Abstract
“Kışın olmağa hubdur” “It is an excellent place to spend the winter.”¹ So began the long answer that one Hekim (physician) Beşir Çelebi apparently gave to the young Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81), about the climate of the city of Edirne. Edirne, written as Edrene by the Ottomans in this period and known to the Byzantines as Adrianople, is a Turkish city approximately 240 kilometers due west of Istanbul, on today’s Turkish-Greek-Bulgarian border. The text, known as Tarih-i Edrene — Hikayet-i Beşir Çelebi, recounts a conversation between the two men as they sat by the Tunca river where