at the end of her life. The difference in voice between the love poems of the divan and this mesnevi is so great that one researcher says it is as if the two had been written by two different people.

Evliya Çelebi writes that Mihri had versified treatises on jurisprudence, inheritance law, menstruation and postpartum bleeding. This information has no counterpart in any other source, and no such work has survived. Researchers consider it either a reflection of Evliya's well-known style or a jest. Garîbî, in his Tezkire-i Mecâlis-i Şuarâ-yı Rûm, mentions that Mihri also composed a Teressül (a collection of prose letters) in addition to her divan; this work, too, is not in our hands.

Death and Grave

The biographical dictionaries of the period contain no record of her date of death. Over the last hundred years the date 912 (1506-07) has circulated in almost all sources. Gibb, without naming his source, gives the year 920 (1514-15). The register of gifts published by Erünsal clearly shows that the date 1506 is wrong: on 27 Zilhicce 917 (16 March 1512) Mihri was still sending a qasida to Bayezid II. For this reason her death is accepted to have occurred after 1512, probably at some date when she was between fifty and sixty years old. Gibb's 1514-15 is regarded as the most plausible date, but it rests on no firm document.

Mihri was buried in the cemetery of her grandfather Pîr İlyas's lodge in Amasya. The area around this tomb in the Savadiye quarter, which older sources call Zevâdiye, is today known as Pirler Parkı. According to Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi, the tomb holds Gümüşlüzâde Pîr Şücâ'addîn İlyâs el-Halvetî, his son-in-law Pîr Celâleddîn Abdurrahmân Çelebi, his grandson Pîr Hayreddîn Hızır Çelebi, and their wives and four daughters (hatuns); Mihri Hatun is one of these four hatuns. Neither the old nor the new sources record which grave is hers. A researcher who has spent years investigating the matter inside and around the tomb also reports that he could find no clue on the question.

The Tradition of Women Poets in Amasya

Mihri was not the only woman poet to emerge from the court at Amasya. Zeyneb Hatun, named in the same circle, is known as the first Ottoman woman poet whose name and poetry are recorded; she is said to have compiled a divan in the name of Mehmed the Conqueror (Fâtih) and to have received a reward for it. Zeyneb's divan is lost; all that remains of it are three poems seen in biographical dictionaries and anthologies, and her birthplace is disputed between Amasya and Kastamonu. Her life, the disagreements among the sources over her name, and her surviving poems are described in detail in the article on Zeyneb Hatun.

The two poets share common ground: both were daughters of judges, and both were women trained in learning who knew Arabic and Persian. The fact that Mihri has a divan in hand gives her a distinct weight; Zeyneb's divan has disappeared. Ayşe Hubbî Hatun is also mentioned among the women poets of the same period in the biographical dictionaries, but there are no detailed entries about them of the kind devoted to Mihri. Mihri's distinction lies in expressing a woman's sensibility so openly within the tradition. Unlike poets who remained bound to the classical mold, she carries both the voice of the lover and that of the beloved in her poetry. One tradition says that Mihri trained poets and that Ani Hatun was among them; this information could not be verified with reliable primary sources.

Publication of the Divan and Later Recognition

The divan reached readers again after centuries. Maştakova's critical edition was published in Moscow in 1967. In Turkey, Mehmet Arslan's Mihrî Hatun Divanı appeared in 2007 among the publications of the Amasya Governorship. A crater newly discovered on the planet Venus has been named Mihri Hatun by the International Astronomical Union; the naming is recorded as having been made in 1985. Books about her include Didem Havlioğlu's Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Meryem Aybike Sinan's Mihri Hatun: Kelimelerin Sultanı (2015) and Sennur Sezer's Türk Safo'su Mihri Hatun (2005).

Chronology

1454-55: Prince Bayezid II comes to Amasya at the age of seven or eight.

1455-56: Hâtemî (Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman) is born; this is the beginning of the range estimated for Mihri's birth (between 1455-56 and 1460-61).

1481-82: Bayezid II becomes sultan; his son Prince Ahmed becomes governor of Amasya.

26 January 1505 (20 Şaban 910): According to the register of gifts, the first recorded gift is made to Mihri.

29 August 1508 (2 Cemâziyelevvel 914): She sends her divan and receives 3000 akçe.

12 February 1510 (3 Zilkade 915) and 10 January 1511 (10 Şevval 916): Two more gifts are made in return for her qasidas.

16 March 1512 (27 Zilhicce 917): The last date on which she is documented as alive; she sends a qasida to Bayezid II and receives a gift.

After 1512 (1514-15 according to Gibb): She dies in Amasya and is buried in the cemetery of her grandfather Pîr İlyas's lodge.

1967: The divan is published in Moscow.

2007: The divan is published in Turkey among the publications of the Amasya Governorship.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Mihrî Hatun, Dîvân (nşr. E. İ. Maştakova), Moskova 1967.
  • Mehmet Arslan (haz.), Mihrî Hâtun Divanı, Ankara: Amasya Valiliği Yayınları, 2007.
  • Sehî Bey, Latîfî, Âşık Çelebi and Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi (biographical dictionaries); Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnâme; Garîbî, Tezkire-i Mecâlis-i Şuarâ-yı Rûm (ed. İsrafil Babacan, 2010).
  • Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin, Amasya Tarihi.

Academic studies

  • İsmail E. Erünsal, "Mihrî Hatun", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/mihri-hatun
  • İsmail E. Erünsal, "Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi'nin Arşiv Kaynakları I: II. Bâyezid Devrine Ait Bir İn'âmât Defteri", Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten, 1981.

Books

  • Didem Havlioğlu, Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History, Syracuse University Press, 2017.

Other sources

Online sources