The masked death of Ottoman Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-66) outside the besieged fortress of Szigetvár (present-day Hungary) in 1566 is one of the most dramatic stories of dynastic fate in the sixteenth century. Anxiety over Süleyman’s death invoked a masquerade of faked correspondence, staged ceremonies, and executions meant to disguise his demise, silence rumors, and preserve the Empire. Moreover, as Süleyman’s life ended during yet another quixotic quest for a triumphant victory in Vienna, flurries of diplomatic reports and information-gathering campaigns created a unique paper trail that extended from Ottoman Istanbul to Habsburg Vallodolid. Thus, a dynastic death, and the campaign that led to it, incited a trans-imperial circulation of texts replete with anxiety over imperial futures that crossed ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Traces of this event can be found in 134 entries of one volume of the umur-i mühimme defteri (registered copies of imperial decision-making), one of the most common sources utilized by historians of the Ottoman Empire. The “fixity” of this bound register, however, eclipses the intermediary voices and structures cultivated in order to manage administrative control over a dispersed empire. The mühimme was itself a method of record-keeping that attempted to “bind” regional dynamics to imperial intent. Historians who rely on this register are in danger of reproducing the vision of the center even when seeking to illuminate disparate lives and processes. This paper first demonstrates that even internal to an individual mühimme volume we can uncover a more diffuse set of actors and practices—a “mobile” archive of reports dispatched from the campaign trail and serving not as a final report but rather an administrative process at work. The second part of the presentation shifts to traces of both military siege and sultanic death left in the archives of Simancas, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Budapest, Vienna, and Belgrade. Here I argue that in order to disinter the recorded remnants of what is otherwise a momentous event within the competitive rivalries of early modern Eurasia we must also engage in a traverse that maps a new itinerary of both “archive” and “state.” Finally, I revisit commemorative manuscripts devoted to Süleyman’s life and legacy and demonstrate that they too participated in producing and “archiving” the fate of both ruler and Empire. The paper uses the techniques adopted to shape and preserve dynastic legacies to reveal the vulnerabilities of an early modern administrative power based in part on record-keeping.