The Levant War between Mehemet Ali and the Sublime Porte was one of the central “enigmas” that haunted European diplomats in 1839 (FO, 407/6). It propelled the question of sovereignty in the Levant front and center. European diplomats tried to understand why the army of Mehemet Ali attacked its Ottoman co-patriots. Was this a rebellion, a personal feud between rulers, an insurrection or an attempt by Mehemet Ali to become sovereign? Rather than focus on Mehemet Ali and his personal designs to attain rulership of Egypt for his house, this paper tackles the problematic of Ottoman sovereignty in 1831-41 differently. It sidesteps the conventional focus on the rulers of Egypt and the Sublime Porte and looks at its soldiers of war: the European, Levantine, Cairene and Beiruti fighters. Instead of seeing sovereignty as an exclusive and Bodinian framework between two rivaling ruler (Grimm, 2009; Fahmy, 1997; Marsot 1984) – Mehemet Ali and Sultan Mahmud II – who command unrivaled power in their domains, it looks at sovereignty on the ground between Emirs, Naval Captains, army conscripts and European diplomats. Specifically, it tracks how rivaling soldiers fought under different flags and negotiated their capture and submission to new rulers. Thus, it locates sovereignty as a diffuse and interlocking problematic that was multilayered and negotiated as opposed to sovereignty belonging to the realm of rulers and treaties. First, this paper surveys Mehemet Ali’s designs to invade the Levant in 1831 to reign in runaway conscripts. It then analyzes the claim that Egyptian conscripts were given refuge in the Levant to avoid conscription in the province of Egypt (Toledano, 1990). Subsequently it confronts the question of conscription in the Levant, and the mode of government Mehemet Ali adopted in 1833 that uprooted several of these borderland communities away from their homes. Finally, it closes with the Levant Crisis of 1839-41 and tracks the question of the Levantine conscripts and Beiruti prisoners of war who returned to Alexandria with the army of Ibrahim Pasha against their will in 1840. Thus it demonstrates how the Levant was a porous borderland prior to 1831 that did not follow a national model of Bodinian sovereignty, which was tied to the monopoly on power in a defined territory. Rather, it followed a negotiated Ottoman form of belonging, in which power was devolved to local rulers in exchange for recognition, which was upended by the diktat of war.