This paper explores the role of language and poetic production in the political project of a scholar-turned-king in eastern Anatolia, Burhan al-Din Ahmad of Sivas (d. 1398 CE/800 AH). Burhan al-Din’s legacy is preserved in four manuscripts from his rule, three authored by him (two in Arabic, one in Old Anatolian Turkish) and one (in Persian) authored by his courtier, ‘Aziz b. Ardashir al-Astarabadi. In these works, an understanding of ritual performance based on the thought of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240) animates the entirety of his imperial project, recasting the twin pillars of Persianate kingship, “feasting and fighting” (bazm u razm) in a cosmology wherein justice is the equilibrium between God’s beauty and majesty, manifest in the presence of the King, “God’s shadow.” By using Ibn al-‘Arabi, who privileged political performance over dynastic legitimacy, Burhan al-Din gained a means through which to articulate a legitimacy that connected his rule directly to Muhammad himself, sidestepping his own lack of lineage. This paper argues that the multilingual nature of the manuscripts produced at his court was crucial to this process. By demonstrating his court’s mastery over language, he performed the new metaphysics of the late medieval period. This is most clear in his divan, one of the earliest written works of Turkic court poetry, wherein his weaving of a “new garment” imitated Muhammad’s miracle of the Qur’an, transforming him into a true “King of Islam.” In his own words, this performance gathered together both Muhammad and Jamshid, archetypal prophet and archetypal king, within Burhan al-Din’s own “presence,” here understood as the itinerant court that followed him in feast and fight. By melding prophethood and kingship in a single presence, his project illustrates an early crystallization of post-caliphal post-Ilkhanid Islamic sovereignty. This paper concludes by arguing that the multilingual nature of Burhan al-Din’s project and its insistence on the king’s own linguistic production foreshadowed the new strategies and languages of political rule that would be mobilized in the Timurid age and beyond in the Eastern Islamic World.