Istanbul enjoys a modern reputation as THE Ottoman city—the megalopolis that served as the empire’s “capital” from its conquest in 1453 through the collapse of Ottoman power. Yet from the perspective of Ottoman courtly residence patterns, Istanbul only became the virtually unchallenged seat of the House of Osman in 1703, when the success of an Istanbul-based revolt saw the dynasty promise to abandon their then predominantly Edirne-based patterns of habitation and reside almost exclusively in Istanbul. This sudden and monumental shift in the geographic range of Ottoman courtly mobility saw the ambit of the imperial retinue’s immediate influence shrink by several orders of magnitude from the level of the macro-province of Rumelia to that of the metropolitan city. While previous studies of Istanbul’s urban history have shed considerable light on the changed relationships between “palace and populace” in this brave new world, few if any such works have examined courtly-municipal engagements in the period through Ottoman ego-documents, a genre of literary production that permits historians to analyze the symbiotic bond between courtly and municipal populations beyond the at times highly circumscribed and ideological viewpoints provided by authors working largely within courtly networks of patronage. In order to highlight the potential of these autobiographical sources for studying the broader municipal visibility and influence of the Ottoman court’s intra-Istanbuline migration patterns, this paper examines the presentation of Sultan Mahmud I’s (r. 1730-54) itineraries in the diary of Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi (d. 1790-91), a member of the Ottoman religious establishment who kept a record of his daily life over a c. five year period in the late 1740s and early 1750s. While Sıdkı Mustafa was not required by his profession to write about the activities of the Ottoman sultan, he nonetheless includes some of Mahmud I’s movements among the fires, earthquakes, and other municipal happenings that intersperse his diaristic record of his life in the city. Hence, based on an inter-textual close reading of the diary alongside contemporary court chronicles and imperial daybooks, this paper argues that Sıdkı Mustafa includes the Ottoman emperor’s relocations in his diary because he considered them to be important and potentially impactful events for those who dwelt in eighteenth-century Istanbul. This was due to the regularity of courtly mobility in the municipality, the power, wealth, and resources brokered at the Ottoman court, as well as the sensorial spectacle that typically accompanied the sultan’s movements through urban space.