Studies on the social and cultural histories of monarchy address the ways that monarchs and dynastic institutions coloured the worldviews and experiences of humans, animals, and other beings which inhabited their imperial domains. In this connection, recent scholarship on the institutional practice of monarchy has highlighted the importance of hunting and of interaction with animals to the court cultures of world history. While aspects of this tradition are not absent from work on the Ottoman dynasty, the relationship between sovereignty and the stewardship of animals in the Ottoman Empire has received little attention. What then might Ottoman perspectives on their emperor’s interactions with animals tell us about his role in shaping the natural world beyond the immediate purview of human affairs? In response to this question, this paper explores the relationship between imperial sovereignty, hunting, and animal stewardship in the context of the Ottoman imperial court society (Dergah-i Ali) of the late seventeenth century. Based on a genre-spanning analysis of hunting narratives penned by elite Ottoman men who wrote about or travelled with the Ottoman “court out of doors,” namely those contained in Abdurrahman Abdi Pa?a’s (d. 1692) Veqayiname, Evliya Çelebi’s (c. 1611-81) Seyahatname, and Mustafa Naima Efendi’s (1655-1715) Ravzat ul-Huseyn fi Hulasat-i Ahbar el-Hafiqeyn, I argue that Ottoman descriptions of Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) participation in the imperial hunt (sayd u shikar) reveal a shared conception of sultanic prowess based on competent engagement with animals. In each case, the emperor and his actions are judged based on his ability to see the workings of God in the animal world and legislate life and death accordingly as he traversed the forests and plains of his realm in his mobile court complex (Otag-i Humayun). By virtue of their references to “spiritually-guiding cows,” slaughtered stags that resemble seditious “rebels,” and skillful rabbits deserving of mercy, I maintain that these authors conceived of the Ottoman sultan’s interactions with non-human animals as an indication of his fitness to rule over humans as well. In this way, the authors hint at a discursive link between human and animal “subjects” as well as between worldly sovereignty and access to the Divine Order.