Recent trends in Ottoman history writing capture the important link between law, legitimate power, and state formation. By pushing these modes of scholarship further, I hope to argue that over the course of the seventeenth-century a new discursive domain, defined by a tug-of-war between patrimonial and consultative strategies of negotiation, emerged with significant consequences for the nineteenth-century age of reforms. This argument relies (and in part “constructs” a notion of documentary archives) on three modes of discursive engagement: kanunnameler loosely categorized as law books promulgated by the divans of various Sultans, mühimmeler, records of imperial correspondence with state and non-state provincial agents, and nasihatnameler, representing the diagnostic efforts of contemporary Ottoman observers afflicted by a growing apprehension of imperial “decline.” Collectively, I argue that these documents can be read to reveal the residue of negotiative actions and thus the quotidian legal concerns of an early modern empire confronting the increasingly global dynamics of war, fiscal transformation, and demographic change that challenged the distributive legitimacy of an Istanbul-based imperial government. Using the traditional precepts of the Circle of Justice as they appear in each of the documentary genres outlined above, I demonstrate an ever expanding gap between social ideals, or expectations of rule, and the legal realities defining relations between productive property, peoples, and competing constellations of power. Reading these genres in conjuncture reveals a rich and dynamic heritage of ethical categories, traditionally the domain of intellectual historians. I push, however, for a new understanding of such categories as active strategies of rule, visibly deployed in administrative documents and revealing a conscious tactic to recraft Muslim religio-legal traditions to buttress imperial authority, create consensual legitimacy and ensure the continuity of Ottoman rule. More significantly, I argue that the notion of sultanic authority predicated on agrarian models of ethical rule and “the order of things” that was assumed to depend on clearly defined relationships between social groups, was explicitly invented by the nasihat writers in the midst of a seventeenth-century crisis. This moment, then, marks not “decline” but rather a mode of critical intervention and invention whereby the legality and legitimacy of Ottoman rule was articulated as an ideal against a backdrop of change.