Selîmî was a sixteenth-century poet who wrote a seven-stanza elegy on the killing of Şehzade Mustafa (Prince Mustafa) in the army camp near Konya Ereğlisi in 1553. Almost everything we know about him today comes from this single poem: apart from his pen name, he has not been clearly identified in any source, and his dates of birth and death, his home town and his profession are unknown. He is a poet of uncertain identity whose connection with Amasya can be traced only through this elegy; this page sets out separately what the sources say and what they do not.

The subject of his poem is Prince Mustafa, who lived for twelve years, from 1541 to 1553, as sanjak governor (sanjak-bey) of Amasya and gathered the last great princely circle in the city. There is no information that Selîmî was ever in Amasya or entered the prince's circle there. We include him among the divan poets of Amasya because he is the author of one of the nineteen surviving elegies composed for Amasya's prince.

Life and Identity

Selîmî's 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 in the Millet Library; the same anthology contains an elegy by a poet with the pen name Kâdirî, and according to Recep Hasar the two poems were written out by the same copyist. The elegy is headed "Mersiyye-i Selîmî Berâ-yı Katl-i Sultân Mustafâ" (Selîmî's elegy on the killing of Sultan Mustafa).

On the basis of the poem's style, İsen considers Selîmî one of the soldier poets who, like Taşlıcalı Yahya, were with the army at the time of the event. Some details of the elegy agree with this view: the poet says that the prince travels the lands of Karaman in a coffin, he knows where the death took place, and he addresses his reproach directly to the heavens. Selîmî's soldiering, however, is an inference rather than a documented fact. Semra Güler notes that the names of these poets occur in the biographical anthologies of the period, but that nothing more is known about them.

The State of the Sources

The pen name Selîmî is common in Ottoman poetry, and the people known by it have to be kept apart. The best known of them is Selim I (Selim the Grim), who used the pen name Selîmî in his Persian divan and who has his own category in the Literature section of our site. The poet of the elegy must not be confused with him, since Selim I died in 1520. The entry Selîmî in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü belongs to a folk minstrel (aşık) known for the Mirasyedi Destanı and an epic on the Cretan uprising, who probably lived in the eighteenth or nineteenth century; he too has nothing to do with this poet.

A further confusion comes from our own articles. Although some accounts give the name as Selâmî, İsen, Hasar and the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü write Selîmî. In the last stanza of the poem the pen name occurs in the line "İy Selîm ol gerçi teslîm-i fermân eyledi", where a clear play on sound is made between the words "Selîm" and "teslîm". Since this wordplay makes sense only with the reading "Selîmî", we believe that Selîmî is the correct reading; this judgement is our own.

His Poetry

Selîmî's only surviving poem is his elegy for Prince Mustafa. It is a murabba of seven stanzas in the metre "fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilâtün fâ’ilün", and every stanza ends with the refrain "Kanı ol şehzâdeler şehbâzı Sultân Mustafâ" (Where is he, the falcon among princes, Sultan Mustafa). Hasar establishes that among the elegies for sultans and princes, all those written in murabba form were composed for Prince Mustafa; Selîmî's poem is one of this group. The poet directs his reproach at the heavens and does not blame the sultan or the viziers by name; the wish that the sultan should weep whenever he remembers the prince remains the sharpest sentence in the poem. He likens the prince to the huma bird and to a companion of the martyr of Karbala, and says that he sacrificed his life on the sultan's path.

The original text of the poem, its English prose rendering and a commentary are published as a separate article in this category. The other elegies written for Prince Mustafa and their poets are described in our article Elegies for Prince Mustafa, and the prince's life in the biography Şehzade Mustafa.

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