Merzifon lies northwest of Amasya, on the southern slope of Mount Tavşan (Taşan), at the edge of the fertile plain that bears its name. Standing at roughly 750 metres above sea level on the road linking Istanbul and Ankara with the port of Samsun, it served for centuries as a crossing point and market town. For a small town in the shadow of larger cities, it produced a surprising number of statesmen, Sufis, madrasa professors and poets who carried its name with them into history as part of their own. Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, who rose to the Ottoman grand vizierate, is the best known of them, yet the town's intellectual and spiritual life cannot be told through him alone; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the scholars who taught in its madrasa and the sheikhs of its lodges shaped that life at least as decisively.

The Historical Setting

The core of Merzifon is thought to have been a small fortress built in the Hittite period as a border post. The settlement enters history in the first century BC, when Roman rule followed the Kingdom of Pontus. In 64 BC, when Pompey defeated Mithridates of Pontus, a settlement called Phazemonis already stood here, and Pompey declared it a city and named it Neapolis. The origin of the modern name is disputed. The name that Stephen of Byzantium recorded in the fifth century as Phamidzon gradually became Mazifon, Marsovan and Mersivan; Seljuk sources write it Bâzimûn, Persian sources Merzubân, and Ottoman documents Merzifon. The claim that the name derives from Barsevinç of the Hun Turks, or from a combination of the Persian merz and the word Pont, has no serious support.

After the Battle of Manzikert, the Danishmend emir İltegin Gazi captured the town. His son Sihâmüddevle Hüseyin Gazi lived here for a long time, and the place where he stayed survives as a neighbourhood of the town under the name Samandolu (Buğdaylı). From the Danishmendids onward Merzifon took on the appearance of a typical Turkish-Islamic town. Passing under the Anatolian Seljuks, then the Ilkhanids and the Eretnids, the town became a stage in the late fourteenth century for the struggles of Kadı Burhâneddin, the emirs of the Candaroğlu dynasty and Bayezid the Thunderbolt. Kadı Burhâneddin made camp here in 1393, and Bayezid, who had been drawn into the conflict, reached Merzifon with a large army and took the town.

The town's institutional backbone was built in the Ottoman period. After the Battle of Ankara, Çelebi Mehmed, who had consolidated his authority around Tokat and Amasya, had a madrasa built in Merzifon between 1414 and 1417. Counted among the earliest monuments of Turkish-Islamic architecture, the building remained the centre of intellectual life for a century and a half. In 1419 Çelebi Mehmed's mother Devlet Hatun added a mosque, a lodge and a soup kitchen in the İmaret quarter. Murad II built the Medreseönü Mosque, which the sources call the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Mosque, and a second madrasa. These buildings determined the town's appearance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while the people who studied in their orbit carried its name across Anatolia. According to the survey of 1520 the town had thirty-four quarters, twenty-eight Muslim and six non-Muslim, and its population is estimated at five or six thousand.

Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha

Merzifon's best-known son, Kara Mustafa Pasha, was born in 1634-1635 in the village of Marınca, today called Karamustafapaşa. His father, Oruç Bey, was a timar-holding cavalryman who fell as a martyr during Murad IV's siege of Baghdad. Orphaned at the age of four, Mustafa came under the protection of Köprülü Mehmed Bey, then sanjak governor of Amasya and a friend of his father, and received a good madrasa education alongside Köprülü's sons. Another account in the sources makes his father a cavalryman named Derviş and gives his birth year as 1626-1627. Having married Köprülü's daughter, Mustafa served first as sword-bearer and then as report-writer under his father-in-law's grand vizierate and accompanied him on the Transylvanian campaign. When he brought news of the conquest of Novigrad, Mehmed IV made him second master of the horse, and two years later he was appointed governor-general of Silistra. He later served as governor-general of Diyarbekir and, under the vizierate of Köprülüzade Fâzıl Ahmed Pasha, as grand admiral from 1661 to 1666; he also acted as deputy grand vizier.

