From the 16th century to the two first decades of the 19th century, subjects from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis) and from the sultanate of Morocco were enslaved in Spain, Italy and Malta. Like their Christian counterparts in North Africa, in order to be freed from slavery, these Ottoman/North African captives sent various petitions and letters to their respective sovereigns: namely to the sultans of Morocco, the deys of Algiers and the beys of Tunis and Tripoli. The paper will analyze these claims and the institutional processes through which they were conveyed for the second half of the 18th century. It will compare North African petitions to the ones sent by European captives in order to assess how North African slaves defined their legal status and above all their legal belonging in a situation of legal domination in Europe prior to the colonial period.