CHAPTER IV.
During the ninety years that elapsed between the time when cOsmán found himself independent and the accession of his great-grandson Büyezíd I — him whom the Turks call Yildirim Báyezíd or Báyezíd the Thunderbolt, — the Ottoman Kingdom had grown considerably. Not only had extensive territories been acquired in Europe, but in Asia many and important districts had been wrested from the Byzantines, and two out of the nine other Kingdoms of the West-Turkish Decarchy had been absorbed. Of these two, Qarasi was the first to disappear, it having been annexed by Orkhan in 737 (1336–7); the other, Hamíd, was purchased by Murüd I in 783 (1381–2).
Báyezíd the Thunderbolt lost no time; in 792 (1390), the very year of his accession, he annexed other five of those little states, Aydin, Saru-Khan, Menteshe, Germiyan and Tekke, in a single campaign. The remaining two, Qaraman and Qizil-Ahmedli, soon followed; and thus, despite the temporary set-back caused by Timur’s invasion, the West-Turkish Empire was re-established. In 800 (1398) a further step was taken; the districts of Siwas, Qaysaríya, Toqat and Erzinjan, which had formed the little kingdom of Cadi Burhán-ud-Dín, were incorporated; and on the east and south-east the Ottoman frontiers marched with the territories of the newly sprung-up Turkman dynasties of the Black Sheep and of the White Sheep, of the Zu-l-Qadr and the Bení-Ramazán.
The work of building up the West-Turkish Empire was thus in full progress when the invasion of Timur, culminating in 804 (1402) in the Battle of Angora with the defeat and capture of Báyezíd and the seeming annihilation of the Ottoman power, threw everything in Western Asia into momentary chaos and retarded for a brief period the development of Turkey. The dethroned kinglets of the seven little Turkish states annexed by the Thunderbolt re-entered into more or less short-lived possession of their own, while the Ottoman princes, Suleyman, Ἳsa, Músa and Mehemmed, fought furiously with one another for what was left of their father’s empire. For eleven years the fratricidal conflict raged, till in 816 (1413) Prince Mehemmed, thenceforward Sultan Mehemmed I — Chelebi Sultan Mehemmed or Sultan Mehemmed the Debonair, as his people loved to call him, — found himself sole survivor of the four brothers and undisputed sovereign of the Ottoman state. The empire to which Mehemmed thus succeeded did not materially differ in extent from that which his father had inherited quarter of a century before. The seven little kingdoms indeed were gone, but except for their loss the Ottoman frontiers were practically unchanged.
Timur’s dash into Asia Minor was no true conquest of the country; it was but a raid on a grand scale; he harried Anatolia from end to end, and then departed to return no more. And so the confusion which followed was only superficial, no vital change was wrought; all that happened was a certain delay in the consolidation of the West-Turkish power.
But though the development of the Turkish empire was thus arrested for a moment, the development of Turkish poetry proceeded without check or pause. In the work produced about the time of the Tartar onslaught we find no trace of that uncertainty as to course, that halting between two opposing principles, which in greater degree or less has marked all the verse written up till now. From this time West-Turkish poetry formally renounces every exclusively Turkish characteristic; these Turkish verse-forms which happened to be duplicated in the Persian system are retained, but the old syllabic prosody passes altogether away from literary verse, not to re-appear till the rise of the Modern School in our own day. The victory now obtained by the Persian poetic system is complete; not only is every detail of this accepted and made into an integral part of the Ottoman, but whatever is unrepresented there is resolutely refused admittance, or if it happened to be present, is ruthlessly cast out.
Along with this development appears another phenomenon. Before the invasion of Timur poets had been few in Rúm - we have not been able to find a dozen in the course of a hundred years — after that event they arise on every side.
One cannot but ask how it is that these things, the final self-adjustment of Turkish poetry to its foreign model and the sudden increase in the number of its practitioners, should have occurred at the very moment when the Power which represented the nascent nationality of the Western Turks was reeling under the rudest blow ever dealt it in all its long history.
