Zeyneb Hatun is one of the first women in Ottoman poetry whose name and verse have both come down to us. She lived in the fifteenth century, and the biographical dictionaries of poets (tezkires) record that she compiled a divan in the name of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) and was rewarded when she presented it to the sultan. The divan no longer survives; what remains are a few ghazals, a handful of couplets and a single Persian opening couplet scattered across the pages of tezkires and anthologies. These few texts are enough to understand why the sixteenth-century biographers called her a "manly" (merdâne) poet. Her best-known ghazal, quoted in almost every tezkire and answered with imitative poems (nazire) by later poets, opens with the line "Keşf it nikâbunı yiri gögi münevver it".

Her connection with Amasya is disputed, and the dispute goes back to the earliest records of who she was. Âşık Çelebi and Beyânî introduce her as the daughter of a kadı (judge) of Amasya, while Latîfî says she was the daughter of a talented man from Bakır Küresi in the Kastamonu region. Kınalızâde sets the two accounts side by side and leaves the verdict to God. The Amasya historian Hüseyin Hüsameddin, drawing on local records and an anthology he saw in Osmancık, argues that Zeyneb Hatun was from Amasya and that the Kastamonu attribution arose from her husband's service as a judge there. Since the details of her life are told in the separate biography on this site, only the points that help in understanding her poetry are taken up here.

Life and the Amasya Years

What the tezkires agree on is that Zeyneb Hatun was raised by a learned father and received the same education as the male poets of her age. Latîfî writes that her father, noticing her ability and intelligence, taught her every branch of learning and had her read Persian divans and Arabic odes. Sehî Bey likewise describes her as a lady who "studied the sciences in due order", excelled in the theory of music known as ilm-i edvâr and was without equal in the art of poetry. The Persian couplet preserved by the sources shows that she knew the language well enough to write verse in it. The TDV Encyclopedia of Islam entry also notes that the sources present her as a woman who knew Arabic and Persian, occupied herself with music and composed songs.

Her father's name is given differently in the sources. According to the TDV entry, her father was the kadı Mehmed Çelebi. Hüsameddin, however, in the first volume of his Amasya Tarihi, lists among the poets who won fame in Amasya in the reign of Mehmed II "from among the women, Zeyneb Hâtun, daughter of Belâ'î Çelebi". In the tenth volume of the same work, where he lists the learned women of the city, the historian gives a more detailed family picture. According to this account, Zeyneb Hatun was the daughter of Nizâmeddin Abdurrahman Çelebi, kadı of Amasya, known as "Molla Beylik", and the sister of the military judge (kazasker) Molla Vildan Mehmed Çelebi; Selâmet Hatun, who had a dervish lodge in Amasya, was also her sister. She took her learning from her father and her elder brothers and married İmâdzâde İshak Fehmî Çelebi, one of the scholars and poets of the day. This discrepancy between Hüsameddin's two volumes has not been resolved, and the family ties cannot be confirmed by any other source.

The tezkires also diverge on her marriage. Âşık Çelebi relates that after Zeyneb married she obeyed her husband and withdrew from poetry and from the company of men, while Mihrî Hatun, who never married, continued to attend the gatherings. Latîfî says exactly the opposite: in his account the lords did not permit her to marry, so Zeyneb never wed and came into this world and left it a maiden. The Osmanlı Müellifleri and Hüsameddin, on the other hand, name her husband as İshak Fehmî Çelebi. According to Hüsameddin, Fehmî Çelebi served as kadı of Kastamonu for five or six years, and Zeyneb lived in his house there during that time. This is what misled Latîfî, and the Kastamonu attribution grew out of this residence. The historian adds that there can be no doubt she was buried in Amasya, in the Üçler quarter beside her father and grandfather, that old records show she had a school in the same quarter, and that she lived as a widow for a long time after her husband's death.

Her date of death is given in two forms. Late Ottoman sources, notably Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir's Osmanlı Müellifleri, give the year 879 (1474); the TDV entry notes that it is not known where this date was taken from. Hüsameddin records the year 889 (1484). Both dates fall in the reign of Mehmed II or the years immediately after it, and both agree with the tezkires' statement that the divan was presented to Sultan Mehmed.

