Molla Fenari (d. 1431), admittedly one of the most influential scholars of the nascent Ottoman sultanate, did not hesitate to leave his hometown Bursa, the then Ottoman capital city, upon the Timurid victory over Yildirim Bayezid’s forces in Ankara (1402) and the disintegration of the latter’s intended imperial enterprise. Prior to the Battle of Ankara, Fenari was an acclaimed professor and the judge of Bursa, a bureaucratic position on top of its scholarly attachments. The failure of the Ottoman enterprise, which was later dubbed as “interregnum” from a teleological perspective, had not then shown signs of temporariness and was quite possibly seen by many as an absolute decay. Since Bursa, once home to Fenari’s academic and judicial career, was now a place of no political and social stability, the scholar sought an alternative safe harbor. That safe harbor was the land of Karaman, whose imprisoned ruler Me?med Bey had just been freed by Timur and thus set out to restore his principality from its ashes in the central lands of the bygone Seljuks. Fenari’s writings from the period and a critical review of the so-called “Ottoman interregnum” suggest an alternative perspective for understanding the intellectual authority that the scholars of the time, among whom Fenari, claimed to hold in their relation to the political authority. Accordingly, the man of knowledge enjoyed a sovereignty that is not only parallel to, but in many respects above the political authority, which is seen as nothing other than the guarantor of the social order pragmatically needed for one’s maintaining his scholarship without interruption. My presentation consists of three parts. First, I will summarize the consequences of Timur’s Anatolian campaign and the politico-geographical scene of its aftermath for Molla Fenari. This will explain his decision to move his whole intellectual activity to Karaman and what this relocation might have involved. Secondly, I will look at what Fenari wrote in Karaman and how it sheds light unto the scholar’s expectations from the political authority as well as his conception of the sovereignty of knowledge. Finally, I will reflect on how later Ottoman historiography, primarily under the influence of Tashkoprizade’s Ottomanizing program, tends to downplay, or simply ignore, the significance of Fenari’s Karaman sojourn, thus indicating the transforming notions of the relationship between the intellectual and the political spheres from late medieval to early modern times.