This paper investigates the role of warfare and jihad in establishing Burhan al-Din Ahmad of Sivas (d. 1398) as an ideal king in Eastern Anatolia. Without a strong claim to the throne, Burhan al-Din's imperial project stressed performance above all, and warfare, both literally as well as metaphorically, was an integral part of it. Born to a line of kadis, Burhan al-Din ascended the local bureaucracy of the Eretnid kingdom, former vassals of the Ilkhans in Baghdad, until he crowned himself in August of 1381. He successfully consolidated and gathered his small kingdom, fighting off not only local rivals, but also Timur, the Mamluks, and the early Ottomans. In the last four years of his rule, after 14 years of struggle and warfare, his court produced four manuscripts which serve to represent Burhan al-Din as the perfect equilibrium of the twin principles of Persianate kingship, feasting and fighting ("bazm wa razm") and thereby the embodiment of God's majesty and beauty ("jalal wa jamal"). Burhan al-Din drew on the theories of Ibn al-'Arabi to argue for an understanding of razm as jihad, both alchemical and metaphysical, whereby the performative and affective aspects of attack, resoluteness, and marching enacted a process through which the king's body was transformed. This transformed body, displayed in the gatherings of feasting, became the elixir through which the kingdom was maintained. This performative understanding of razm extended to not only jihad and ghaza, but even linguistically related terms that draw on the Arabic root meaning of struggle and exertion, such as ijtihad and mujahida, respectively covering both the legal and spiritual domains. Drawing on far older paradigms, any "oath-breaker" thus became an infidel against whom warfare, whether real or metaphoric, was lawful. This was not to suggest that he did not register that most of his enemies were Muslim, and in fact, his reticence to identify his razm as ghaza and his celebration of adjacent ghazis, even when at war with them, was tied into his performative reading of jihad. This performative reading allowed for the king's self-exertion in multiple dimensions to serve as a validating framework for a monarch who, otherwise, lacked the more straightforward arguments of his contemporaries.