Early modern Ottoman money was a major political project with clear stakes for creditors and debtors. Despite stabilizing mechanisms introduced by either the state or commercial interests, the value of the many different coins used in the empire fluctuated through debasement, wear, and counterfeiting. Through court cases, fetwas, and chronicles, this paper first examines the largely undiscussed dialogue that emerged between legal and financial interests on the relationship between money and credit contracts in Istanbul during a period of monetary instability in the seventeenth century. Particularly, how did merchants and judges value a plurality of variable coins when pursuing a delayed payment? And what were the consequences for different groups including creditors and debtors? Early modern credit relations permeated all aspects of Ottoman economic life. They constituted the life blood of human relations, forging viable social groups and distributing power within them. Through monetary policies, state actors, often swayed by powerful factions, intervened in these debates even as other segments of society resisted those policies. Through the relationship between credit and money, this paper then intercedes in debates on the influence of European capital in the Ottoman Empire by examining the English Levant Company’s credit relations with Ottoman subjects in the second half of the seventeenth century. This examination reveals the diversity of early modern ideas about money and the challenge of navigating monetary environments that weighted the interests of creditors and debtors differently. By tracing Levant Company merchants’ agreements with Ottoman traders and state bureaucrats over credit transactions, moneylending, and counterfeiting in Ottoman courts, Levant Company courts, and private correspondence in English and Ottoman, this paper demonstrates how Levant Company agents selectively adopted practices of Ottoman legal customs like istiglâl credit transactions, the use of pawns (rehn), promissory notes (temessük), bills of exchange (poliçe), court documentation (hüccet), and the agio rate of exchange to mitigate risks in their trade with Ottoman merchants and navigate between state and market assessments of money’s value. Further, it demonstrates the persistence of inter-English disputes over credit. Together, this history counters longstanding triumphalist narratives about the role of English chartered companies in the rise of global credit networks and contradicts arguments about the role foreign legal systems played in supporting European merchants. Instead, it demonstrates the persistent problem of both inter-English and English-Ottoman credit relations in the early modern period and the role Ottoman legal customs played in mitigating those risks.