Tâcîzâde Câfer Çelebi was chancellor (nişancı) to Bayezid II, chief military judge (kazasker) of Anatolia under Selim I (Selim the Grim), and one of the most widely read poets of the late fifteenth century. He was born in Amasya in the years when his father Tâcî Bey served Prince Bayezid there, received his first lessons in the town, and spent the last winter of his life in Amasya again, with Selim's army. Today he is remembered above all for the Heves-nâme, a mesnevi describing Istanbul and an affair of his own; in his lifetime, however, his reputation rested on his divan, which placed dozens of poems in the anthologies of response poems and served as the model for hundreds of them.

The years as chancellor, the Çaldıran campaign and the execution of 1515 are told at length in the biography of Tâcîzâde Câfer Çelebi; below, his life is only briefly recalled, and the main part is left to his divan, his idea of poetry and the sources of his poems. His father Tâcî Bey and his brother Sa'dî Çelebi wrote poetry too, and the couplets of both that survive in biographies and anthologies have been gathered separately.

Life and Years in Amasya

The sources give three different birth years for Câfer Çelebi. Hüseyin Hüsameddin's Nişancılar Durağı gives Şaban 856 (August 1452), a date also adopted by the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam. The entry in the eighth volume of the same author's Amasya Tarihi, however, gives Ramazan 860 (August 1456). Kâtib Çelebi's statement in Süllemü'l-vüsûl that he died in 921 at the age of fifty-three points to 868 (1463-64). İsmail E. Erünsal, who edited the divan, finds Kâtib Çelebi's reckoning the more convincing, on the strength of a couplet in the Heves-nâme implying that the poet was twenty-two at the time of his love affair in 891. What is certain is that he was born in Amasya; Hüsameddin even names the quarter: Dârüsselâm.

His father Tâcî Bey managed the affairs of Prince Bayezid while the prince was governor of the sanjak of Amasya; Latîfî calls him the prince's treasurer (defterdar), Âşık Çelebi his lala (tutor-guardian), and Âlî and Kâtib Çelebi his "müdebbirü'l-umûr", steward of his affairs. Câfer Çelebi's first teachers were also men of Amasya. In Amasya Tarihi Hüsameddin writes that he learned calligraphy from Şeyh Hamdullah and the literary sciences from Rükneddin Ahmed el-Cendî, Hatîb Kâsım and Abdî Efendi; Nişancılar Durağı names Şeyhîzâde Abdî, Muîdzâde Muhyiddin Mehmed and Horasânîzâde Seyyid Abdullah Çelebi. He then studied in Bursa and Istanbul with the leading scholars of the day, Hacı Hasanzâde, Hatîbzâde, Kestelî and Hocazâde among them, and became a candidate for office (mülazım) under Hacı Hasanzâde.

A career that began with teaching and judgeships was interrupted by a period in prison over a letter he had written to Prince Cem; after his release he became professor at the Mahmud Paşa madrasa in Istanbul and in 903 (1497) was appointed chancellor. He held the post for some fourteen years. Because he sided with Prince Ahmed in the struggle for the throne, his house was plundered in the Janissary revolt of 1511 and he lost his office. Selim made him chancellor again and, on the way back from Çaldıran, chief military judge of Anatolia. While the army wintered in Amasya in 1514-1515 the Janissaries rose once more, and this time Câfer Çelebi's house was attacked in Amasya. After the return to Istanbul he was executed on 8 Receb 921 (18 August 1515) on the charge of having incited that revolt, and was buried in the graveyard of his mosque at Balat.

