Who has the right to build a fortress? In this presentation, I examine how Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, the notorious provincial governor from Ottoman Epirus (r. 1784-1820), provoked this question by launching an ambitious building program of military works that included the repair and construction of no less than eleven fortifications along the Ionian coast (what is now Albania and northern Greece). In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the collapse of the Venetian Republic as well as Napoleon’s voracious expansionist policy transformed the eastern Ionian Sea into a contested space where Ottoman, British, French and Russian forces clashed for control. While it was standard practice in the early modern period for local administrators and notables to contribute their own resources for the defense of the imperial border, the central authorities in Istanbul still maintained direct oversight in the form of sending construction supervisors to the provinces and keeping official building registers. However, with the notable exception of Lepanto (İnebahtı), where Istanbul worked with Ali Pasha and his sons to maintain the pair of fortresses defending the Gulf of Corinth, it seems that this provincial governor commenced the construction of defensive works in his territory on his own initiative and with personal funding. This paper addresses broader questions about political authority in the provinces by investigating both the internal and trans-imperial disputes that erupted over the construction of these fortresses, which in some cases transgressed the terms of international treaties. In order to elucidate the multiple sides of these disputes, I bring together a variety of archival sources, including building registers from the State Ottoman Archives, British diplomatic reports, Ali Pasha’s personal papers and a hitherto-unexamined manuscript by a French engineer responsible for designing several of these constructions. This study of Ali Pasha’s fortifications not only joins a growing scholarly literature interested in Ottoman military technology and the defense of the imperial frontier, but also offers a view to the ground-level negotiations contingent upon the scramble for political space on the periphery.