According to Islamic law, manumission created a legal tie between the owner freeing his/her slave and the person that thereby obtained his/her freedom. Thus, manumission transformed but did not sever the master-slave relationship. While a freed slave immediately enjoyed the same full legal rights as a freeborn person, the manumitted man or woman and his/her descendants remained perpetually indebted to the emancipator and to his/her family, because of the patronage links created by the bonds of clientage (velâ). These patronage ties between the manumitting owner and the freed person created an inheritance relationship, the former owner inheriting from his/her manumitted slaves. The property of the emancipated slave, or of his/her descendants, who died without priority heirs or agnates, reverted to the male or female patron or to the agnatic heirs of the latter, in accordance with the system of devolution. The present study aims to clarify how this arrangement worked out in practice, through a close study of the inheritances of former palace-slaves. Using sharia court records, especially estate inventories and registers of inheritance dating to the period between the 1570s and the late 1700s, this paper evaluates the inheritance relationship between manumitted palace slaves and their former masters. The approach is comparative, as I juxtapose the former palace inmates with ex-slaves not affiliated to the imperial household. According to Islamic law, if the master was no longer alive, his/her inheritance share went to his/her own male heirs. Only if the ex-master had no heirs, was the master’s share cancelled and the freed slaves’ tie with the former owner’s household definitely broken. The situation of palace-affiliated people, however, was different. For if the former owner of a palace slave and his/her heirs were deceased when the former slave died, the master’s share went to the reigning sultan. Hence, this paper demonstrates how imperial household affiliation had an impact on inheritance relationships. It argues that affiliation to the imperial household differentiated the inheritances of former palace slaves from those of other manumitted persons. As freed palace slaves had an unbreakable inheritance relationship with the imperial household, it is safe to argue that this arrangement created an almost eternal bond between manumitted slaves and the imperial household.