The opening of Hüsameddin's entry gives the poet's roots in Amasya as follows:

Ca'fer Çelebi-Tâcî Beyzâde Amasya'nın Dârü's-Selâm Mahallesi'nde "İstanbulca Tâcî Bey" demekle meşhûr Hacı Beyzâde Tâceddîn İbrâhim Paşa bin Mevlânâ Safiyyüddîn Mustafa Çelebi bin Hacı Mehmed Gâzi Bey bin eş-Şeyh Alâaddîn Alî bin İbrâhim'in sulbinden 860 senesi ramazânında doğdu. Pek genç iken bir taraftan hutût-ı mütenevvi'ayı Şeyhzâde Hamdullâh Efendi'den ve diğer taraftan ulûm-ı edebiyyeyi Mevlânâ Rükneddîn Ahmed bin Mahmûd el-Cendî, Hatîb Kâsım, Mevlânâ Abdî Efendilerden ahz ü ta'allüm edib İstanbul'a gitdi.

In English: Câfer Çelebi, son of Tâcî Bey, was born in Ramazan of the year 860 in the Dârüsselâm quarter of Amasya, the son of Hacı Beyzâde Tâceddin İbrahim Paşa, known in Istanbul as "Tâcî Bey". While still very young he learned the various scripts from Şeyhzâde Hamdullah Efendi and the literary sciences from Mevlânâ Rükneddin Ahmed bin Mahmud el-Cendî, Hatîb Kâsım and Mevlânâ Abdî Efendi, and then went to Istanbul.

The view that Tâcî Bey was the same person as Tâceddin İbrahim Paşa, governor-general of Kefe, belongs to Hüsameddin alone. Erünsal points out that none of the ancestors in this genealogy appears in any other source, that Hüsameddin does not say where his information came from, and that his works must therefore be used with caution.

Works

The divan. Câfer Çelebi's divan is known from eight manuscripts, none of them in the author's hand: in a poetry anthology at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, in the Dârü'l-kütübi'l-Mısriyye in Cairo, in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, in the Hâlet Efendi and Ayasofya collections of the Süleymaniye Library, in the State Library in Marburg, in the Nuruosmaniye Library and in the British Museum. The Hâlet Efendi copy carries a curious confusion: its owner attributed the divan to a Mevlevi sheikh, "Ca'fer Dede", and erased the word "Çelebi" from its title. Erünsal collated six of these manuscripts and prepared the critical text of the divan as a doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh in 1977; it was printed in 1983 by the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul University. In 2018 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reissued this edition as an e-book, with the introduction translated into Turkish by Fatma Meliha Şen and updated from newer sources. The transcription on the poem pages is likewise taken from this 2018 edition.

By Erünsal's count the divan contains 28 Turkish kasides (qasidas), one müseddes, 255 Turkish ghazals including eight murabbas, three Turkish terci-bends and ten kıt'as. To these are added four Arabic kasides, one Arabic müstezat, one Arabic ghazal, two Persian kasides, one Persian tahmis, two Persian ghazals and one Persian murabba. Hüsameddin's remark that he had "three divans in three languages" (elsine-i selâsede üç dîvânı) reflects this multilingual make-up. The surviving manuscripts point to a single divan containing poems in three languages; three separately arranged divans have not come to light. M. Tayyib Gökbilgin puts the total number of couplets in the divan at 3382.

Heves-nâme. A mesnevi of about 3810 couplets in the hezec metre, completed in 899 (1493-94). The poet gives the date in his last couplet through the abjad value of the phrase "Maḥabbet-nāme-i Ca‘fer". The first part describes the buildings of Istanbul, from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the Fatih Mosque and the Semâniye madrasas; the second is the poet's account of himself and his well-known attack on Şeyhî and Ahmed Paşa as imitators; the third is a love affair that begins at Kâğıthane. Câfer Çelebi says he dedicated the work to "the fairy-faced" rather than to a sultan or a vizier. Some of the ghazals scattered through the mesnevi also appear in the divan; Erünsal thinks it more likely that they were written for the mesnevi and later taken into the divan. Necati Sungur's critical text was published in 2006.

