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Whereas Adam Talib posited a “post-court era”, in which courts were increasingly marginalized in the field of adab, we have to side with Matthew Keegan, who warned against “medieval anthologizers’ curatorial biases, coupled with the broader decline narrative that haunts modern scholarship on the Mamluks”. Qani?awh’s court was not the literary barren field that much of the Arabic and Arabic-centred sources, produced extra muros, would have us believe. Instead, it was a rich and vibrant literary site, and a cosmopolitan hub in a burgeoning Turkic literary ecumene. Within this court, we also need to re-centre the ruler himself, Qani?awh: no longer the passive object of panegyric or the coveted target of patronage alone, but having an authorial voice in his own right, one that was idiosyncratic yet in conversation with other voices.