Sâmî was the poet of a seven-stanza muaşşer elegy written on the killing of Şehzade Mustafa (Prince Mustafa) in 1553. This elegy stands foremost among the poems that aim directly at the sultan and openly condemn him. The poet's identity, however, is uncertain: the only identification proposed for him rests on a biographical anthology written much later and is problematic in its chronology, and there are other poets bearing the same or a similar pen name. This page treats the poem itself and the question of identity separately.

Sâmî's known connection with Amasya is made through Prince Mustafa, the subject of his elegy. The prince was sanjak governor (sanjak-bey) of Amasya from 1541 to 1553 and had gathered a wide circle of poets and scholars in the city. As will be explained below, the biographical anthologies also mention a poet with the pen name Şâmî who served as sanjak governor of Amasya; but there is no evidence that this man was the poet of the elegy.

Life

The elegy was first introduced by Mehmed Çavuşoğlu in his article "Şehzade Mustafa Mersiyeleri", published in 1981-1982. Çavuşoğlu notes that the sultan, who dismissed Rüstem Pasha, did not touch Taşlıcalı Yahya, who had given voice to the feelings of the people, that poets encouraged by this tolerance also wrote elegies, and he stresses that Sâmî and Nisâyî openly condemned the sultan. In his 2018 thesis Recep Hasar, relying on the Safâyî Tezkiresi, writes that Sâmî was a cavalryman (sipahi) from Istanbul; he gives no other information about the poet's life. The words "câh u cehüm" (my rank and standing) in the first stanza of the elegy suggest that the poet had some service or hope attached to the prince; this is an inference.

The State of the Sources

The Safâyî Tezkiresi on which Hasar relies is the Nuhbetü'l-âsâr min fevâidi'l-eş‘âr completed by Mustafa Safâyî Efendi in 1720. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, this anthology was prepared as a continuation of the Rızâ Tezkiresi and covers poets who lived between 1640 and 1720. It therefore seems difficult for the Istanbul cavalryman Sâmî mentioned by Safâyî to be the same person as the poet who wrote an elegy in 1553. Hasar's identification should thus be treated with caution; this assessment is our own.

The sixteenth-century anthologies, on the other hand, mention not Sâmî but two poets with the pen name Şâmî. In Arabic script the difference between the two letters is only three dots, and in manuscripts these dots can sometimes be lost. The first Şâmî is Şamlıoğlu Mustafa Bey: he was a sanjak governor in the reign of Bayezid II and, according to the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, died around 1500 or a few years later; he cannot be the poet of the elegy. The second Şâmî is introduced by Beyânî as "Şâmî-i Sânî" and by Kınalızâde in the second entry under the same name. According to Kınalızâde this Şâmî too was from Damascus and was named Mustafa; through the treasurer Çivizâde Mahmud Çelebi he entered the service of Selim II, left the palace as chief taster (çaşnigirbaşı) and became sanjak governor of Amasya. Beyânî also records that he became governor (mirliva) of Amasya. This Şâmî's connection with Amasya is clear, but no source says that he wrote an elegy for Prince Mustafa, and the anthologists do not mention one. The possibility that the two names have been confused is no more than a possibility; for the present, the poet of the elegy remains a Sâmî whose identity cannot be established.

His Poetry

Sâmî's only surviving poem is his elegy for Prince Mustafa. The poem is a muaşşer of seven stanzas in the metre "fe’ilâtün fe’ilâtün fe’ilâtün fe’ilün"; the first nine lines of each stanza rhyme among themselves, and the tenth is the refrain "Mustafâ n’oldı kanı n’eyledün â pâdişehüm" (What became of Mustafa, where is he, what have you done, O my sultan). Hasar notes that all the elegies for sultans and princes in muaşşer form were written for Prince Mustafa.

The poet puts questions to the sultan: is it fitting to slay his son, to whom will his crown and throne pass, has he no fear of God. In the fourth stanza, with the redif (refrain word) "olasın" (may you be), blessing and curse are interwoven; it is wished that the sultan's thousand-year life be but a moment, that his crown be lost and he be left naked, and that he weep for his son. In the fifth stanza Muhibbî (the lover), the pen name Süleyman used in his poems, is invoked to ask, "is this the love in you". The poet also answers the claims that the prince had come to an understanding with the Shah of Iran and had come to fight his father: the prince was killed while he wished to take revenge on his father's Qizilbash enemy, and when he came to the imperial tent he had not even two soldiers with him. Semra Güler finds Sâmî's elegy as daring as Yahya's in that it aims directly at the sultan.

The original text of the poem, its couplet-by-couplet English prose rendering and a commentary are published as 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

Academic studies

Books

Online sources