Prose works. The Mahrûse-i İstanbul Fetih-nâmesi recounts the conquest of Istanbul in ornate prose studded with Qur'anic verses, hadith and couplets in three languages; Celâlzâde Mustafa Çelebi copied the whole text into his Meâsir-i Selîm Hân. Erünsal shows that some of its information is sounder than the accounts of Tursun Bey, Neşrî and Âşıkpaşazâde. Whether he left a separate collection of letters (münşeat) is uncertain; the three letters written to Shah Ismail during the Çaldıran campaign, the victory letters on the conquest of Modon and Koron and a letter to the khan of Samarkand are counted as his. He translated the ethical treatise Enîsü'l-ârifîn from Persian for Hadım Ali Paşa and in 894 (1489) rendered Kazvînî's history of the Persian kings into Turkish for Bayezid II. Âşık Çelebi also mentions a Kusnâme in the genre of ribald verse (hezel).

Literary Personality

According to Erünsal, the influence of Ahmed Paşa of Bursa is plain in Câfer Çelebi's kasides. Most of them are panegyrics to Bayezid II; four are addressed to Selim I, three to the vizier Hadım Ali Paşa, one to Prince Ahmed and two to a sheikh, while two are written to the beloved. Those for Bayezid dwell on the sultan's piety and devoutness. His habit of placing a ghazal addressed to the beloved inside almost every kaside is, as Erünsal notes, not very common in the Turkish kaside. He likes to make the passage from the prelude (nesib) to the praise (medih) turn on a rhyme word: in the kaside presented to Selim he first places "selîm" (sound, healthy) in the rhyme as an adjective and repeats it in the next couplet as the sultan's name.

His ghazals run from five to twelve couplets; all but one deal with profane love. Erünsal finds their language witty and informal: Câfer Çelebi does not hesitate to set the idioms of everyday speech, proverbs and turns of phrase such as "whatever black days may come" into his couplets, he is fond of rhymes built on puns and on extended rhyme (iltizam), and he shapes some ghazals with a sound pattern suited to musical setting. The ghazals include many nazires (response poems) to Ahmed Paşa and, less often, to Şeyhî and Necâtî; Erünsal shows couplets in which he takes over a line of Ahmed Paşa while changing a single word. That the poet who accused these two masters of imitation in the Heves-nâme should bear their mark so plainly in his divan did not escape earlier scholars either.

The verdicts of his contemporaries do not agree. Sehî finds his poetry graceful; Latîfî ranks him with Hassân in verse and with Sahbân in prose. Âşık Çelebi reports a conversation: when Câfer Çelebi said that love was a fable and that a man of sense would make no claim to it, Selim told him that his ignorance of love was evident from his poems, since they had no taste of love in them. Gelibolulu Âlî is harsher still, calling him "nâmı zâtına gâlib", a statesman whose fame exceeded his worth, and dismissing the Heves-nâme as verse without salt. Âşık Çelebi also records Müeyyedzâde's quip that his Persian was "Engürî Persian", Ankara Persian. Most biographers prefer his prose to his verse and his kasides to his ghazals.

Against these verdicts, the circulation of his poems points to a wide readership. Edirneli Nazmî's Mecma'u'n-nezâ'ir, compiled in 1523, contains 84 of Câfer Çelebi's poems, ten of them model poems (zemin) to which other poets wrote responses. By the count of the anthology's editor M. Fatih Köksal, 146 nazires were written to his poems; with this figure he comes after Ahmed Paşa, Necâtî, Şeyhî, Ulvî, Nizâmî, Ahmedî, Nesîmî, Atâyî and Prince Cem. The Pervâne Bey Mecmuası contains 99 of his poems and Eğridirli Hacı Kemal's Câmi'u'n-nezâ'ir 14. Erünsal names Basîrî, Nihâlî, Mesîhî, Revânî, İshak Çelebi of Skopje, Kemalpaşazâde, Zâtî and Amrî among those who wrote response poems to him. For each ghazal that entered Nazmî's anthology, the group of response poems it belongs to is noted in the commentary on that ghazal.

