Recent scholarship on Egypt has recognized that the relationship with Istanbul and the wider Ottoman world remained crucial to the history of the province during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Petitions sent from Egypt, and the imperial orders issued in response, were a key vector in this ongoing relationship between center and province. A great number of both original petitions and registers of imperial orders survive in the Basbakanlik Archive in Istanbul. However, they have not received much attention from historians of Egypt, who have focused largely on the sharia court registers held at the Egyptian National Archive. Petitions deserve more attention because they reveal the close involvement of the imperial government in affairs at all levels of Egyptian society, ranging from petty quarrels among neighbors through the administration of local institutions to the violent feuds of the military grandees. Egyptians of different socio-economic backgrounds sent petitions concerning a wide range of issues. Subjects sent petitions demanding intervention in private legal disputes, requesting appointment to positions in awqaf, or asking for pensions in recognition of previous service. Members of Egypt’s military elite sent petitions in the context of their violent factional struggles: to demand control of a revenue source, to complain about the actions of a reforming governor, or to seek refuge from an enemy. The issues handled by the petitioning system encompassed both public issues and private concerns; the petitioning system was intimately involved in both the political and the legal. In this paper I will use original petitions, imperial orders, and stories of petitioning reported in chronicles, to examine how both the military elite and ordinary subjects used petitions to draw the imperial government into their affairs. I will look at how rhetorical strategies differed according to the petitioner’s status and demands, and I will ask whether the imperial palace treated petitions differently according to whether they were sent by ordinary subjects or military officials. Through these investigations I will attempt to trace the boundary between the public and the private in Ottoman legal and administrative practice, and I will address the overarching question to what extent petitioning was a system of patronage based on political expediency, and to what extent it was a legal system based on procedure.