In a warring oligarchy, wealth defense is accomplished directly by armed oligarchs who separately rule their own domains. In a ruling oligarchy, the arrangement is collective and requires at least partial disarmament for the system to be stable. A sultanistic oligarchy is a third mode of wealth and property defense. Oligarchs are either fully disarmed or coercively overwhelmed, tend not to rule directly, and yet enjoy protection from a single powerful oligarch against potentially devastating lateral and vertical threats. The primary locus of coercion to defend wealth rests “above” all oligarchs, but not in the law-bound institutions of an impersonal bureaucratic state. The defense role remains in oligarchic hands – but those of one oligarch whose overarching rule is direct and personalistic. As in the other oligarchies already considered, there are no absolute property rights under a sultanistic oligarch. There are only property claims, which sultanistic regimes enforce systemically but also with the vicissitudes that accompany personalistic rule. The stability of a sultanistic oligarchy depends vitally on how well the lead oligarch manages wealth defense for oligarchs in general, although, ironically, this usually involves sultanistic predations on individual oligarchs to be effective.