One of Âşık Çelebi's statements conflicts with this chronology. The biographer writes that in the reign of Sultan Bayezid, in the service of Şehzade Ahmed (Prince Ahmed), Zeyneb Hatun was a contemporary of Mihrî Hatun and that the two together presented odes and eulogies. Since Prince Ahmed's governorship of Amasya began after 1481, it is hard to see how a poet who died in 1474 or 1484 could have taken part in his circle; the TDV entry also says this report should be treated with suspicion. It is worth noting that on the same pages Hüsameddin records a second Zeyneb Hatun from the Mü'eyyedzâde family: this second Zeyneb served as a companion to the ladies in Prince Ahmed's palace in Amasya, her husband lived as the prince's companion, and she died around 923 (1517). It is possible that Âşık Çelebi's report about Prince Ahmed arose from a confusion of these two women, but no source says so explicitly.

Works

Zeyneb Hatun's only known work is her divan. Latîfî writes that she compiled a divan of Persian and Turkish odes and poems in the name of Sultan Mehmed. Kınalızâde repeats the information in the words "Sultân Mehemmed Hân nâmına tertîb-i Dîvân eylemişdür". Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, in the tezkire section of his Künhü'l-ahbâr, goes a step further: he says the divan was presented to the sultan and that the presentation was met with handsome gifts, then notes that no biographer had recorded in whose possession the divan was, that is, that it left no trace in the tezkires written up to his day. Âlî's tezkire counts Zeyneb among the poets of the reign of Mehmed II.

The fate of the divan continued to be debated in later centuries. Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir wrote that a copy of the divan was kept in the Ayasofya section of the Süleymaniye Library and ranked her as a poet equal to Fıtnat Hanım. Mehmed Çavuşoğlu's research, however, found no such copy, and the TDV entry records that no copy of the divan has been found to date. An international catalogue project surveying Islamic manuscripts in Anatolia states that the divan contained poetry in Turkish, Persian and Arabic and is no longer extant; the same catalogue shows a ghazal by Zeyneb Hatun in a manuscript registered under number 5782 in the Beyazıt collection of a library in Turkey.

In the absence of the divan, her poems survive in three kinds of source. The first is the sixteenth-century tezkires: Sehî's Heşt Bihişt, Latîfî, Âşık Çelebi, Beyânî, Kınalızâde and Âlî. The second is the nazire anthologies; it is known from H. İbrahim Demirkazık's 2002 thesis, which edited part of the Pervâne Bey Mecmuası, one of the great nazire collections of the sixteenth century, that this anthology contains a poem by Zeyneb Hatun. The third is local anthologies; Hüsameddin relates that in an anthology he saw in Osmancık he read a poem headed "a ghazal by Zeyneb Hâtun of Amasya" together with the reply written to her by her husband İshak Fehmî Çelebi. The texts Hüsameddin copied were later burned, and only a single couplet remained in his hands.

Literary Character

The language the tezkire writers use about Zeyneb Hatun also reveals plainly how their age regarded a woman poet. Sehî says that in his time two ladies appeared among women whose poems were fine and whose couplets were unrivalled, that their ghazals passed from hand to hand among the people and that it was therefore necessary to record them; one of the two was Zeyneb, the other Mihrî. Âşık Çelebi calls her "tâ'ife-i nisânun ehl-i 'akl u temyîzi", that is, a woman of reason and discernment, and places her verse at a rank that "adorns the couplets of the household of poets". Beyânî gives a shorter and sharper verdict: "Eş'ârı ârifânedür. Kız nakşı degüldür merdânedür." In modern terms, her poems are the work of a pen of spiritual insight; they do not resemble a maiden's embroidery, but are a manly utterance.

Kınalızâde develops the same idea in a more ornate style and with an Arabic couplet: "Ve me't-te'nîsu li'smi'ş-şemsi 'aybun / Velâ et-tezkîru fahrun lil-hilâl." The couplet means that the feminine gender of the sun's name is no flaw in it, nor is the masculine gender of the crescent's name a cause of pride. The biographer writes that Zeyneb's only apparent "flaw" was that she was counted among women and that her name was not found in the register of men, but that because she was adorned with the learning and accomplishment that adorn men, she did not remain hidden behind the veil and came before the eyes of all. Such praise shows that the male-centred literary world of the age could accept a woman poet only under the label "manly". Didem Havlioğlu examines this language in detail in her article on Ottoman women poets and shows how the tezkires, by setting Zeyneb's marriage against Mihrî's maidenhood, construct a tension between marriage and the poet's vocation.