After Fâzıl Ahmed Pasha's death he was appointed grand vizier on 5 November 1676 and remained in office for about seven years. The first great problem of his tenure was the status of the Ukrainian Cossacks. In the campaigns launched after Chyhyryn fell under Russian influence, the fortress of Chyhyryn was taken in 1678, and the peace terms fixed at Bakhchisaray were ratified in 1681. The real turning point was the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Inheriting from the Köprülü father and son a state whose internal and external problems were largely settled, Kara Mustafa Pasha believed that remaining in office depended on achieving a success on the scale of his predecessors'. The siege began on 14 July 1683; it dragged on because heavy siege guns had not been brought, and on 12 September it turned into a rout under the attack of the allied forces commanded by Jan Sobieski. It is reported that the pasha intended to withdraw to Belgrade and regroup the army, but that intrigues among his rivals at court led Mehmed IV to order his execution. He was executed in Belgrade on 25 December 1683. The sources disagree on where he was buried: according to some accounts in the courtyard of a mosque or outside the walls in Belgrade, according to others in the graveyard of the Saruca Paşa Mosque in Edirne.

The works Kara Mustafa Pasha left to his hometown still define the physical fabric of Merzifon. The complex he built between 1666 and 1679 included a mosque, the Taşhan caravanserai, a covered market, a library, a primary school, two bathhouses and shops; the water channels belonging to his endowments also brought significant changes to the town's social and economic life. A mosque was also built in the village of Bahçekent in the name of his mother, Âbide Hatun. The pasha founded endowments in Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir and Aleppo, and his complex on Divanyolu in Istanbul was completed by his son Ali Pasha. Contemporary observers describe him as an intelligent, brave and capable soldier and also as proud, obstinate and fond of fame. He has been known as "Kara" in the West, "Merzifonlu" in Turkey and, after his execution, as "Maktul" (the Slain).

Sheikh Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî

The figure who left an older and more lasting mark on Merzifon's spiritual life than any statesman is the Sufi and poet Sheikh Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî. Born in Merzifon, Abdürrahîm was the son of a man known by the nickname Sarı Dânişmend; Ahmet Suphi Furat gives his father's name as Emir Aziz Efendi. After his early education at home he went to Egypt, where he became attached to Zeynüddin el-Hâfî, founder of the Zeyniyye branch of the Suhrawardiyya order. He then travelled with his sheikh to Khorasan and stayed there for several years to complete his training. The text of the licence (icazetname) issued to him by his sheikh, written in Arabic and dated 832 (1428-1429), is preserved in Lâmiî's Turkish translation of the Nefehât. The document lists the works he had read and was authorised to teach, among them Zeynüddin el-Hâfî's Vesâyâ-yi Kudsiyye and the İ'lâmü'l-hüdâ and Avârifü'l-me'ârif of Shihâb al-Dîn al-Suhrawardî, founder of the Suhrawardiyya order. The Avârif is one of the Sufi texts most widely read by members of the Zeyniyye.

When Hâfî sent him to Anatolia he said, "We lit a log of love and threw it into the land of Rûm." The remark, also reported by Taşköprülüzade, shows that Abdürrahîm's mission was more than the end of an apprenticeship; it meant carrying a branch of the order to Anatolia. Abdürrahîm settled in his native Merzifon and spent his life there teaching books, writing and giving spiritual guidance until his death. He wrote Turkish poems under the pen name Rûmî and became famous for the couplet "Tövbe yâ rabbi hatâ râhına gittiklerime / Bilip ettiklerime bilmeyip ettiklerime". The sources mention the works İrşâdü'l-enâm, Vesâyâ, Dîvançe-i İlâhiyyât and Işknâme, but only the Işknâme survives; it is recorded among the Turkish manuscripts of the Istanbul University Library. He probably died in 850 (1446). Mecdî Efendi of Edirne records that he performed miracles during his life and at his death and that people visited his grave to receive blessing. His tomb is still in Merzifon. A separate study of him by Berin Taşan was published in İzmir in 1975.

