Ottoman Literary Historiography, at least until recently, has shown no interest in dealing with issues regarding the contextual meaning of what a pre-modern literary text narrated. Accordingly, important questions are usually not addressed in this field of scholarship, such as what was the meaning of specific narratives chosen to take place in the complex texture of a text woven with extractions from various sources, and what can this choice tell us about textual strategy. In my study, I will attempt to ask these questions in the context of one of the most important examples of Ottoman biographies of poets (tazkirah) in 16th century, Âsik Celebi’s Mesairu's-Suara by looking into the anecdotes it provides about Aq Qoyunlu ruler Ya‘qub and his vizier Qadi Saen-al-din Savaji. Given that Mesairü's-Su'ara was a canonical text which was limited only to poets who wrote in the Ottoman language, the writer’s choice in including narratives whose characters were not even poets but leaders of a historically rival state seems strange. However I will argue that these stories are tokens of an intertextual relationship between our tazkirah and texts circulated in the Persianate world, namely Hakim Shah-Muhammad Qazvini’s Hesht-Bihisht which was a Persian translation and expansion of Alishir Navai’s famous tazkirah Macalisu’n-Nafa’is, Jami’s Baharestan and Idris-i Bidlisi’s Diwan-i du sarayanda az qarn-i nuhum Qadi Isa Sawaji wa Šhayh Najm ad-Din Mas'ud (the latter two being protégés of Ya’qub). I will try to explain why an Ottoman tazkirah writer commemorated an Aq Qoyunlu ruler and vizier, by demonstrating how this choice is a result of Âsik Çelebi’s desire to underline Mesairü’s-Su'ara pertinence to this politically and intellectually interrelated world and to prove its credibility.