What makes a sovereign, and a messianic one at that? Whilst much of the scholarship on Ottoman sacred kingship might argue that the answer lies in normative treatises on government and chronicles of history penned by scholar-bureaucrats at court, there is also growing appreciation--mostly outside of the field of Ottoman Studies--that the key to the decipherment of divine kingship as a genre lies in the embodied enactment and performance of it. In other words, kings had recourse to an array of ritual-symbolic tools via which they could render themselves and their bodies sacred, cosmic, or divine. These were the building blocks of a scaffold that gave structure, shape, and strength to virtually all early modern articulations of sovereignty from the Balkans to Bengal. In order to demonstrate the productive potential of this problématique, this paper will narrow in on one of the most spectacular festivals of the early modern era: the circumcision festival held by Sultan Murad III for his son and eventual successor prince Mehmed in 1582. Held amidst heightened awareness of the onset of the Islamic Millennium (c. 1591-92), the festival has been interpreted by Ottoman scholars in a plethora of ways: as a source of dynastic legitimation at court, an avenue of leisurely diversion for the populace, and a diplomatic coup de theatre in front of foreign audiences. While all are valid, these interpretations relegate the sacred to the periphery and push the imperatives of sacred kingship and its occultist repertoires out of view. Focusing on a few key pyrotechnical performances that were described by one Ottoman observer as wondrous magic, and which involved the thaumaturgical presence of the sultan’s body, this paper will demonstrate that the demonstration of messianic and sacred kingship--that most extreme and radical type of sovereignty--was enacted via the elemental and mysterious medium of fire.