Pîrî Baba holds a place of his own in Merzifon's history. What is known of his life rests on the Menâkıb-ı Pîrî Baba written by Hoca İbrâhim and on Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme. According to the legend, Pîrî Baba was one of the dervishes sent to Anatolia by Ahmed Yesevî, but he is thought in reality to have lived in the second half of the fifteenth century. The hagiography says that he came from the village of Narince, that at the age of seven or eight his mother apprenticed him to a cobbler in Merzifon, and that even as a child he was devoted to worship. In the account he performed the noon prayer in the Kaaba and brought water from the well of Zamzam whenever his master asked for water. Hoca İbrâhim says the lodge built in Pîrî Baba's name appears in the land survey of 926 (1520), and it has been suggested that the work was written, while Pîrî Baba's nephew Ali Dede was still alive, probably in the reign of Selim I.

The central theme in the sources is Pîrî Baba's relationship with the sultan of his day. According to the Menâkıbnâme, the dervish lived in the furnace room of the bathhouse and kept staying there during the hours reserved for women, which provoked the Merzifon ulema and led to a complaint to the sultan. Evliya Çelebi gives the grounds of the complaint as his scrubbing women's backs with a bath mitt and soap and telling pregnant women the sex of their unborn children. The Menâkıbnâme names the sultan as Mehmed II. Coming to punish Pîrî Baba, the ruler witnessed his extraordinary states, understood that he was a saint, and Pîrî Baba announced to him the conquest of Istanbul. After the conquest Mehmed wished to grant him gifts and lands, but the dervish refused them and asked that they be given to the Merzifon ulema so that they would pray for him. According to Evliya Çelebi, the sultan was Murad II instead; Pîrî Baba announces to him the conquest of İzmir and to Prince Mehmed the conquest of Istanbul, and when the prophecy comes true, 366 villages and the town of Merzifon are endowed to the lodge. The number of villages and the endowment in this account are legendary elements with no basis in any historical document. Scholars read the motif, in which the saint is placed above the sultan and which also appears in the hagiography of Otman Baba from the same period, as a narrative pattern, and interpret it as a reaction to Mehmed II's hostile policy toward dervishes.

Pîrî Baba's affiliation is disputed. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak counts his hagiography among the Bektashi menâkıbnâmes written in the sixteenth century, but the information in the work is not enough to call him a Bektashi. His going about naked, Evliya Çelebi's use of the term "ışık", by which Kalenderî dervishes were then described, and his resemblances to Otman Baba suggest that he was a Kalenderî. Suraiya Faroqhi notes that the lodge was in Bektashi hands in the seventeenth century but that it cannot be said to have been founded as a Bektashi lodge. The survey of 1520 shows a sheikh named Şahkulu Baba b. Bâyezid serving at the lodge, and the survey of 1574-1575 shows the same man still in office. When Evliya Çelebi visited Merzifon in 1647-1648 he wrote that many visitors thronged the tomb and the lodge, that the sick who bathed in the bathhouse were believed to be cured, and that a sheikh named Memi Dede Can was then at the lodge. The date of Pîrî Baba's death is unknown. His tomb is in the Tekke quarter of Merzifon and was last repaired in 1977 by the General Directorate of Foundations. The Pîrî Baba Lodge and the cult of Pîrî Baba have kept their social and cultural influence to the present.

Other names are also recalled in the region's Sufi history, with tombs that still stand: Kılıç Baba, İsmâil Dede, Topçu Baba, Pehlivan Dede, Fevzi Baba, Fîruz Dede and Dâvud Dede. Written sources on most of them are limited, and what is known rests largely on popular tradition.

The Merzifon Madrasa and Its Professors

Ahmet Suphi Furat compiled the intellectual history of Merzifon in an article in İslam Tetkikleri Dergisi, drawing on biographical dictionaries such as Taşköprülüzade's Şekâik-i Nu'mâniyye, Mecdî Efendi's translation, Nev'îzâde Atâî's Hadâiku'l-hakâyık and Kefevî's Ketâ'ib. According to the article, from the time of Çelebi Mehmed Merzifon produced scholars, men of letters, jurists, Sufis, judges and muftis, and the madrasa continued teaching until the end of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, that is, throughout the classical Ottoman period. Furat notes that beyond the madrasa, literary, moral and mystical education was also kept alive in mosques, lodges and the gatherings held in the homes of the learned and their patrons. Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî and the madrasa teachers, as leaders of two different fields, the mystical and the scholarly, formed an environment of learning and culture that nourished one another until the time of Murad II.

