By the turn of the 17th century, the concentration of the ulama's upper echelons in the hands of several powerful families and their associates was already well underway. This process had created resentments both within the ulama and between the ulama and members of other administrative groups, who interpreted this change as a deviation from the supposedly ideal system of the mid-16th century. Owing partly to such resentments, the 17th century's initial decades saw a proliferation in the number of poems of personal invective being produced and consumed by and against members of the ulama. In this paper, several examples from this invective corpus are examined so as to elucidate what such works reveal about how authors from both within and without the ulama reacted to the changing environment around them, and particularly how they used invective as a tool to navigate this era's increasingly insular patronage networks. Though Ottoman invective has received little scholarly attention, it is a mode of writing that, if approached with a full awareness of its rhetorical strategies, has much to tell about the subjectivities of its practitioners. These poems were, to a great extent, composed with eventual oral dissemination in mind, and as such, this paper uses the tools of discourse analysis to unpack how invectives by authors both known – like Nev'îzâde 'Atâyî, Riyâzî, and Nef'î – and anonymous operated as performative acts of aggression and defense within the context of contemporary patronage networks. At the same time, the paper highlights the broader social and cultural context through comparison with similarly engaged texts of the same period, such as the advice literature of Mustafâ 'Âlî and Koçi Beg and Üveysî's "Admonition to Islambol" (Nasîhat-i İslâmbol). Based on the terms of the discourse animating all these works and the concerns that they evidence, the paper argues that the changing composition of the Ottoman ulama and udaba in the early 17th century was felt, by both the winners and losers of the newly emerging structure, as a crisis of Ottoman identity itself, one often linked to an anxiety about the growing power and influence of "outsiders" from a periphery both geographical and cultural in nature. Ultimately, by examining the hitherto neglected corpus of Ottoman personal invective poetry within its historical context, this paper sheds new light on how the learned classes of the time experienced and responded to the tumultuous period in which they found themselves.