Ἅlí suggests as an answer to this question the influence of certain Persian men of letters who accompanied Timur on his campaign in Asia Minor. Like many another Oriental prince, the Tartar conqueror was fond of the society of poets and men of learning, and numerous stories are on record concerning his interviews with the learned men of Rúm and of the good-humoured way in which he received their sometimes not very courtier-like sallies. These Turkish scholars would doubtless discuss their craft with the erudite Persians in Timur’s suite, and in the course of conversation get many a hint that would profit them in their further work. Such friendly intercourse between the followers of an invader and the people of an invaded country may appear strange to a modern European; but there was nothing unusual in it. In those days nationality and patriotism, as we conceive them, existed not in the East. Wars were waged under the impulse of religious enthusiasm, or from sheer greed of plunder, or the mere love of fighting, or else, as in this instance, through the ambition of princes. Except in the first case, nothing like personal animosity existed between the individual combatants; and when they were not actually engaged in fighting, they were ready enough to meet on friendly terms.
But though the impulse given to Ottoman letters by such intercourse with accomplished Persians no doubt goes for something, it seems hardly a sufficient explanation of the efflorescence of full-blown literary poetry at this particular juncture. Another partial explanation may perhaps be found in the encouragement given to letters, and especially to poetry, by Prince Suleyman, the eldest son of the Thunderbolt, and for a time the most successful of the competitors for the throne. The court which this gallant but reckless Prince held at Adrianople was, while it lasted, the centre of Ottoman culture, and under the genial influence of his appreciative patronage poetry was fostered as it had never been before.
But it seems to me that the true answer to the question lies in the simple fact that the time was now ripe for the development that took place. That this synchronised with the Tartar invasion was a mere accident; it would have been accomplished all the same had Timur never crossed the frontier. We have seen how the distinctively Turkish element was becoming ever less and less as poet succeeded poet. There was very little trace of the syllabic prosody in Suleymán’s Hymn; the next step would naturally be to omit it altogether. Again, we are told that Niyází, who wrote before the invasion, had exactly reproduced the Persian lyric style in his Turkish verses, and the scraps of these that we have go to confirm the statement.1
Niyází, moreover, did not stand alone; the poets Ahmed-i Dá῾í, Ahmedí and Nesímí were all contemporary with him; and although much of the work of these three was doubtless produced after the Tartar raid, they were (with the possible exception of Dá῾í of whom we know little) certainly writing before that catastrophe, and most probably during the lifetime of Niyází.2 The complete Díwáns of Ahmedí and Nesímí are in our possession, and in these we find the Persian system completely accepted and alone recognised. As it is unlikely either that these poets rewrote their early lyrics in later life or that their editors would omit their earlier works when compiling their Díwáns, I am inclined to believe that the complete ascendency of the Persian system was practically established shortly before Timur’s invasion, and so was not, as Ἅlí would infer, a result of that event.
The increase in the number of poets at this point may be accounted for by the general advance in culture made by the Turkish people since the chaos brought about by the Mongol invasion and the Seljúq collapse. Especially during the reign of Báyezíd was this advance remarkable. Under that monarch Brusa became a centre of learning; and although this for the most part took the direction of scholastic theology, the science which above all others stood emphatically for ‘learning’ in medieval Islam, it prepared the ground for a wider and more liberal culture.
For eight years after the Battle of Angora Prince Suleymán reigned as an independent sovereign over the Ottoman territories in Europe. During this time his court at Adrianople was, as we have said, the centre of West-Turkish culture. That it was so in a truer sense than Brusa had yet been was owing to the Prince’s possessing a taste for literature, and especially for poetry, such as none of his fathers had ever displayed. He loved to surround himself with poets; and it was chiefly from their ranks that he chose his boon-companions for the wild carouses in which he delighted. For unhappily for himself, this Prince’s devotion to every form of pleasure was at least as strong as his love of poetry. His unbridled debauchery lost for him the respect of his soldiers and his people; so that at last in the hour of need his army deserted and left him to perish miserably at the hands of his rivals. 814 (1411).