İlyas er-Rûmî and Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea

Among the first professors to teach at the Merzifon Madrasa, Kefevî names Molla İlyas b. Yahya b. Hamza er-Rûmî. Taşköprülüzade describes him as professor, judge and mufti of Merzifon and says that he studied jurisprudence under Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Mahmud al-Bukhârî, known as Khwaja Muhammad Pârsâ, and received a licence from him in Bukhara in 821 (1418). According to Kefevî, Murad II gave the Merzifon Madrasa to İlyas er-Rûmî, who served as judge and mufti. Since no work of his is recorded in the sources, we know little more about him.

After İlyas er-Rûmî the madrasa passed to Seyyid Ahmed b. Abdullah of Crimea. Taşköprülüzade reports that Murad II gave him the madrasa at Merzifon. By Furat's reckoning the young scholar, who must then have been twenty-five to thirty, stayed there until 1451, the year Murad II handed the throne to his son for the second time, then came to Istanbul and met Mehmed II during the vizierate of Mahmud Pasha. That he did not confine himself to teaching in Merzifon is clear from his Haşiye ale't-Telvîh, dated 849 (1449). This is an Arabic gloss of about 250 folios, some 500 pages, on al-Telvîh of Sa'd al-Dîn al-Taftâzânî, itself a commentary on al-Tawdîh, Sadr al-Sharîʿa Ubaydallâh b. Masʿûd's commentary on his work of legal theory, al-Tanqîh. His gloss on Taftâzânî's al-Mutavval, called al-Muavvel and devoted to rhetoric, is dated 856 (1452), and it leads Furat to think that the preparation of the work took place in the Merzifon Madrasa. Manuscript copies are today in the Süleymaniye Library.

Abdullah el-Amâsî and Muhammed Kocevî

Another professor who taught at Merzifon under Murad II was Abdullah el-Amâsî. The nisba Amâsî suggests that he was born in Amasya or served there for a time. Taşköprülüzade names him among the scholars of Mehmed II's time and writes that after studying under the leading scholars of the age he became a professor at the Merzifon Madrasa, continued the post at the Sultan Bayezid Han Madrasa in Amasya, and died there. He is described as devout, ascetic and righteous, with deep knowledge of jurisprudence, hadith and Qur'anic exegesis as well as of the literary sciences, and was regarded as a master of rhetoric. He is also recorded as having taught al-Sakkâkî's Miftâhu'l-ulûm to a large body of students and made them love it without recourse to commentaries.

Muhammed Kocevî, father of Muhyiddin Seyyidî Çelebi (d. 931/1524), whom Taşköprülüzade lists among the scholars of Bayezid II's time, was also a professor at the Merzifon Madrasa. Furat notes that all we know of him is that he taught for a long time in this madrasa, and that he may have held the post before his son.

Molla Ahî Yûsuf and Molla Seyyid İbrahim

Molla Ahî Yûsuf b. Cüneyd of Tokat, who lived in Bayezid II's reign, was a student of Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea. Since Taşköprülüzade gives this with the phrase "when Molla Seyyid Ahmed was professor in that madrasa", it appears that Ahî Yûsuf began his studies in the Merzifon Madrasa. He later became a student of Molla Salâhaddin, one of Sultan Bayezid's teachers, and joined the retinue of Molla Hüsrev. He taught in madrasas in Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul and was appointed to one of the Sahn-ı Semân madrasas. He is the author of the gloss Zahîretü'l-ukbâ on Sadr al-Sharîʿa's Sharh al-Wiqâya and of Hediyyetü'l-mühtedîn, a work dealing with statements that lead to unbelief. He is said to have owned many books, which he endowed for scholars to read.