Zeyneb Hatun's name is seldom separated from Mihrî Hatun's. Beyânî says the two poets were contemporaries and companions and that many debates, exchanges of verse and friendly dealings passed between them. Kınalızâde writes that cups of banter and poetic exchange circulated between them and that many witticisms arose because "Hammâme-nâme", letters flown by carrier pigeon, went back and forth. Studies of Mihrî Hatun's poetry also record that she was on friendly terms with Zeyneb Hatun as well as with poets such as Necâtî, Güvâhî, Makâmî, Âfitâbî and Münîrî. If Mihrî was born in the 1460s, the death date of 1474 leaves little room for this friendship, while 1484 allows a brief overlap. The tezkires' habit of naming the pair together, and later generations' view of them as Amasya's two women poets side by side, gave rise to the idea that the city's tradition of women poets began with Zeyneb. The TDV entry likewise states that she pioneered the spread of divan poetry in Amasya and that poets such as Mihrî Hatun and Ayşe Hatun grew up in the same region after her.

The style of her poems, as far as the few surviving examples allow us to judge, conforms to the mature manner of the fifteenth-century ghazal. Her images come from the classical repertoire: the beloved's veil and face, the pool of Kevser (Kawthar) in Paradise, ambergris-scented hair, the musk lands of Khitai and China, the search of Khidr and Alexander for the water of life, the Sura of Joseph. Zeyneb links them through plays of sound and sense; the puns and double meanings she builds between "sûret" and "sûre", between "zen", "zînet" and "Zeyneb", and between "dîvâne" and "dîvân" show that she used her learning with an unostentatious skill. Latîfî's account of writing a nazire as a child to the ghazal he calls "şi'r-i meşhûr" (a famous poem) shows that it was a text still memorised and imitated by the following generation. Latîfî added his nazire to his tezkire in his own hand, and its first couplet keeps exactly to Zeyneb's pattern: "Ey hûr meclisi yine firdevs-i enver it / Şîrîn lebüñle sâgarumuz câm-ı kevser it."

Selected Poems

The texts below are taken from the published editions of the tezkires and of Hüsameddin. There are small differences of reading between the manuscripts; each text follows one edition, and the significant variants are noted in the commentary.

Ghazal: "Keşf it nikâbuñı yeri gögi münevver it"

Keşf it nikâbuñı yeri gögi münevver it
Bu 'âlem-i 'anâsırı firdevs-i enver it
Depret lebüñi cûşa getür havz-ı kevseri
'Anber saçuñı çöz bu cihânı mu'attar it
Hattuñ berât yazdı sabâya didi ki tîz
Var milket-i Hıtâ ile Çîni müsahhar it
Âb-ı hayât olmayıcak kısmet ey göñül
Biñ yıl gerekse zulmete seyr-i Sikender it
Zeyneb ko meyli zîynet-i dünyâya zen gibi
Merdâne-vâr sâde-dil ol terk-i zîver it

In English: "Lift your veil and light up earth and sky; turn this world of the four elements into the most radiant Paradise. Stir your lip and make the pool of Kevser surge and overflow; loosen your ambergris hair and drench this world in fragrance. The down upon your cheek wrote a warrant to the morning breeze and said, 'Quick, go and conquer the lands of Khitai and China.' O heart, if the water of life is not your portion, then even if it takes a thousand years, march like Alexander into the land of darkness; you will not find it. Zeyneb, give up leaning, as women do, toward the ornaments of the world; be manly, plain of heart, and abandon finery." The first three couplets raise the beloved's beauty to a cosmic scale. The world turning into Paradise as the veil lifts, the lip making Kevser surge and the hair perfuming the world are expressed as a series of commands. The "hat" of the third couplet means both the fine down on the face and handwriting; this writing is a warrant issued to the morning breeze, and the breeze is sent to conquer Khitai and China, the lands of musk. The fourth couplet rests on the story in which Khidr found the water of life while Alexander searched for it in vain in the land of darkness, and it says that fate is stronger than effort. The final couplet is the source of the biographers' verdict of "manly": the poet addresses herself by name and, playing on the sound of "zen" (woman), "zînet" (ornament) and "Zeyneb", refuses to let worldly finery be treated as a womanly weakness. The text follows Latîfî. Âşık Çelebi, Beyânî, Kınalızâde and Hüsameddin read the second line of the fourth couplet as "Biñ yıl gerekse Hızr ile seyr-i Sikender it", and in the last line the reading "merdâne var" in place of "merdâne-vâr" is common. In Âlî the final word appears as "zînet". (Latîfî, ed. Canım, pp. 256-257; Âşık Çelebi, ed. Kılıç, p. 257; Beyânî, ed. Sungurhan, p. 84; Kınalızâde, ed. Sungurhan, p. 408; Âlî, ed. İsen, pp. 55-56; Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, X, 176-177.)