Ἅshiq and Ἅlí give us the names of some of the poets whom Suleymán gathered around him at Adrianople. Prominent among these are the brothers Ahmedí and Hamzeví. Ahmedí, the author of the earliest extant Ottoman romantic poem, is so notable a figure that we leave him and his work to be dealt with at some length in the next chapter. His brother Hamzeví is chiefly remarkable for having collected in twenty-four volumes the legendary history of Hamza the uncle of the Prophet. This work was in prose freely interspersed with verses; and it was by reason of it that the author adopted his makhlas of Hamzeví.1
Another of the circle was Sheykh-oghli, of whom Ἅshiq tells us that he wrote a poem called Ferrukh-Náme or ‘The Book of Ferrukh’ (the name of the hero)1 from which this couplet is quoted: —
So came from hand what comes from heart,2 ’twould e’en be
That every beggar would a king or queen be.3
More important than either Hamzeví or Sheykh-oghli — at least so the biographers must have deemed him as they accord him alone of the three an entry all to himself — is the poet Ahmed-i Dá῾í. Latífí, Hasan Chelebi and Ἅlí agree in making this writer a native of Germiyan, in which petty kingdom, according to the last-mentioned, he had been a cadi or judge.4 In due time, however, he found his way to Adrianople, where he was received into high favour by Prince Suleymán.5
He wrote a good deal for his Ottoman patron including a poem called Jenk-Náme or ‘The Book of War,’6 which seems to have been a versified history of the struggle between Suleymán and his brothers.1 Another’ of his works was a treatise on the branch of polite learning that is called Ἱlm-i Teressul. This consists in the knowledge of the rules of courtesy that must be observed in correspondence, rules which determine with great nicety the manner in which a person should be addressed according to his social station, and the ways in which different subjects should be presented. When Hasan and Ἅlí wrote, this treatise of Dá῾í’s was widely known among the people. In some manuscripts and in the printed edition of Latífí it is said that Ahmed-i Dá῾í wrote further a work dealing with Persian and Arabic lexicography, which he called ῾Uqúd-ul-Jewáhir or ‘The Strings of Gems.’
According to Von Hammer, Sehí Bey, the earliest biographer of poets — he wrote but a few years before Latífí, — says that in his time Dá῾í’s Díwán was known everywhere, copies being very common in both Rumelia and Anatolia. Such may very well have been the case three centuries and a half ago, but copies are sufficiently rare nowadays; at least I have failed to discover any, and so must rest content with repeating Latifi's somewhat superfluous remark that the ghazels are in an ‘antiquated’ style. Latif! and Hasan quote this couplet, than which, they both declare, there is nothing better in the whole Díwán: —
By Tá Há’s chapter,2 O mine eye, I charge thee speak, didst e’er thou see
A worry like my Dear, a frenzied Lover like this heart of me?3
In the printed edition of Latífí there is the following comment on this couplet: ‘The foregoing couplet was highly esteemed of Dá῾í and is the most approved artistic distich in his Diwán. But it is remarkable that with all his skill and knowledge he should have overlooked the amphibological sense of his words and should not have perceived of how many meanings his language is susceptible. For he saith in the second line of the above distich, Yarim gibi fitne, ‘a worry like my Dear.’ The word fitne ‘worry’ is in this place a curious expression, amphibologic, implying censure, and suggesting a coarse word. In the common speech of the people they apply titne ‘worry’ to a certain small dog, a kind of cur. The poets of the age generally use this word when speaking of the rival, as in this couplet: —
Thou’st shown the rival the chief seat, and to yon worry, 
hast said.
Alack! alack! I am not held e’en as a dog before thy gate!’
[In this verse the word 
, addressed by the sweetheart to the rival, has two meanings, ‘great’ and ‘howl:’ an attempt has been made to preserve the equivoque in the translation, by the hononyms Hey (title) and Hay (bark).
The word fitne may have been popularly applied to a dog in Latífí’s time, but I have seen no allusion to such a use elsewhere, and it is unknown in the present day.]
Ἅlí, though he cites the above, prefers the following ghazel, which he says he takes from Sehí Bey. In this ghazel, the first three couplets of which are quoted also by Latífí and Hasan, the Persian influence now supreme in poetry appears in fullest flower. The rhyming is already intricate to a degree beyond which no later master of the craft ever pushed. Here, in this little poem whence every vestige of spontaneity is banished and where artificiality is all in all, we see forged to the last link those alien fetters which are for ages to trammel and repress the genius of Turkey.
Ghazel.1 [39]
O Lunar-fashioned Sun of light!2 thy face is Jovial in sight!3
What light? The Ascendant light. And what ascendant? The ascendant bright.
By thy fair face ashine is earth, and by thy life the time ’s a garth!
What garth? The garth of Heaven on high. What Heaven? The Heaven of Kevser’s site.4
Thy face it is the Verse of Ruth, thy self it is of Power the Proof!
What Power? The Maker’s Power forsooth. What maker? The Maker of Might.
As Solomon’s the story thine, as Alexander’s glory thine!
