In the early 1630s Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623-40) initiated a series of prohibitions against the consumption of coffee, tobacco, wine, and boz that he personally enforced on incognito tours of the Ottoman capital. At the height of his curfews, lantern regulations, and sumptuary regimes, fear of his sword and his wrath incited the Istanbullular to watch their step as they traversed their urban environment. Like a vengeful creature of the night, tales of his brutal dealings with those unlucky enough to chance upon him became a part of the urban lore of Istanbul. Having ruled with the aid of his regent Kösem Mahpeyker Sultan (1589-1651) during his early years as emperor, Murad IV’s prohibitions would become emblematic of his period of maturity (c. 1632-40), an era when a plethora of challenges both internal and external to the empire created a political environment that later authors viewed as requiring the intervention of a strong, active ruler who could save the polity by taking the empire into his own hands. Although a number of works have mentioned these tours in light of other issues, no single study has specifically honed in on this aspect of imperial mobility as a consistent thread in Ottoman urban history. This paper thus examines the ways in which Ottoman authors wrote of emperorship by way of reference to urban life and vice versa through their recollections of Murad IV’s incognito tours in the 1630s. Drawing on sections from Katib Çelebi’s (1609-57) Fezleke-i Tevarih (“Sum of Histories”), Evliya Çelebi’s (c. 1611-83) Seyahatname (“Book of Travels”), and Mustafa Naima Efendi’s (1655-1715) Ravzat ul-Huseyn fi Hulasat-i Ahbar el-Hafikeyn (“The Garden of Huseyin in the Summary of the Chronicles of East and West”), I argue that the available accounts of the prohibitions as well as their justifications and enforcement speak to a conception of sultanic responsibility that extended to his “campaigning” in the city streets and personally interacting with his subjects. In each case, the battle for the public good unfolded in the streets of the metropole, and it was up to the emperor to dispense justice himself by blending into the crowd as another pedestrian in transit. While court chronicles and other comparable sources must always be read with a critical eye by virtue of their proximity to power structures, I suggest that they may yet yield insight into historical views of the subject-sultan relationship as it unfolded in urban space.