Molla Seyyid İbrahim (d. 935/1528), another scholar of Bayezid II's time, also taught at the Merzifon Madrasa. His family had migrated from Iran to Anatolia and settled in a village called Yenice near Amasya. Taşköprülüzade writes that his father was a man of miracles whom Bayezid II also respected. After studying first with his father and then with Hocazâde at the Iznik Madrasa, Seyyid İbrahim served for a time as tutor to Prince Korkut and was then appointed to the Merzifon Madrasa. He later taught at Karahisar, at the Vizier Mustafa Pasha Madrasa in Istanbul and at the Bayezid Han Madrasa in Amasya, and was appointed to the fatwa office at Amasya at eighty akçe a day. Before long he left that post and was retired on a hundred akçe a day. When Selim I took the throne he bought him a house near Eyüp; Seyyid İbrahim lived there until his death, and the house was endowed for those who would become professors at the Ebû Eyyûb el-Ensârî Madrasa. Taşköprülüzade records that he visited this scholar, who copied many books in a fine hand and lost his sight in his last years, the day before he died.

Molla Atûfî

Molla Atûfî, counted among the scholars of Selim I's time, gives his full name at the end of his own commentary on the Meşârik as Hıdır b. Mahmud b. Ömer el-Merzifonî el-Atûfî. The sources generally call him simply Atûfî; Taşköprülüzade does not give the nisba Merzifonî, and in Mecdî's translation he appears as Kastamonî. Furat thinks he bore this nisba because he was probably born in Merzifon. He dedicated some of his works to Bayezid II and, in his book on prophetic medicine, Ravzu'l-insân, called him the truly learned and practising caliph of the age. Instead of a professorship he preferred to teach and preach in the mosques of Istanbul, and he wrote on subjects ranging from Qur'anic exegesis and hadith to medicine and the science of dreams. He died in Eyüp, where he lived, in 948 (1541) and was buried near his house. Furat also mentions among the scholars of Selim's time Molla Bünyad er-Rûmî el-Merzifonî, about whose life the sources give no information and of whom only a short treatise, Er-Risâletü'l-'Âşûriyye, survives.

Merzifon under Süleyman the Magnificent: Molla Hâfız Acem and Other Professors

The best-known teacher of the Merzifon Madrasa in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent was Molla Hâfız Acem. Full name Hâfızüddin Mehmed b. Ahmed b. Âdil Pasha, he fled the pressure of Shah Ismail, came to Anatolia, and died around 1550. After a serious education in Tabriz he joined the circle of Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi of Amasya, whom he had met in Shiraz around Jalâl al-Dîn al-Dawwânî; Müeyyedzâde presented him to Bayezid II after the death of Mehmed II and secured him the Ankara Madrasa. While teaching there he copied a Sadr al-Sharîʿa in his fine hand in as short a time as a month and used it in his lessons. After moving to the Merzifon Madrasa he continued both to teach and to write. At Merzifon he first wrote a gloss for some sections of Sayyid Sharîf's commentary on the Miftâh, then returned to the subject and finished his gloss by writing the third part of the Miftâhu'l-ulûm in fifteen days. More than sixty years earlier Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea had also worked on rhetoric in this madrasa. When Hâfız Acem came to Istanbul he presented the gloss he had written at Merzifon to Müeyyedzâde. Selim I, wintering in Amasya, got to know him and appointed him to the Eski Ali Pasha Madrasa in Istanbul. His later posts were at the Iznik, Sahn-ı Semân and Ayasofya madrasas; he wrote the treatise Heyûlâ at Iznik, Şerh-i Tecrîd at Sahn-ı Semân and Medînetü'l-ilm at the Ayasofya Madrasa.

