This paper analyzes the attitude of the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem toward the Order of Friars Minor, commonly referred as “the Franciscans,” during the first part of the seventeenth century. The Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem, despite their exploitation of the Franciscans as a revenue stream, often protected the friars from the angry crowds who sometimes gathered aiming to attack them. The Ottoman Empire and the European rulers had signed agreements to ensure the protection of the European citizens in Ottoman lands, mainly traders and members of religious orders. Any breach of such agreements could have harmed the Ottoman Empire at both the political and economic levels. Nonetheless, many factors led to frequent riots by the local population against the Franciscans; among these were the weakness of local governments, the spread of epidemic diseases, and severe droughts that led to bad harvests, dying animals, and hungry people. The description and analysis of the situation will be based on three letters that Franciscan friars living in Jerusalem wrote to a senior officer of their order who held the position of commissariat in charge of the Holy Land. As an organization, the Custody of the Holy Land’s mission was stewardship of Catholic holy places and the reception of pilgrims, and the main tasks of the Custodian included providing for the friars and supplying them with all of the resources they needed to maintain the holy places. The letters, which were found in the archives in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid, were written between 1619 and 1621 and contain first-person observations about the challenging circumstances the friars faced in the Holy Land and detailed descriptions of the conditions of many of the buildings where they lived, worked, and worshipped.