What glory? Joseph’s glory sheen.5 What Joseph? Joseph lord of right.
The chesner Sphere6 thou hast outdone; the realm of fortune thou hast won! What realm? The realm of luck. What luck? The luck of him who’s Cæsar7 hight.
Untold the slaves about thy stead; the meanest is thy slave Ahmed! What Ahmed? Ahmed the Dá῾í.8 What Dá῾í? Dá῾í servant-wight.
1 Niyází is the first Turkish poet to follow the universal Persian practice of using a Makhlas or Pen-name. Previous and contemporary writers had been content with their personal name or their surname; but ‘Niyazi’ is neither a personal name nor a surname, but a pen-name, and one, moreover, that has been adopted by several subsequent Ottoman poets. To choose such and write under it was, of course, an essential part of the programme of an author whose aim was the naturalisation of every Persian literary usage. The practice at once became universal, and from this time forth the poets who wrote under their personal name are in a microscopic minority.
2 The first draft at any rate of Ahmedís Iskender-Náme was finished in 792 ([390). Some of Nesímí’s verses are said to have been recited in the presence of Fazl-ullláh the Hurúfí who was put to death by Timur in 804 (1401–2).
1 ‘Hamzeví’ is an adjectival form of Harnza; ‘Hamzan’ we might say. Von Hammer, I know not on what authority, gives 81S (1412) as the date of Hamzeví’s death.
1 Ἅlí is mistaken in saying that Ἅshiq attributes the Ferrukh-Náme to Ahmed-i Dá῾í. Kátib Chelebi describes this book as ‗a Turkish poem by Sheykh-záde in the reign of Sultan Yildirim Khan.’ In the printed edition of Ἅlí and in Fluegel’s Kátib Chelebi the name of the work is given as 
Ferah-Náme (which would mean ‘The Book of Gladness’), an obvious slip for 
Ferrukh-Náme, as will appear from what is said in Chapter IX. Sheykh-oghli and Sheykh-záde are the same name, the first being the Turkish, the second the Persian form for ‘Sheykh-son.’
2 i. e. could the hand carry out the heart’s desires.
3 
4 It must be by a slip that Von Hammer makes Dá῾í a native of Qaraman.
5 Von Hammer, without indicating his authority, gives 81S (1412) as the date of Dá῾í’s death.
6 Von Hammer, following Latífí, reads Chenk-Náme or ‘The Book of the Harp;’ but Hasan Chelebi and Kátib Chelebi read Jenk-Náme. Ἅlí confuses Dá῾í’s poem with Sheykh-oghli’s, calling the former Ferah-Náme, while he says it contains much brilliant battle imagery.
1 Fluegel’s edition of Kátib Chelebi thus describes the Jenk-Náme: ‘In Turkish, by the poet Ahmed of Germiyan and the poet Dervísh, concerning the war of Sultan Selím with his brother Báyezýd.’ This last phrase obviously should read ‘the war of Sultan (i. e. Prince) Suleymán with his brothers the sons of Báyezíd.’ Sultan Selím I had no brother named Bayezid, while Sultan Selím II was never engaged in war with a brother. Who the ‘poet Dervish’ is, or what Kátib Chelebi means by making him joint author of the Jenk-Náme, I do not know.
2 The twentieth chapter of the Koran is called the Chapter of Tá Há, these being the Arabic names of the two letters T H which are pretixed to it.
3 
1 This ghazel is evidently addressed to Prince Suleymán.
2 The Sun that combines the beauty of the Moon with his own radiance is the Prince.
3 Jupiter was reckoned by the astrologers the most auspicious of the planets.
4 Kevser is the name of one of the rivers of Paradise, see p. 36.
5 Joseph, as we shall see again and again, is the constant type of youthful beauty with the Muslim poets.
6 The Sphere, conceived as an evil power whose delight is to thwart and baffle man (see p. 44, n. 3.), is constantly personified by the poets, sometimes under a male, sometimes under a female form. In the present instance it is represented as a chess-player intent on checkmating the Prince, who none the less has beaten it and won the prize fortune.
7 Qaysar i.e. ‘Cæsar,’ is the special title of the Emperor of Constantinople, be he Byzantine or Ottoman.
8 The word dá῾í, which this poet Ahmed adopted as his makhlas, means ‘one who prays for another,’ a ‘bedesman.’