The current historiographic consensus on the nature of the Ottoman dynastic institution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries holds that emperors of the period typically “reigned but did not rule,” and that many had little if any direct contact with their subjects outside of sedentary palace structures. While future research on the subject may continue to confirm the validity of this “figurehead thesis” with respect to the realm of politics and everyday administration, the bases of this debate tend to overlook the multitude of ways in which all sultanic regimes of the period engaged with the human and non-human inhabitants of the municipalities in which Ottoman court societies resided. To share a city, neighbourhood, town, village, forest, plain, roadway, waterscape, or other habitation with the court was thus to cohabit with a biodiverse, mobile, and highly populous collective whose conspicuous presence in Ottoman locales could significantly influence municipal life by virtue of its demography, wealth, hunger, violence, and distribution of privilege, among other forms of influence. Recent social historical scholarship has ably demonstrated the close relationship between the dynasty’s public celebration of its “life cycle” (imperial births, circumcisions, and deaths) and the human population of Istanbul, who were incited to engage in these events as audience-participants. However, the dynasty did not always mark its biological milestones with heavily orchestrated fêtes of this kind, but rather with more impromptu protocols which could nevertheless substantially affect life in their broader municipal surroundings for the local humans and animals caught within their ambit. Based on an analysis of texts penned by both Ottoman and foreign observers of courtly-municipal interactions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this paper argues that Ottoman court societies of the era enacted measures to accommodate dynastic biological factors such as the needs of dynastic women pregnant with heirs to the throne, or the sudden deaths of regnant emperors outside of Istanbul in ways that could restrict or enable the mobility of local denizens, alter the physical environment of a municipality, create novel labour conditions, or necessitate forms of multi-species migration between locales. As Ottoman courts of the empire’s middle centuries were not strictly Istanbuline “creatures,” spending time in towns, cities, and villages throughout much of southeastern Europe, there is cause to historicize these practices as responses to biological exigencies related to the dynasty’s “life cycle,” but which also functioned as factors in this region’s social histories of monarchy.