The assessment in Hüsameddin's entry also carries the wish to count the poet among the great men Amasya produced:

Ca'fer Çelebi gâyet fâzıl, ulûm-ı şer'iyye ve edebiyyede kâmil, fünûn-ı akliyyede mâhir, elsine-i selâsede şâir, edîb, hattât-ı bediü'l-üslûb, kâtib-i bî-nazîr idi. Hutût-ı mütenevvi'ada pek mâhir olup hatt-ı siyâkatı îcâd ve sûret-i tuğrayı ve fermânların şekl-i ifâdesini ibdâ' etdi.

In English: Câfer Çelebi was a very learned man, accomplished in the religious and literary sciences, skilled in the rational sciences, a man of letters who wrote poetry in three languages, a calligrapher with a style of his own and a secretary without peer. He was a master of the various scripts; he developed the siyakat script and gave new form to the tuğra and to the wording of imperial decrees.

The Text of the Divan

Every poem of the divan has a page of its own. There the transcription of Erünsal's edition stands unchanged; after a couplet-by-couplet rendering comes a commentary on the structure of the poem, its meaning, its figures of speech and, where known, its historical context. The numbers follow those of the edition: the kasides, terci-bends and the müseddes are 1-32, the ghazals keep their numbers in the edition, and the kıt'as form a separate series. In the 2018 printing the numbers of some ghazals are printed with two figures in the form "11=12"; the page titles follow the first number, which is also the one used in the introduction.

The 2018 edition contains 290 Turkish poems of the divan: 32 kasides, counting the terci-bends and the müseddes, 248 ghazals, one of them a mülemma, and 10 kıt'as. The Arabic and Persian poems and some of the eight murabbas were left out of it; they are in the second volume of Erünsal's 1977 thesis, whose scanned text is available in open access. The Heves-nâme, being a mesnevi and not counted as part of the divan, is not included in this series.

The best-known couplet of the divan is tied to a story told by Âşık Çelebi. Two or three days before his execution Câfer Çelebi recited a newly written ghazal to a friend who had come to visit him, and said that this couplet pleased him most:

Ben şehīd-i tīġ-i ‘ışḳ olduḳda rāh-ı yārda
Yunmadın defn eyleñüz benden ġubārı gitmesün

The couplet says: "When I fall a martyr to the sword of love on the beloved's road, bury me unwashed, so that the dust of that road does not leave me." Resting on the custom that martyrs are buried without washing, the line became a prophecy in the eyes of the biographers for a poet who was put to death a few days later on the sultan's order and buried unwashed by his brother Sa'dî Çelebi. In Erünsal's edition the couplet belongs to ghazal 163.

Chronology

856 (1452), 860 (1456) or 868 (1463-64): Born in Amasya; the date varies by source.

890 (1485): Death of his father Tâcî Bey.

894 (1489): Translates Kazvînî's history of the Persian kings into Turkish and presents it to Bayezid II.

899 (1493-94): Completes the Heves-nâme; becomes professor at the Mahmud Paşa madrasa.

Rebîülevvel 903 (October 1497): Appointed chancellor of the Imperial Council.

905-906 (1500): Takes part in the campaign against Modon and Koron; writes the victory letter.

909 (1503): Receives a gift from the sultan for his kaside with the refrain "benefşe" (violet), which mentions the plague in Istanbul.

27 Cemâziyelâhir 917 (21 September 1511): His house is plundered by the Janissaries; he loses the chancellorship.

Şevval 919 (December 1513): Chancellor once more.

920 (1514): Joins the Çaldıran campaign; on the way back becomes chief military judge of Anatolia and winters with the army in Amasya.

8 Muharrem 921 (February 1515): His house is attacked during the Janissary revolt in Amasya.

8 Receb 921 (18 August 1515): Executed in Istanbul and buried in the graveyard of his mosque at Balat.

1977: İsmail E. Erünsal prepares the critical text of the divan as a doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh; it is printed in 1983 and reissued in 2018 as an e-book of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Online sources