In August 1567, the Divan urged the Doge of Venice to hunt pirates who had captured Ottoman subjects traveling between Ancona and Istanbul. The Ottoman correspondence argued that the Doge should recover the travelers “in accordance with the protection agreement” between the Serenissima and the Sublime Porte. Requests like this were commonplace. They were grounded in an Ottoman interpretation of the treaties linking Venice and Istanbul (ahdname), as well as in the Venetian pretense to have jurisdiction over the Adriatic. In this regard, the Venetians argued fiercely that the Ottomans should keep their warships out of the “Gulf of Venice;” in return, they promised that Ottoman subjects would be protected by – and from! – the Venetian navy. However, protection was more easily promised than delivered. By the mid-sixteenth century, pirates targeting Ottoman travelers infested the Adriatic. When confronted by the Divan, the beleaguered Venetian authorities frequently retorted that, in spite of the agreements, they “had no obligation” to protect the mobility of Ottoman subjects and that “all we do is a favor to the Sultan!” In light of the ahdname and of the Venetian claims over the Adriatic, this statement seems preposterous. However, many other polities besides Venice used similar arguments to justify their failures at protecting foreign subjects at sea. Venice’s diplomatic stance suggests that the terms “jurisdiction” and “protection” were ambiguous concepts in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean that had to be negotiated constantly. Indeed, scholars today still struggle to define them. Likewise, the connections between these concepts and cross-cultural circulation remain obscure. How did negotiations about mobility shape the Veneto-Ottoman understanding of maritime space? Who had the right or obligation to protect whom? How did attempts to promote and protect mobility affect the formation of jurisdictions and the projection of imperial power? This paper seeks to explore these questions through Venetian and Ottoman sources (Senato Dispacci, Documenti Turchi, Mühimme Defterleri) from the sixteenth century. Scholars have long identified maritime mobility as the defining feature of the Mediterranean. Currently, the history of Veneto-Ottoman relations tends to characterize circulation between the two polities either as seamless or as highly contested. This paper takes a middle ground. It shows how ideas about mobility, jurisdiction, and protection took practical shape through a constant process of negotiation and conflict resolution couched in rhetoric that aggressively manipulated concepts such as reciprocal recognition and obligations, in ways typical of early modern international diplomacy.