Closing couplet (manuscript variant): "Zeyneb çü yâr zülfi gibi târe olmagıl"

Zeyneb çü yâr zülfi gibi târe olmagıl
Dîvâna olma şi'rüñi dîvân u defter it

In English: "Zeyneb, do not be scattered like the beloved's tresses; do not be mad, but gather your poems into a divan and a register." This couplet appears in only one manuscript of Sehî's Heşt Bihişt, in a note added at the end of the entry on Zeyneb Hatun, where it is given as a "beyt-i makta'" (closing couplet) and counted among the poet's famous verses. Its rhyme and its refrain "it" are the same as those of the ghazal "Keşf it nikâbuñı"; it may therefore be a second closing couplet of the same ghazal circulating in some anthologies, or the last couplet of another ghazal written on the same pattern. The real subtlety of the couplet lies in the pun between "dîvâne" (mad) and "dîvân" (the book in which poems are collected): the poet advises herself to gather up her words instead of scattering herself in love. From a poet known to have presented her divan to the sultan, this advice carries a particular meaning. (Sehî, Heşt Bihişt, KTB edition, p. 159, note 12.)

Couplets: "Şehâ bu sûret-i zîbâ saña Hakdan hidâyetdür"

Şehâ bu sûret-i zîbâ saña Hakdan hidâyetdür
Sanasın sûre-i Yûsuf cemâlüñden bir âyetdür
Senüñ hüsnüñ benüm 'ışkum senüñ cevrüñ benüm sabrum
Bular her dem-be-dem artar dükenmez bî-nihâyetdür

In English: "O king, this lovely face is a guidance granted you by God; you would think the Sura of Joseph a verse of your beauty. Your beauty and my love, your cruelty and my patience: these grow from moment to moment, never run out, and have no end." In introducing Zeyneb Hatun, Sehî gives only these two couplets as examples. The first rests on a network of correspondences between "sûret" (face, form) and "sûre" (sura), and between "âyet" (verse) and "Yûsuf": the sura of the Qur'an that tells the story of Joseph, the symbol of beauty, is counted as a verse of the beloved's face. The second couplet pairs four concepts two by two and says that all of them grow at once; the lover's patience is as boundless as the beloved's cruelty. The address "Şehâ" (O king) is very often directed at the beloved in divan poetry; the tezkires record nothing to suggest that these couplets were addressed to a particular person, such as the sultan. In some publications the end of the first line reads "inâyetdür"; Sehî's edition reads "hidâyetdür". (Sehî, Heşt Bihişt, KTB edition, p. 159.)

Persian opening couplet: "Zülf eger nîst hevâ-dâr-ı kad-i bâlâ-yet"

Zülf eger nîst hevâ-dâr-ı kad-i bâlâ-yet
Hem-çü men ser beçe-i Rûmî nihed ender pâ-yet

This opening couplet is the only example of Zeyneb Hatun's Persian poetry to have reached us. Latîfî gives it in Arabic script as a "Persian matla" and calls it "ol muhadderenüñ bikr-i fikri", the untouched thought of that veiled lady. Âlî also quotes the same couplet as a "matla-ı latîf", a graceful opening couplet, from the poet's Persian verse. The text is given here in Hüsameddin's Latin-script reading. The meaning of the couplet has been understood differently in the editions. In Rıdvan Canım's edition of Latîfî it is rendered "If your tress is not a lover of your tall stature, then the head of a child like me turns toward your feet"; in Mustafa İsen's edition of Âlî the couplet is understood as saying that the tress covers the beloved's neck and asking how lovers in such a state could lay their heads at her feet. Both readings share the same central image: the hair that falls down the beloved's stature to her feet is seen as a lover laying his head before her. This couplet is the concrete example on which the biographers rely when they say Zeyneb knew Persian well enough to write poetry in it. (Latîfî, ed. Canım, p. 256; Âlî, ed. İsen, pp. 55-56; Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, X, 176.)

