The cycles of ruler visibility and popular belonging analysed in this book are not unique to the Ottoman Empire. In fact, as the Auspicious Event was unfolding in mid-June 1826 in Istanbul, the neighbouring Russian Empire, which had just had its own traumatic, game-changing event in the Decembrist Revolt six months earlier, was eagerly awaiting the elaborate coronation ceremonies of its new sovereign, Emperor Nicholas I (1825–55), in the old capital of Moscow. Whereas Mahmud II faced an acute security crisis in the absence of the Janissary forces, which was to plague most of the rest of his reign, his counterpart in Russia rose to the throne amidst an acute legitimacy deficit. Thus, Nicholas I embarked even more quickly on reforms in all spheres of public life, beginning with the public image and popular symbolic functions of the sovereign. At the core of this new policy of modern ruler visibility lay the systematic pan-imperial public ruler celebrations of a larger number of holidays (not only the royal birthday and accession day, but also the coronation day, patron saint (namesake)'s day, etc.), which the emperor introduced a full decade before Mahmud II, and which had a similarly broad and long-lasting impact (at least until the Russian Revolution of 1905). Much like its Ottoman equivalent, this expanding ceremonial intervention into the lives of Romanov subjects from all social strata has not been studied to date.

Comparing the evolution of symbolic interaction between the ruler and the ruled in these two empires has interested me since the inception of the present book, all the more so since the trajectories of the two empires in the nineteenth century were closely intertwined in a number of ways. It suffices to call to mind the series of wars they fought (1806–12, 1828–9, 1853–6, 1877–8) as well as the largely contemporaneous programmes of economic, legal, fiscal, administrative and infrastructural modernisation they implemented in the nineteenth century. A serendipitous recent discovery at the National Library of Finland, once a depository library of the Russian Empire, gave my evolving research an additional boost and new directions, opening up a range of inter-and trans-imperial lines of inquiry.