Müverrih Osmanlı şu’arâ tezkirecileri
Ottoman poet biographers as historians

Summary/Abstract: Ottoman poet biographies (tadhkirah), whose main purpose is to provide information about the life and works of poets in the period from the 16th to the 20th century, have a special place among the important sources of classical Turkish literature. The poets whose biographies are in question performed different duties and belonged to different strata of the Ottoman social structure. However, what they all have in common, regardless of their social status, is the fact that all they were poets. The authors themselves, collecting biographies of poets who came from different social strata, used different sources. These sources could have been the poet himself, a close friend of the poet, a biography of another poet, a history book, or the author himself. Verses of chronograms that poets have written for centuries on various occasions are also one of the written sources used by the authors of tadhkirahs. A significant part of the poets in their tadhkirahs also used an ebced system that assigns numerical value to Arabic letters. Many chronograms were written in this way, so the enthronement of the sultan, the conquest of cities, important natural events, and even the completion of the books they wrote, were numerically calculated. However, in addition to the biographies of poets that the authors dealt with as a central theme, they often wrote chronograms in their honor, which provided them the identity of a historians. The authors did not purposely write chronograms to be called historians, but aimed to write verse chronograms which, relying on ebced, would describe certain important events in the life of the poets. It is not uncommon in the tradition of Ottoman writing of chronograms to find chronograms dedicated to the poets being written about. This research will provide data on authors who wrote chronograms dedicated to individual poets in their tadhkirahs, and includes historical poems in them, and thus made a significant contribution to both history and literature.

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