Throughout the Ottoman Empire’s existence, the circulation of the imperial writs constituted one of the cornerstones of imperial governance, with orders of the sultan continuously circulating between the centre of the provinces, making the will of the sultan known, but also embodying the sultan’s authority itself. At the same time, the very physicality of imperial fermans has long fascinated scholars of the empire, resulting in the enormous amount of studies devoted to the diplomatics of Ottoman chancellery. The present paper seeks to address the issue from a different perspective, one frequently ignored by the scholarship – namely those of intended addressees of those documents, who remained often not only at a physical, but also cultural distance from the imperial centre. As such, they were frequently unable to access the contents directly due to lack of linguistic or literacy skills in Ottoman Turkish. However, as the paper seeks to demonstrate, these difficulties notwithstanding, the early modern elites of Moldavia and Wallachia nonetheless were able to grasp the meaning conveyed
in these lavish documents, but also the documents themselves were intended not as carriers of textual communication, but as part of the multimedia experience in which the presence of the sultan was recreated in a far-away province.