Among other scholars of Merzifon in the reign of Süleyman recorded by Furat, Kutbeddin el-Merzifonî, who was in the circle of Zenbilli Ali Efendi, the sheikh al-Islam of Bayezid II's time, in the latter's last years, was a professor who most probably owed his nisba to being born in the town. He died in 935 (1528) and taught at the Iznik, Davud Pasha and Trabzon madrasas. Kutbeddin is said to have had wide knowledge of the Arabic sciences and jurisprudence and to have written glosses on parts of Sadr al-Sharîʿa's commentary on the Wiqâya and Sayyid Sharîf's commentary on the Miftâh, but these works could not be found in manuscript libraries. Zeyrek Muhyiddin Muhammed el-Hüseynî (d. 947/1540), from the vicinity of Ankara, studied under Yusuf Germiyânî, Seyyidî Muhammed Kocevî and Birgivîzâde Muslihuddin Efendi, became the assistant of Bâlî Efendi of Aydın, taught at the Ankara, Merzifon and Tokat madrasas, and died while serving as tutor to Prince Mehmed, son of Süleyman. He is known to have built a mosque and a place of instruction in his own town. Molla İbnü'ş-Şeyh, whose real name was Abdullah, was the son of a deputy of Tâceddin, one of the Zeyniyye sheikhs. Coming from a family of Boyabat, he began teaching at the Merzifon Madrasa, continued in other madrasas, and before long chose seclusion and retired. He is recorded as having wide and reliable knowledge, especially of the Beyzâvî commentary. Şeyhzâde, whose real name was Abdurrahman, was the son of Cemâleddin Efendi, one of the scholars of Bayezid II's time; he took lessons from Hâfız Acem at the Merzifon Madrasa, then became the assistant of Molla Karabağî at Iznik and, after Karabağî's death in 1535, served at the Cezerî Kasım Pasha Madrasa.

Poets and Later Centuries

Merzifon's tradition of learning and literature did not end when the age of the madrasas closed. In the nineteenth century poets such as Hilmi Dede, Hıfzî, Eyüb Sabri and Muallim Cûdî Efendi emerged in the town. The town grew steadily in population and physical form during that century; the clock tower that the Amasya governor Ziyâ Pasha had built over the madrasa gate in 1866, and the American College, founded in 1876 and occupying the highest point in the north of the town with its hospital, school, library, laboratory and observatory, are counted among the town's new educational institutions. The town remained an important centre of trade and education in the Republican period, and by 1960 its population had passed twenty thousand.

Chronology

1414-1417: Çelebi Mehmed has a madrasa built in Merzifon.

1418: İlyas er-Rûmî receives a licence in Bukhara from Khwaja Muhammad Pârsâ.

1419: Çelebi Mehmed's mother Devlet Hatun has a mosque, a lodge and a soup kitchen built in Merzifon.

1428-1429: Zeynüddin el-Hâfî issues a licence to Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî (AH 832).

1446: Probable year of Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî's death (AH 850).

1449: Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea writes Haşiye ale't-Telvîh in Merzifon.

1451: Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea leaves the Merzifon Madrasa.

1452: Seyyid Ahmed of Crimea completes his gloss al-Muavvel.

1520: According to the land survey Merzifon has thirty-four quarters; Şahkulu Baba is sheikh of the Pîrî Baba Lodge.

1528: Molla Seyyid İbrahim and Kutbeddin el-Merzifonî die.

1541: Molla Atûfî dies in Eyüp.

1634-1635: Kara Mustafa Pasha is born in the village of Marınca.

1647-1648: Evliya Çelebi visits Merzifon.

1666-1679: Kara Mustafa Pasha's complex in Merzifon is built.

5 November 1676: Kara Mustafa Pasha becomes grand vizier.

14 July 1683: The Siege of Vienna begins.

25 December 1683: Kara Mustafa Pasha is executed in Belgrade.

1977: The Tomb of Pîrî Baba is repaired by the General Directorate of Foundations.

Sources

Academic studies

Other sources

  • Berin Taşan, Merzifonlu Şeyh Abdürrahim Rumi, İzmir 1975.
  • Taşköprülüzade, eş-Şekâik en-Nu'mâniyye (ed. Ahmet Suphi Furat), Istanbul 1985.

Online sources