Ahmadi Taj al-Din Ibrahim ibn Khidr

Taj al-Din Ibrahim ibn Khidr Ahmadi, one of the best-known Ottoman poets of the fourteenth century CE. His name is Ibrahim, his title Taj al-Din, and his father Khidr. ¹

The source says he died in 815 AH (1412 CE). The same source estimates his birth at about 735 AH (1334 CE). Both come from one source and need a second. ¹

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), article by G. L. Lewis, calls Ahmedi the greatest Ottoman poet of the eighth/fourteenth century. His birthplace and date are not known; the evidence favours Germiyan, before 735/1334–5. After studying in Anatolia he went to Cairo to study under al-Babarti, the commentator on the Hidaya, and made friends with Hadji Pasha and Molla Fenari. Back home he entered the service of the Germiyanoglu at Kutahya, Sulayman Shah, who ruled c. 769/1367 to 788/1386 and for whom he wrote the Iskendername. Later he joined the court of Bayezid I, and was especially favoured by Bayezid's son Sulayman Celebi. ²

His diwan contains many panegyrics on Sulayman, to whom he dedicated the final version of the Iskendername, Jemshid u Khurshid and Tarwih al-arwah. He wrote an elegy on Sulayman's death in 814/1411 and then a prayer for the new sultan, Mehmed. He died at Amasya in 815/1413, according to the EI2 article; the record's Mawsu'at date of 815 AH (1412 CE) is the same Hijri year. The Iskendername is a didactic poem on Alexander, based on Firdawsi and Nizami but expanded, in pure Turkish in the native parmak hisabi metre; it ends with a versified history of the Ottomans, the first surviving one, on which later historians drew. ²