How was Istanbul, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire and now the financial heart of contemporary Turkey, provisioned in the early 19th century? Tracing how the sovereign's duty to provision the city and protect his subjects from hunger was gradually transferred to the market and became a responsibility of the subjects (later, citizens) alone, makes a compelling case for situating food politics, and politics of urban provisioning in particular, at the centre of our conceptualisation of the relationship between the sovereign and the political community.