His paternal great-grandfather was a Turkish sipahi named Kara Davut Agha who was in the service of Mehmed II.

[1] Peçevi was a provincial official in many places and became a historian after his retirement in 1641.

[1][3] Peçevi Effendi is famous for his two-volume book Tarih-i Peçevi ("Pecevi's History") of the history of the Ottoman Empire, the main reference for the period 1520–1640.

The information about earlier events Peçevi took from previous works and narrations of veterans, while his own times are described firsthand and from tales of witnesses.

Parts of Peçevi's chronicles has been translated into Turkish, Bosnian, German, Hungarian, Georgian and Azerbaijani.