Couplet: "Hased ol rinde kim her gice bâdâm-ı rû-magz-âsâ"

Hased ol rinde kim her gice bâdâm-ı rû-magz-âsâ
Yatur dildâr ile pehlû-be-pehlû bir firâş üzre

In English: "I envy that libertine who every night, like a double-kernelled almond, lies side by side with the beloved on a single bed." This couplet is not found in the tezkires; Hüsameddin quotes it from an anthology he found and copied in Osmancık, as the only surviving couplet of a lost ghazal. According to the historian, Zeyneb Hatun one night saw her husband Fehmî Çelebi asleep in bed with a slave girl and left the ghazal she had written on his pillow. Fehmî Çelebi answered with a ghazal of his own and apologised. Hüsameddin says that because both ghazals contained intimate matters between husband and wife he did not copy them, that his drafts were later burned and only this couplet survived, and that he regretted not having written the ghazals down. The printed reading "rû-magz" should most probably be "dû-magz" (double-kernelled); a double-kernelled almond, with its two kernels lying side by side in one shell, is a classical image for sharing a bed with the beloved. If the story is true, this couplet contradicts Âşık Çelebi's statement that Zeyneb gave up poetry after her marriage and shows that she went on writing within marriage. (Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, X, 174-175.)

Chronology

855-886 (1451-1481): Reign of Mehmed II (the Conqueror). According to the tezkires, Zeyneb Hatun compiled her divan in Sultan Mehmed's name during this period, presented it and was rewarded.

879 (1474): Date of death given in the Osmanlı Müellifleri and other late Ottoman sources; its origin is unknown.

889 (1484): Date of death recorded by Hüsameddin. According to the historian she was buried in Amasya, in the Üçler quarter beside her father and grandfather.

1978: Mehmed Çavuşoğlu records that the copy of the divan which Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir had placed in the Ayasofya collection could not be traced.

2010: Didem Havlioğlu examines the representation of Zeyneb Hatun in the tezkires in her article on Ottoman women poets.

2013: Hasan Aksoy's entry "Zeyneb Hatun" is published in volume 44 of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ ve tabsıratü'n-nuzamâ, ed. Rıdvan Canım, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2018, pp. 256-257.
  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ'irü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2018, pp. 256-257.
  • Beyânî, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Aysun Sungurhan, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2017, p. 84.
  • Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Aysun Sungurhan, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2017, p. 408.
  • Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, Künhü'l-Ahbâr'ın Tezkire Kısmı, ed. Mustafa İsen, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2017, pp. 55-56.
  • Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, I, p. 217; X, pp. 174-177.

Academic studies

  • Mehmed Çavuşoğlu, "16. Yüzyılda Yaşamış Bir Kadın Şâir: Nisâyî", Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi, 9 (1978), pp. 405-406 (via the TDV entry).
  • H. İbrahim Demirkazık (ed.), Pervâne Beg Nazîre Mecmuası (67b-100b), MA thesis, Marmara University, 2002, p. 154 (via the TDV entry; not consulted).

Official sources

  • Sehî Beg, Heşt Bihişt, ed. Halûk İpekten - Günay Kut - Mustafa İsen - Hüseyin Ayan - Turgut Karabey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism e-book, Ankara 2017, p. 159.

Books

  • Hasan Aksoy, "Zeyneb Hatun", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 44, Istanbul 2013, pp. 360-361. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Didem Havlioğlu, "On the Margins and between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries", Turkish Historical Review, 1/1 (2010), pp. 25-54.
  • Gönül Ayan, "Mihrî Hatun ve Şiirleri", Erdem, Atatürk Culture Centre.
  • "Zeyneb Ḫātūn (d. possibly 879/1474)", The History of Islam in Anatolia manuscript and author database, mid:1235.
  • Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir, Osmanlı Müellifleri, II, pp. 219-220 (via the TDV entry).

Online sources