Tax farming has proven an attractive subject for historians of the early modern Ottoman economy. Through its diligent recordkeeping, the empire supplies modern scholars with vast amounts of hard economic data, but the question of how to interpret this data is much more vexed. Ottoman tax farming is usually understood as a competitive system in which entrepreneurial tax farmers bid against one another to raise the lease price (iltizam) that they contracted to pay to the state treasury in return for the right to administer a particular tax farm (mukata‘a). According to the standard model, this lease price would reflect the economic profitability of the associated tax farm, as well as the state’s willingness (or non-willingness) to risk assigning it to more daring entrepreneurs. Yet this standard model errs insofar as it considers only two actors: the tax farmer and the state, the latter imagined in the abstract. Missing are the individual bureaucrats, powerbrokers, and policymakers whose behind-the-scenes influence was a key factor in the awarding of tax farming contracts. Ottoman tax farmers did not negotiate with an abstract state, but with individuals, often self-interested, who at times used their positions of authority to demand kickbacks from tax farmers as a condition of their assignment. Instead of bidding to raise the lease price, these tax farmers could use bribery (often couched in the form of “presents” and “fees”) to prevail over their competitors in backroom deals. Provincial governors, who themselves were often required to pay enormous sums to purchase their offices, could also use their military authority to extort wealth from the tax farmers operating in their regions of jurisdiction. The present study uses seventeenth-century archival sources to reconstruct these shadowy financial exchanges, arguing that the institutional practice and political culture of tax farming cannot be understood without further investigation of the mechanisms through which tax farmers won their contracts and the conditions under which they worked.