“I am seated over my treasure, whether I be in Birjand or Qáyin;
O Nizárí, henceforth, free and untroubled, thou hast the treasure of
poverty and a safe corner.”

The MS. of Nizárí's poems alluded to above contains only ghazals or odes, and these, though spirited enough, appear for the most part to be of the usual Bacchanalian type, and to give little or no indication of the poet's religious views or general circumstances. It is in qaṣídas and math-nawís that such indications are generally to be found, and, unfortunately, neither of these classes of poems are represented in the MS. in question. According to Sprenger, * Nizárí died in 720/1320, and left two mathnawís, one of which, entitled Dastúr-náma, he describes as “very witty and amusing,” but I have never seen it. Nizárí's writings would probably repay further study.

In conclusion a few words must be said about Sulṭán Walad (or Veled, according to the Turkish pronunciation),

Sultán Walad (or Veled) and his Rabáb-náma the son and ultimately the spiritual successor of the great Mawláná Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí. He was born in Asia Minor at Láranda (the modern Qaramán) in 623/1226 when his father was only nineteen years of age, and his proper name was Bahá'u'd-Dín Aḥmad. His best-known work is a mathnawí poem, entitled Rabábnáma (the “Book of the Rebeck”), which, though mostly written in Persian, contains 156 verses in Turkish, which Gibb describes as “the earliest important specimen of West-Turkish poetry that we possess.” These archaic verses have attracted the attention of Von Hammer, Wickerhauser, Bernhauer, Fleischer, Salemann and Radloff, and Gibb has very fully discussed them and their author in the first volume of his great History of Ottoman Poetry, pp. 149-163. “To Sultán Veled,” he says (loc. cit., pp. 156-7), “belongs not only the honour due to the pioneer in every good work, but the credit which is justly his who successfully accomplishes an arduous enterprise. To have inaugurated the poetry of a nation is an achievement of which any man might be proud.” Thus even so great an admirer of Turkish poetry as Gibb is constrained to admit that it chiefly owes its inception to a Persian, and is in fact, in a sense, a branch of Persian poetry, to which for five centuries and a half (A.D. 1300-1850) it owed its inspiration. At all events the rise of both the Ottoman State and Turkish literature belong to the period which we have discussed in this and the preceding chapters, and henceforth it will be necessary to allude to both with increasing frequency.