In an influential 1962 novel, the American writer Ray Bradbury pits an evil travelling carnival against the hapless inhabitants of a small Midwestern town. While Bradbury presents the ensuing tensions as stemming from his antagonists’ status as a “dark carnival,” the notion that itinerant groups could bring bane as well as boon to the settlements they visited is nonetheless applicable to the social-historical influence that court societies wielded within their geographies of mobility. Indeed, some observers of mobile retinues viewed the court as a vehicle for socially harmful ends, though such views are most common among those who were not themselves regular members of courts. Hence, as accounts penned by courtly “insiders” typically present courts as distributors of fortune or enforcers of order, these “outsider” perspectives on the “darker side” of courtly migration are useful for diversifying scholarly perspectives on the municipal impacts of historical courts on local humans and non-human animals. The Ottoman court of the late seventeenth century, and the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-87) in particular, provides an instructive case in point, as this retinue undertook frequent inter-local journeys between Istanbul and Edirne, as well as less common, if nonetheless significant migrations throughout western Anatolia and the Balkan peninsula. While contemporary court-based historians speak openly, if briefly, of courtly violence meted out against “war prisoners” and various kinds of “brigands,” they rarely if ever touch on the destructive potential of courtly mobility for Ottoman municipalities. However, a number of “outsider” authors, all detached, by varying degrees, from the courtly establishment, explicitly claim that Mehmed IV’s residence patterns could be harmful, or even lethal for humans and animals exposed to courtly-municipal engagements. Indeed, some “part-time” Ottoman courtiers like the traveller and storyteller Evliya Çelebi (c. 1611-83) actively construe this sultan’s “court out-of-doors” as a travelling locus of violence through graphic, and at times critical descriptions of imperial executions, while foreigners like John Covel (1638-1722), Edward Brown (1644–1708), and Paul Rycault (1629-1700) recount instances where humans and imperial horses who were compelled to participate in the sultan’s hunting parties throughout Ottoman Rumelia died of exposure, fatigue, or malnourishment. Although the testimony of each of these authors must be historicized critically on a case-by-case basis, this paper argues that their utility for reinserting “subaltern Ottomans” into their own social histories of monarchy in locales beyond Istanbul makes interpreting these voices well worth the epistemic problems they present.