Most studies of petitioning in the Ottoman Empire focus on the rights and responsibilities of petitioners and their sovereign in terms of a tacit political covenant where the ruler provides justice and stability in exchange for certain responsibilities such as working the land, paying taxes, and serving in the army. However, the right to petition the sultan was not limited to Ottoman subjects; in fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many non-Ottoman Muslims from across Central Asia petitioned the Ottoman sultan and state for the redress of grievances they experienced while traveling in the sultan’s “well-protected domains”, particularly during the hajj. Although they were legally subjects of Tsarist Russia and Qing China, these Muslims professed allegiance to the caliph as a spiritual, and theoretically temporal, authority. These travelers, whom I call “spiritual subjects,” petitioned the sultan in his capacity as the caliph. However, even as they requested patronage, they did not share the responsibilities of legal Ottoman subjects. How did they conceive of the Ottoman sultan’s responsibilities toward the non-Ottoman umma? What notions of justice, rights and responsibilities informed their petitions? How did Ottoman statesmen interpret the notion of “spiritual authority” and “spiritual citizenship,” and how did it inform day-to-day governance? My paper will explore these questions and propose an alternative framework for studying the dynamics of trans-imperial petitioning. Drawing on sources from the Ottoman interior and foreign ministries that are preserved in the Basbakanlik Archives, I suggest that non-Ottoman petitions to the sultan evince the development of a relationship that was characterized by greater asymmetry than the pact between the ruler and his legal subjects. In responding favorably to non-Ottoman Muslims, the sultan-caliph was at pains not only to dispense justice but also to promote and project Ottoman authority to colonial powers and foreign observers. Thus, broader concerns about legitimacy – both domestic and international – factored into the state’s willingness to offer rights, protections, and patronage to individuals who were not legally Ottoman subjects. As I will show through a reading of both the petitions and the state’s responses to them, this was in exchange for a form of loyalty that could theoretically be used as leverage in international politics.